Dirt, a community-powered web3 media ecosystem, is excited to announce that we have raised a $1.2 million seed round led by Collab+Currency, alongside Offline Ventures, Flamingo DAO, Spice Capital (Maya Bakhai), Unicorn DAO, and Matt Hackett–joining earlier angel investments from Workweek, David Phelps and Jad Esber. The funding marks a new phase connecting the mainstream media ecosystem to NFTs and web3 culture.

Dirt uses media to form an NFT-powered lifestyle brand with a shared sense of identity and ownership — both at the organizational and content levels. Dirt’s new media model empowers creatives and contributors to be rewarded for their work, readership, and participation using web3 rails.

Why now?

Over the past decade, we’ve watched the arc of digital media bend toward unsustainability. The people who suffered the most were the creatives — our friends and our peers. We are determined to build the media company that we want to see in the world, empowering artists, writers, and curators through the growing number of web3 tools. Dirt’s digital assets will fund a range of productions, but will also establish a consumer brand of their own.

Oops!!! Dirty had a magic mushroom adventure that interrupted this week’s newsletter dispatch. We’re capping off (no pun intended) season 3 with a last chance to get more DirtDAO tokens before a large-scale NFT/token sale later this year.

Artist Kyle Knapp (aka @bummervacation) has created five varieties of mushrooms minted in editions of ten. Each edition is priced at 0.05 ETH or ~$130. Every mushroom edition holder will be airdropped 20 tokens per edition from our preexisting stash of $DIRT-S1 tokens — then they’ll all be gone. Tokens allow you to participate in allocating Dirt’s budget to make decisions on future articles, artworks, brand collaborations and events. Like this feature about VR in the workplace commissioned by the DirtDAO.

Choose the mushroom that best represents you, or buy a full set! Are you a Chanterelle, or more of an Enoki? Dirty’s trip is an adventure for all of us. Season 4 will kick off next week with more daily dispatches on digital culture.