A Look Back at Polygon Guilds & Advocates in 2022

Polygon Labs

December 21, 2022

Whew. What a year! And what a time for reflection. The gm’s piled up while devs built heads down–plus a ton of other stuff in Web3 happened, too (maybe you heard about it).

Through it all, the folks in DevRel at the Polygon Companies have been grateful for the brightest, most precious aspect of the Polygon network ecosystem: the community.

Builders on Polygon have been supporting one another, growing, hacking, and learning all year – and the Polygon companies were here to help their journeys, one person at a time.

So let’s rewind. Here’s just a taste of what builders in the Polygon ecosystem accomplished in 2022.

Polygon Guilds

The dream? Find a community of builders and Web3 enthusiasts IRL, and nearby.

That was the goal when the Guild program launched at the beginning of the year. Build local, think global. And the message was hugely popular: hundreds of members joined Guilds all over the world.

Now, more than 70 Polygon Guilds are actively organizing meetups, conferences, workshops, talks, and other get-events to learn about the future of the web.

The power of Guilds was on stark demonstration during Polygon’s Web3: Made in India campaign. The initiative highlighted the organic community of devs with the Guild Roadshow, a celebration of builders all across India.

7 Guilds, 3,000 participants, and one tour later, Guilds in Kochi, Jaipur, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Mumbai, Delhi, and Lucknow saw 120+ speakers with the best Web3 alpha.

All this is just in one country! Guild activity across the globe was intense this year. A handful of highlights:

Open Source Festival 2022 kicked off by Guild Lagos
Road to Web3 with Guild Nagpur
Nighttime catchup Futuristic22 conference with Guild Toronto
Web3 data and strategy with Guild Munich, plus Guild Berlin’s recap video on developer relations

Guild Buenos Aires with the side event in ETHLatam
Blockchain basics in Florence
Guild Seoul unpacking DeFi and NFTs
And so, so much more, both online and off: Web3 101, a thread explaining Supernets, Open Future with Web3, talking about DeFi breakthroughs, celebrating the World Cup, Web3 style.

All year, Guilds across the world have flourished, at a grassroots level. And by providing support and education, the Polygon companies are helping communities flourish.

Polygon Advocates

The Polygon Advocate program empowers members of the community who are passionate about the protocol and its development to help others learn all about building on the Polygon network – and tap into the best Ethereum scaling solutions on the planet. By foregrounding education and community, Advocates were instrumental in helping builders all. Over. The. World.

More than 7,000 developers joined global workshops and training programs organized by Polygon Advocates in 2022.

A few year-end Advocate highlights for the ole memory box:

Supported 2,400 builders during the Web3: Made in India campaign at cities across the subcontinent with real-time, face-to-face conversations about the bleedingest of edges in Web3
Workshops galore, like this one in Kochi launching devs on their Web3 journey (bon voyage!)
Bootcamps for building in Web3, like what went down in Turkey
Education, by communicating complex technical terms in easy-to-understand Twitter threads, newsletters, podcasts, and a glut of other content.
IRL presence at workshops, summits, and conferences like ETHVietnam’s BUIDLATHON and GDG in Malaysia
Showing up online, too, by organizing Discord AMAs to field developer questions

Dalip Tyagi, SVP of Developer Relations at Polygon, said, “We have seen overwhelming interest in the Polygon Advocate program and the tremendous impact created by the Polygon Advocates both on the local and global stage. We wish to bring more resources to our program in 2023 to increase the impact of the program further.”

The examples are nearly endless (buy coffee with an NFT in Turkey!), but the takeaway is concrete: Advocates rocked this year.

There are big community updates coming in 2023. Expect more from Guilds, and a completely revamped, rebooted Advocates program.

So much is happening, and so quickly, that you’ll want to check out our blog and tune in to our social channels for the latest from the Polygon ecosystem.

Together, we can build an equitable future for all through mass adoption of Web3!