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Illini Blockchain Structure v1

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Become the main blockchain club at UIUC & a reputable source in the blockchain industry

🧭 Mission

Illini Blockchain is a curiosity driven club whose sole purpose is to learn about the ecosystem of blockchain. We aim to learn through collective discussion, projects, and community engagement.

🔭 Vision

  • Be the bridge between UIUC student talent and the blockchain industry
    • Lots of CS + ECE technical talent who take challenging systems courses are perfectly suited to work in this industry, but aren’t exposed to blockchain
      • Have many members join blockchain companies
  • Work with blockchain startups/companies/DAOs as volunteer consultants
  • Get experience in the industry and contribute to the ecosystem
  • Centralized Resource of Blockchain Information
    • Go-to guide for the ~truth~ about blockchain

⚖️ Values

  • Curiosity driven
  • Inviting to all levels
    • Lack of knowledge is valuable
      • Our core mission is to help people go from nothing to being "blockchain literate"
      • Helps solidify the understanding of "experienced" members as well
  • Vulnerable
    • Leave egos at the door, need to be open minded and willing to be wrong to learn and grow
      • Can't put other people down
  • Diversity
  • No one left behind

🌌 Guiding North Stars

Education

Be the bridge between people who are interested and people in the crypto industry.

Be the go to place to start learning about blockchain (scope? in general in the blockchain industry or for UIUC?)

Community

Create a crypto community at UIUC.

Move people up the ladder of interest (no interest → interested → desire to learn → believe it is the future → passionate)

Projects

Turn technical talent into blockchain developers

Get real blockchain industry experience and contribute to the ecosystem by developing on platforms, partnering with VCs, and/or developing for companies

Also, open to non-technical projects (...have to figure out what that looks like)

Current Status

Organizational Structure

Startup mentality

3 official meetings per week (~2 hours each), 2 for jam sessions and 1 for projects

Frequent discord chats and random calls to bounce ideas of each other

Education

Learn through research & jam sessions

Translate learnings and teach others through Tweet threads and blog posts

Covered Bitcoin, Ethereum, ETH 2.0, Solana, & NFTs. Moving onto DeFi.

Community

Twitter: slowly growing every day

GroupMe: group of people who have expressed interest

Discord: currently structuring and will open a curated, public discord soon

NFT Mint event: hosted 85 people.

Guest speaker event: coming soon!

Projects

Created our own NFT (on testnet)

Handful of ideas in the works

Trying to figure out ways to partner with Burst

Open to new projects

Looking into creating our own DAO

Current Needs

People who have industry experience and knowledge (require minimal on-ramping)

At the end of the day, we want people who are passionate about the club and want to take initiative. How great this club becomes will in large part be how much sweat equity we put into it.