Reimagining Consulting for Web3 | Bankless Consulting
Delivering Trusted Web3 Business Strategies Straight to Your Inbox
Consider the company you help lead. Whether finance, law, consumer goods, entertainment, or, yes, consulting, part of what makes you good at your job is you can see over the horizon to the valley ahead, discern the forest for the trees.
There aren’t many times when your industry is undergoing a silent revolution. But with all that the blockchain enables, every industry is in the midst of unprecedented change, even if you don’t yet know it. Web3 is a once-in-ten-generations opportunity to reimagine what your industry is and will become. Exciting, but terrifying. Are you ready?
Change begets opportunity, and it’s this truth which led a small group of professionals to reimagine what a web3-native consulting firm could look like. Bankless Consulting is the result of this reimagining, and today we’re proudly launching our newsletter.
As we prepare for the second year of our journey, we wanted to show you where we came from, how we are built, and why we are uniquely positioned to help businesses interested in starting or expanding into web3 understand and realize their vision.
We’re in this web3 revolution together — and with Bankless Consulting standing with you at the front lines, you’ll not just experience the revolution, you’ll lead it. Welcome to the future, today.
We hope you enjoy our inaugural issue, and we look forward to hearing from you.
Reimagining Consulting for Web3
Author: Ryan Anderson
Every executive who has spent time in C-Suites and boardrooms has used consulting firms to help clarify a vision, manage a product launch, or streamline corporate operations. These consulting firms provide valuable services to their clients because they harness decades of domain expertise to diagnose the underlying problems of an organization and prescribe solutions.
But what happens when the field they’re consulting in is completely new? Where do the domain experts pull from when the domain is still being established?
The world has changed dramatically in the past decade, but consulting has barely budged in the last hundred years. Consulting methodologies and cultures have been handed down from one generation of suits to the next. They reward adherence to a certain corporate culture and degrees from the same MBA programs, which often results in a homogeneity of thought.
Legacy firms are trained to advise companies with a specific set of solutions built on the traditional structures of the past. When working with new paradigms such as blockchain technologies, they fall back on what has worked in previous decades, rather than adapting their strategy to a new culture and its inherent norms and values.
Legacy firms think in terms of audiences, while web3 moves at the speed of communities. Consultants get their knowledge from analyst reports and research firms, but most have never invested time actively participating in NFT communities or DAOs, nor have they experienced the constraints and tensions of working in a brand new model of organizational coordination.
They may understand the technology, but they have never implemented it. They talk about the future of work, but their frames of reference and organizational structures are firmly rooted in the past.
So how can legacy consulting firms effectively advise companies looking to incorporate web3 technologies and practices into their business if they are still working like background extras in Mad Men?
They can’t. That’s why we built Bankless Consulting from scratch, with a team that lives and breathes web3.
Bankless Consulting is an end-to-end advisory firm built by web3 natives with decades of traditional financial and management consulting experience. We combine an exceptionally talented team of technologists, strategists, community experts, DAO gurus, and token economists to help companies learn about and take advantage of all that the blockchain enables.
When we started imagining what a true web3-native consultancy might look like, the first question we had to ask was “is this even possible?” How can a group of strangers in a global, remote work setting compete with huge consulting firms with hundreds of thousands of employees, country club memberships, and … desks?
As it turns out, it’s not only possible — it’s inevitable.
Our Weaknesses Are Our Strengths
Starting a business is difficult under the best of circumstances, but we quickly learned that all the questions you thought you knew the answer to when you start a company – questions like “how do we pay people” and “how do we organize our global workforce” – have to be reimagined and rebuilt for web3. We encountered problems that you don’t have to think about in traditional companies like “how do we communicate with each other” and “what does management look like?”
When you get down to it, the thorniest problems in web3 are just amplified versions of what’s broken in the corporate world. They’ve just been broken for so long that we’ve learned to ignore them. Without boardrooms and recruiting campaigns to hide behind, we had no choice but to address them, one by one. The organizational challenges we solved while building Bankless Consulting now enable our best work, and we take these hard-earned lessons to our clients.
