Three Years In
A personal reflection on running sqrDAO — what I expected, what actually happened, and what comes next.
GM Builders,
I’m writing this a few days after the end of May, and calling it “May” undersells what just happened. It wasn’t a one-day summit. It was a month of builders in motion: a three-week Founders Residency (May 11–29) with 6 teams in the room, the Web3 Builders’ Summit landing on May 25 with 300+ builders, creators, and even regulators in the building, a Welcome to DAVAS dinner to close the day, and a thousand quieter conversations stacked in between. The merch is packed, the speakers have flown home, the gelato cart is gone, and I am, predictably, exhausted in the specific way that only spending a month with this many builders can exhaust you.
I’m also sitting with something I didn’t expect to feel: the strangeness of running a three-year-old thing.
Three years ago, sqrDAO was a Discord server, a recurring dinner, and a half-baked thesis I wasn’t fully sure anyone wanted. Today it’s a Web3 builders’ community, an accelerator (sqrBUIDL) whose Founders Residency program just ran its first cohort (EMpower, co-run with Lisk Ventures), an investment arm (sqrFUND), a validator stack (sqrNODE), a flagship summit (Web3 Builders’ Summit) on its third edition, and a physical hub in Da Nang. Somewhere in there the thing I was trying to build became the thing I’m responsible for. Those are not the same job.
I’ll get into what just happened in May and where this is going. But first, a bit of self-reflection, because if a 3-year recap is just a list of milestones, I haven’t actually said anything.
The Reflection
Three years in, the honest emotional state is somewhere between grateful and raw.
Grateful because sqrDAO has become the thing I most wanted it to be: a high-signal room of builders who treat each other seriously. Raw because shipping that room costs something, and I’m at the stage where I can no longer pretend the cost is free.
A few specifics I’ve stopped trying to hide from myself:
The travel is unsustainable in its current shape. Four trips in six weeks is not a flex; it’s a tell. I need to redesign my own workflows and the whole operational stack so the operation doesn’t quietly require me to be on a plane to function.
The hardest part isn’t building. It’s holding. Year 1 was almost entirely outbound energy. Year 3 is mostly holding the things I built: relationships, programs, partners, expectations. Holding is harder than building, and almost nobody talks about it.
I’m a recovering ex-VC who became a community operator who became a founder. I’ve now sat in every seat: coder, founder, accelerator operator, investor, community builder. sqrDAO is the convergence of all of them. That’s an unfair advantage and also the reason no playbook fits cleanly.
What I’m proudest of, though, isn’t any single program. It’s that the community has started to act on its own. Members back each other. Members invest in each other. Members hire from each other. Members ship together. Members organize activities by themselves. The flywheel exists, and it doesn’t have my name on it. I am no longer the single point of failure I was in Year 1, which is the only metric that actually matters for something called a DAO.
Why, How, When
A quick history for the readers who joined recently, and there are a lot of you. Here goes:
Why.
In late 2021, I had a conversation with one of the co-founders of Sky Mavis at a VC event and got pulled out of the ICO-era skepticism I’d been carrying since 2017. Around the same time (early 2022), an old friend dragged me into DeFi. I’d been a coder, a founder, a VC, an accelerator operator, but I’d never seen what Vietnam looked like from the builder side of Web3. When I did, the gap was obvious: world-class technical talent, almost no structured paths to the global stage, and a lot of “community” that was really just noisy Telegram groups. So I started gathering people.
How.
sqrDAO began as a Discord server and a recurring dinner group in 2022: small, in-person where we could pull it off, with the chat happening in Discord alongside. The Substack came up around the same time as the writing channel (the Coming Soon post in March 2022 still sits there as a fossil). As the group grew and the conversations got dense, we migrated the main chat to Telegram, where it still lives. We formalized as an community in late 2023, anchored the operation in Da Nang in 2024, and have spent every year since stacking infrastructure on top of the community: investments, accelerators, validators, and a flagship summit that now operates as the official Web3 leg of Vietnam’s flagship venture summit.
When.
