ShapeShifting Internationally

The ShapeShift DAO stays true to its name, as it has shapeshifted into a Web3 melting pot where many international communities have found a DAO to call home. We strongly believe in lifting people up by providing equal access to opportunity, success, and information. We ensure that the global information and community that ShapeShift curates is held to the same transparent and inclusive standard that core contributors experience. To assist with this, the community voted to form an Information and Globalization Workstream to focus on growing and nurturing our international community.

Since decentralizing in 2021, we have rapidly accelerated the spread of information relating to all things ShapeShift to more places than ever一in over eight languages! With the information stemming directly from ShapeShift official channels, we have found that bringing quality and easily digestible content about our FOX ecosystem and its community has allowed us to better inform, inspire, empower, and collaborate with people worldwide. We are continuing on this trajectory through two new updates to the ShapeShift web app, bringing even more features to our global FOX fam: faster language updates and native currency options.

Diversifying Our Community Through Infrastructure

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Faster Language Updates

App.shapeshift.com supports a broad scope of languages and includes eight different languages for users to choose from. Our engineering team has continued to make tweaks to empower our growing global community to continue to be on the cutting edge of DeFi through our app. With this backend update, any changes to the English text within the app automatically notify our skilled team of global translators. They then translate the revision into all of our other supported languages. This decreased translation time means that all languages within the ShapeShift app will now be able to be updated virtually at the same speed as the English updates!

To change the language you experience on the app.shapeshift.com, simply go to settings => Language, and select the language you would like to view.

Native Currency

In addition to the language update improvement, users will now be able to change their transactions to display their native currency. For example, if a user wants to see their BTC balance in Euros instead of US dollars, they now can with the simple click of a button.

Information and Growth in Practice: LatAm

Born out of a series of bounties that started roughly six months ago and growing to a team of 8+ salaried full-time contributors and external contributors, the LatAm team has been a pivotal conglomerate of contributors focused on growing our LatAm community and providing information to these communities. The LatAm team members are proficient in Portuguese and Spanish and, for the first time in ShapeShift’s history, we have reached regions and communities that were previously unattainable. At the start of our globalization efforts, the team was formed to meet the institutional demands that grew in the geographic area where those languages are most prominent, such as Brazil—Rio de Janeiro, and surrounding São Paulo cities. As a result of our increased presence in these areas, ShapeShift has been able to build close partnerships with entities within these communities. With a truly decentralized mindset, LatAm produces its independent content that respects the general ShapeShift brand guidelines while still appealing to their native cultures. They largely accomplished this through posting articles to official ShapeShift LatAm pages on Odysee (the first established Brazilian ShapeShift community) and Mirror.xyz/foxbrasil.eth (a DeFi newsletter curated by the DAO).

The LatAm team also holds their separate community calls in ShapeShift’s Discord during which they inform about the developments at ShapeShift and what the team is currently working on. This allows non-English speakers to participate and feel very much at home. Recently, LatAm contributors participated at an ETHRio Conference earlier this year, further spreading the word about decentralization and the ShapeShift community. This was a great regional event with a global outlook connecting an international network of users, partners, and investors.

Because of these efforts, ShapeShift DAO experienced a rapid influx of non-native English speakers in the past couple of months and welcomed them with open arms into our international community. Some of these newcomers were established as community leaders and quickly grew to be influential and prominent ShapeShift members. As this new FOX community organically grew, developed, and refined itself to fit the needs and communication styles of the surrounding members, we saw the rise of neologism. An example is “Bom DAO” rather than “Bom Dia,” which is frequently used among our Portuguese cohort of contributors.

The ShapeShift LatAm team is paving the way for other international communities by setting the tone through their "guerilla" style of community development. They do this by developing genuine and meaningful connections, understanding the needs and wants of a community, and sharing opportunities available through ShapeShift with their surrounding communities. One of the heads of Growth and Globalization Workstream @thesmith stated:

DAO’s are a revolutionary instrument that offers financial freedom for people and communities alike. Many Latin Americans have found Web3 as their path to financial sovereignty and the community at ShapeShift has given, and continues to give people this opportunity as a contributor working alongside the DAO, or as a community member using our products.

DAOs一such as ShapeShift一are often a Win-Win relationship for not just larger investors (like Coinbase Cloud and FOXChain) but also for the everyday person and smaller communities who want to get involved and be a part of a larger organization.

The Future of Growth

In a transparent DAO environment where ideas from all over the world can be contributed and built upon, new collaboration and interaction forms groundbreaking ideas and communities一such as the one we have built at ShapeShift. Our new back-end improvements, community-facing features, and our roadmap to continue these feature upgrades position ShapeShift to be the prominent multi-lingual DeFi platform.