Solving these problems has been a challenge that we’ll be iterating on and perfecting for the foreseeable future. But the result is a web3-native consulting firm that is designed from the ground up to help businesses implement web3-focused solutions to their most pressing problems — whether that's new organizational structures that allow people to flourish, or web3 technology and partnerships that enable them to grow and expand their business.
We know how to solve these problems because we built these battle-tested solutions, not just for ourselves, but also for our clients.
A Truly Global Team
We lease no offices, but we have consultants on six continents. Sometimes that makes it difficult to organize meetings, but it has forced us to learn to communicate more effectively outside of them.
Since we’re 100% virtual, we can work from anywhere. We’re not beholden to outside interests. We can choose what to work on, not what we have to work on. Valuing personal freedom and agency isn’t just an HR platitude, it’s the core of our business model — one that enables us to do transformative work.
From subject-matter expertise to cultural competence, our teams bring a variety of perspectives to every project. Because web3 is a global enterprise, Bankless Consulting is uniquely positioned to help clients formulate effective, relevant web3 strategies that generate immediate business impact.
Crypto Native, Diverse Experiences
Look at the resumes of any major consulting firm, and you’ll see a trend. An MBA is the price of admission to a job at one of the Big 4 firms.
We have plenty of those, but we also have teachers, doctors, entrepreneurs, writers, engineers, lawyers, and PhDs. Unsurprisingly, they all approach problems differently, and having access to a wide variety of lenses enables us to better analyze complex problems. Intellectual diversity is a strength.
Though we all come from different educational and career backgrounds, we are united by an immersion in crypto-native culture — having touched every aspect of web3, from finance to art to law. We can help traditional companies thrive in web3 because we've done it ourselves.
We Reward the Work
Nearly every consulting firm is built on the premise that the senior members of the organization must be highly paid to direct the company, while those underpaid employees who deliver the actual work are replaceable. The result is an extractive labor practice that creates profit at the expense of burnout and turnover.
We inverted the model, and developed a compensation stack in which client teams are paid directly from project fees, with the majority of the proceeds going to the project team. We don’t have the burden of paying for the trappings of a traditional consulting firm, enabling us to invest that money back into the people building our organization.
Built From the Ground Up
Bankless Consulting started as a group of strangers in a Discord channel with a vision that consulting could be different — better for both clients and those helping them. We had the support of a large community, but we had to hustle to close our first clients while we built a new business model from scratch. And we haven’t lost that hustle.
In the beginning, it was just a group of people who were passionate about the potential of web3 to change the world, and a belief in our ability to come up with creative business solutions using this new technology. With these values and this premise, we built a new way to bring value to both clients and contributors.
It Can Be Better
The consulting industry sometimes gets a bad rap for a lot of good reasons. The old joke is that a consultant is someone who borrows your watch to tell you the time, and often keeps the watch.
The Big Consulting business model is focused on maximizing capital extraction from their clients and labor extraction from their employees. The incentive models of web3 enable us to create with our clients, to share in their successes, and to contribute to sustained growth.
If crypto has proven anything, it’s that things that once seemed permanently entrenched are now open for disruption. Banks are no longer inevitable. The unchangeable can be changed.
We are entering a new era of entrepreneurship, where web3 lowers the barriers to funding, the barriers to creating a community, and the barriers to transforming industries. Builders with great ideas need help steering around the corners on the road to creating or expanding their existing business into web3, but they no longer need permission. They need help understanding the landscape and executing on their vision. This assistance is where Bankless Consulting excels.
We Know the Answer
So, after a year of reinventing consulting, can we compete with the big guys?
The answer is we don’t have to. Bankless Consulting is creating a new way of delivering professional services that works better.
We’ve built a consulting firm from first principles — one that’s focused on the needs of web3 organizations and contributors. We’re built by and for the community, and we are able to put purpose over profit by design.