Three years, but more specifically:
Year 1 (2023) was the year I learned how badly Vietnam wanted this. I started Web3 Builders’ Dinners expecting maybe ten people in a room. Instead, we ended up running them across Hanoi, HCMC, and Da Nang, and the rooms kept filling up beyond what I’d planned for. The partner list grew alongside (AWS, Solana SuperteamVN, Kyber, Avalanche, Aura), and the small, curated, high-trust thesis stopped feeling like a wager and started feeling like a description of what was already there, waiting for someone to organize it.
Year 2 (2024–2025) was when dinners became summits. The first Web3 Builders' Summit happened in Da Nang in November 2024 (about a hundred founders). I spent the night before convinced nobody was going to come, because a 100-person summit is a different animal than a recurring dinner. They came. The second edition (The Rise of AI, June 2025) doubled the room. sqrNODE went live somewhere in there, which felt different from events: infrastructure, not theater. sqrBUIDL launched as our accelerator track, running two BUIDL-athon seasons back-to-back (Shipping on Solana first, then Lisk Vietnam BUIDL-athon), and putting real portfolios (ZoneIn, LedgerX, VerIOT, and a long list of others; see buidl.sqrdao.com) on the board. By the end of Y2 I'd stopped wondering whether the thesis behind sqrDAO was real and started wondering whether I could keep up with it.
Year 3 (2025–2026) is the year you’ve been reading about. The Hub stood up. We announced the EMpower Founders Residency with Lisk Ventures in early 2026 (a longer-form evolution of the BUIDL-athons, three weeks instead of a sprint), and ran its first cohort in May, six teams who stuck the full three weeks. The Summit hit its third edition, with the room full of frens from across Vietnam, Southeast Asia, and beyond. We also registered sqrDAO’s representative office in Da Nang in mid-May, formalizing our MOU with DISSC to help shape the local legal framework for digital assets, Web3, and AI in Central Vietnam. The blog passed 3,000 subscribers somewhere along the way; I didn’t notice when. And Vietnam shipped Resolution 05/NQ-CP and opened VIFC Da Nang, almost on cue. Three years of stage-setting met an actual stage this May. I’m still processing what that means.
What Just Happened in May
May was the densest month sqrDAO has ever run, by a wide margin. Two flagship operations overlapped on purpose:
sqrBUIDL Founders Residency, Cohort 1: EMpower (May 11–29).
Co-run with Lisk Ventures. We picked 8 teams out of 51 eligible applications, a 16% acceptance rate I’m proud of, because we genuinely turned down good folks whose shape didn’t fit this cohort. Of those, 6 made it through the full three weeks in Da Nang. The 8 → 6 gap is itself a Cohort 1 lesson, and one we’re carrying into how we structure commitments for Cohort 2. For the six who showed up: three weeks of programming, mentorship, capital access, late-night debugging sessions, and the kind of compounded relationships you only get from being in the same room with the same builders for three straight weeks.
Web3 Builders’ Summit: LFBUIDL 2026 (May 25).
The third edition. The first one that felt like the room had been waiting for it.
A year ago, this Summit was where Vietnamese builders went to find each other. This year, it was where they showed up to be found. 300+ builders, 50+ speakers, 40+ partners from across Vietnam, Southeast Asia, and beyond, all in one building for one day. Talking about what’s started actually mattering: stablecoins, RWA, AI × Web3.
Co-hosted with DAVAS (organized under the direct guidance of the Da Nang City People’s Committee), with Lisk and DISSC as Strategic Partners. Three keynotes, three Lightning Debates, pitching sessions for the next wave of Vietnamese builders.
It was also the first major community-led Web3 conference inside Vietnam’s new regulatory pilot framework (Resolution 05/NQ-CP, VIFC Da Nang as institutional anchor). We didn’t engineer that timing. We spent three years building toward a moment where Vietnamese Web3 builders would have a real seat at a real policy table. That seat existed in May. People used it.
But the agenda is the boring part. What I’ll remember: hallway clusters reforming around different arguments, people meeting in person after years in each other’s DMs, the way nobody left early. Some of the best conversations never made it to a stage.
