Welcoming 👋

The act of welcoming is a universal behaviour in humanity. It's a deeply personal act, and something we want to build on in the web3 future.

We need to always balance new joiners with existing participants to help create a web of relationships into the greater network.

The history of welcoming

Our wecloming rituals extend back in history, to times before our social structures were shaped by modern economics. Yet, we maintain them today, showing us they're still relevant and useful.

Handshakes are about establishing trust, laying down weapons and mutually exposing each other as a show of good will.

When a guest arrives at a host, we give them a tour, we make sure they're comfortable. The host, with all the resources and the power, serves the guest.

When you show someone around your apartment to welcome them, you're helping them orient, but also making them part of the the environment. It allows the newcomer to give reverence to the new place and their new companions, and allows the established inhabitants to find places for the newcomers to belong in their daily lives. This isn't just about knowing where the bathroom is, it's creating a new collective self-awareness that a new person is part of our space.

From this point of view, we can consider these surviving rituals as conduits that pass us ancient wisdom, reminding us about peace and service to each other. In our modern times, we have global communication yet feel disconnected. We have more wealth than any time in history, yet feel threatened.

And yet, we know the answers, and many of them lie in these simple acts of welcoming.

Much of Cuppa's inspiration comes from this, looking at blockchain technology as a way to reintroduce these human forms of interaction into this post-Capitalist phase of human history.

Blockchain communities tend to be permissionless to join. But getting oriented and connected still tends to be done by throwing up gates. These onboarding processes treat people as economic inputs, not only forcing them to prove themselves and find their own places, but forcing them to frame their relationships to others in economic terms.

Cuppa takes a different approach - we design flows that allow human relationships to form first, using cohorts, so that those relationships can serve the economic needs of the community.

We also consider that if we can trust people to contribute, we can trust them to onboard each other into the contexts that are relevant to them. So this allows us to decentralise onboarding from monolithic processes.