We’re on our way to creating a new class of consultant that helps organizations be more adaptive and responsive to the ever-changing web3 ecosystem. We're building a new home for existing consultants who are more comfortable with ambiguity and complexity over predictable modeling, who are more interested in helping organizations find new ways of doing things rather than just making the old ways cheaper, and who are more than ready to leverage their web3 chops by working on specific projects that pique their interest, on their own terms.
Web3 will disrupt industries for the next decade and beyond. The winners of the blockchain revolution will be those meeting the challenges of reimagining human systems and business solutions face-to-face, not those peering into the room through a keyhole.
Ryan Anderson is a brand and marketing strategist and founding member of Bankless Consulting.
Web3 Business Developments
Curated News on Recent Blockchain Adoption and Innovation
Crypto Payments With USDC Now On Apple Pay
Author: Anvesh Reddy
Apple Pay is enabling quick checkout for digital payments using Circle’s USDC. This app will only be available for select businesses, but its deployment is a decisive move by Apple to support crypto-native businesses while giving its crypto-curious customers a way to pay for regular goods using digital currencies. The new upgrade will improve the user experience for web3-focused businesses like NFT marketplaces, crypto gaming, crypto exchanges, and facilitate cross-border payments.
Mastercard Welcomes 7 Crypto, Blockchain Startups to Fintech Innovation Program
Author: Tim Hakki
The Mastercard Start Path is a global startup engagement program that will be welcoming seven fintech startups this year. The program includes opportunities to collaborate, receive mentoring, and access to Mastercard’s existing clientele.
Among the startups are Loot Bolt, a web3 payments company; Quadrata, a privacy and compliance firm; and Uptop, a company that helps brands personalize their consumer experience.
Bernstein Says Polygon Blockchain Is the Web3 King
Author: Will Canny
The Polygon blockchain continues to lead the way for onboarding major companies like Starbucks, Disney, Reddit, DraftKings, Robinhood, and, most recently, Instagram (Meta). By focusing on hiring talent from global tech companies, Polygon has put itself in a position to be the web3 onramp for millions of users of these consumer-heavy brands.
Polygon will soon have a platform that can support web2-like speed with lower costs, and we can expect the frequency at which companies deploy their web3 strategies on Polygon to only increase.
Tattoo Industry Expands Into the NFT Space Amid Digital Culture Shift
Author: Ana Paula Pereira
NFTs continue to unlock the potential of the creator economy and are starting to make their way into the tattoo industry. Indelible is one company that is leading the way by allowing users to create tattoos and add them to their profile picture (pfp) NFT, giving IP holders a creative outlet to monetize their work and have fun with NFTs.
Italian Egyptologist Views Future Museums as 3-Pronged: Physical, Digital, Metaverse
Author: Park Han-sol
Egyptologist Christian Greco is trying to close the gap between the physical and the virtual. The historian believes that future museums will have three pillars: physical, digital, and metaversal.
Physical museums will act to conserve and preserve historical artifacts and will continue to receive broad public support. He sees the metaverse as an opportunity to enhance our understanding of historical objects by enabling interaction with them in digitally created worlds that replicate the social, geographical, and religious landscapes in which they were created. The metaverse as he imagines it is not a database of images, but a 3D immersion into the past, opening the ability to explore the world as we have never been able to experience it.
Web3 Discovery Sprint
Do you want to know how web3 tools and technology will improve your business?
Bankless Consulting's Web3 Discovery Sprint will give you the knowledge and tools to start or grow your business in web3. Guided by world-class web3 experts with decades of relevant professional experience, our human-centered approach focuses on helping companies chart a clear business strategy from ideation to execution.
We are the world’s first web3-native consulting firm.
Wherever your business is on its web3 journey, we are here to help.
We're on a mission to help our clients understand how to design and implement web3-focused business solutions.
Most business-oriented content is from non-crypto natives who don't fully understand web3 technology or its potential. We only share high-quality content focused on building better businesses.
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See you next week!
Congratulations everybody on this launch! 🚀
big things! Well done guys