Azuki is a global community with strong regional groups that love to get together. Nothing beats the feeling of meeting other beans in person. Today we launched Passport and the Garden Tour. 👇Here are more details on the thinking: Our goals are to celebrate those who support local communities regardless of location and to build a system for more local communities to gather. This product allows local groups to fund their events by incorporating community-run Open Edition mints into the Collectors Page. The garden, as a community, is a network of passionate individuals that participate in decentralized brand building. Local groups are the beating heart of the brand across the world. Their small and large events are key to building out the culture of the garden. Supporting these organizers is just smart community building. (We want to support you all, this is a first step!) Garden Tour is an experimental program to launch 5 community-run events across APAC cities. Through this program we (Chiru Labs) provide communities with funding for the basics of a great event, and the logistics support to make each event its own unique experience. These are community-run events, supporting local events is not a replacement to our official events. The goal of this program is to support more great gatherings like Azuki SG (and many more). (ngl, I also want to take a selfie with @thatother_lky_ ) There have been some epic past community events, we don’t currently have a way to identify everyone that attended and add them to Passport, but I will be looking into it and see what can be done! Passport is an item in Collector’s Profile that updates with a stamp each time you buy an Open Edition from the local organizers. These visual elements are built to satisfy the collector in all of us. I love my old passports full of stamps. We wanted to create a canvas for local activation and introduce the stamps as recognition for those community members that support them. Picking these cities wasn’t an easy choice, so many great local communities deserved to be part of the launch. We tried to cover a range of locations that have lots of collectors but have more difficult access to our official events, where crypto events are already happening, or where we hadn’t seen a gathering lately. I hope all local organizers see this as an encouraging sign that we want to keep looking for innovative ways to support your efforts! Working with local groups in Singapore and now for Hong Kong and Taiwan is a very important, constructive, and creative experience. We are providing resources to cover the basics of an event, with our experience and creative vision for what a great community gathering feels like. The resources invested make sure the groups have what they need, and don’t need to go out of pocket to connect with their community. The time investment helps reinforce the local groups and creates deeper roots for our global community. Ideally, the Passport will continue to add locations and serve as a mechanism to fund events across the world. More details on how to apply will be available as we learn from the program. We want to run this initial wave with a focus on quality and learning before expanding. The Garden Tour, with that level of direct funding support, will not be repeated. Events are very resource and time intensive, we have a lot of other creative areas to invest our resources on. I believe that Garden Tour starts the flywheel of local event activation and the Passport will allow the community to keep the parties going. See you soon at one of these events!