What I told VnEconomy at the Summit:
“The Web3 ecosystem in Vietnam is witnessing significant shifts as institutional infrastructure begins to take shape. Builders in the next phase must simultaneously master three pillars (policy, technical infrastructure, and capital flows) to build products and achieve long-term growth alongside the market.”
And the one-liner I gave Cryptopolitan ahead of the day, which I still stand by:
“The builders who win the next phase are the ones who showed up to equip themselves before the rest of the room caught up.”
One moment from the Summit I’ll carry for a while: in his opening remarks, Mr. Le Son Phong of the Da Nang City Department of Science and Technology explicitly placed the builder community (engineers, programmers, tech founders) at the core of Da Nang’s innovation ecosystem. The city government, on record, is saying the builders are the point. That’s not a sentence I would have believed three years ago.
What Comes Next
A few things we’re watching, and a few things we’re building toward.
The regulatory window is 2026–2030. That is a finite window. We have roughly four years to use it well: get real builders inside the sandbox, ship infrastructure that survives the pilot phase, and make sure the policy that comes out the other end was shaped by people who actually wrote code. The cost of fumbling this window is high. Stablecoins will be the obvious test case. They’re already, in practice, doing what Bitcoin was originally meant to do (fast, programmable, borderless money), and they’re the most-used onchain asset in Vietnam by a wide margin. Whatever framework Vietnam settles on will set the precedent for the rest of Southeast Asia.
Da Nang Blockchain Hub becomes the year-round home. W3BS is one day. EMpower is three weeks. The Hub is every day. That’s where most of Year 4 energy is going: turning the physical space into where builders default to working from, not just a place they visit for events. The community deserves a room of its own.
Cohort 2 and W3BS 2027 are both in early planning. New themes, new shapes. We’re going to apply everything we just learned. Ask me again when September ends.
sqrNODE stays focused on sustainability over scale. Validator revenue underwrites the rest of the flywheel: events, residencies, the builders we back. Year 4 is about running what we have reliably, not adding more.
sqrDAO’s operations are becoming agentic. Two pieces are shipping: sqrAGENT (our crypto-native community agent, talking like a member, not a chatbot) and sqrSKILLS (open-source Claude Code skills on github.com/sqrDAO, free for any builder to fork and/or contribute). Thesis: humans set direction, agents do the reps.
One personal goal: redesign the operating model so Year 4 doesn’t require me to be on a plane every nine days. The community is strong enough now. I need to act like it.
The Chads
I’ve used “we” a lot in this post. Time to acknowledge the people behind that word.
What nobody sees about a month like May is everything the Ops Team did before, during, and after. Residency logistics, speaker schedules, comms, design, partnerships, AV, run-of-show, airport pickups. Every photo in this post exists because someone on the Ops Team made sure the moment was worth photographing. The byline on this article is mine. The month wasn’t.
And everyone who pitched in: sqrDAO members who showed up during Summit week and just helped. Side events at their offices, speaker pickups, last-minute translations, impromptu dinners, photos, intros, rides, fixes. None of it was in anyone’s job description. All of it made the week work.
Beyond the events, the Certified Chads keep doing the work even when no one’s asking, and the Chads Council steers strategy, partnerships, and governance alongside me. The people I lean on when the call is too big for one head to hold.
Full roster at sqrdao.com. Every name there did something this year that doesn’t have my name on it. If yours belongs there and isn’t yet, DM me. Three years in, the list only gets longer.
Sign-off
Three years ago sqrDAO was a Discord server and a recurring dinner with no real plan and a community of almost no one. Today there’s a real room, a real program stack, real founders shipping real things, and a regulatory window we have a shot at using well. Whether that adds up to “a successful third year” depends entirely on what we do with the next twelve months, and “we” is the key word.
sqrDAO is a builders-driven community, first and last. Programs, stacks, residencies, agents: all of it is just infrastructure for the room. The room is the point.
To everyone who showed up (at a dinner, on stage, in the residency, in the Hub, in the DMs, on a panel, in an airport pickup line, or just by reading these posts): thank you. None of this works without you. Most of it works because of you.
still in the trenches, with frens.
LFBUIDL.
Castelian
Founder and Head Chad, sqrDAO
Bullish on sqr dao 🔥