Places are where we live. Where we eat. Where we party and frolic. Where we relax and where explore. Places are central to our identity as human beings. They're where we're from, where we're going, and where we are now.

And while on its best days the metaverse promises a deeply immersive space filled with digital delights and immutable provenance, we believe there's still an unexplored world that exists right in front of us: A world that should be made publicly available to everyone.

Grasping the vast expanse of our globe is difficult. Documenting it is even harder. This is one reason the bulk of information about the world's places is controlled by large organizations or is laden with cumbersome licensing agreements. Two of the most valuable companies in existence provide the primary windows from which we view the world. This is not a coincidence.

Even though the whereabouts of a given place, region, or border is publicly known, accessing that information typically requires the use a specific device or the agreement to a third-party's terms of service and privacy policy.

Some of the most successful ventures to map the world began as games. These projects aligned playful incentives with a love for social gathering, an excitement for exploration, and a joy found in belonging. Games have the power to do this again, and the NFT community has provided a roadmap, as it were. This is a chance to explore the world again, cataloguing the globe's places for the public good.

PlacesDAO exists to curate and document an ever-growing collection of specific real-world places for the purposes of providing them an immutable home on the Ethereum blockchain. Today we're starting small, in Brooklyn, with a collection of 500 real-world locations minted on Layer 1 Ethereum.

The Places treasury will fund expansion to other neighborhoods and cities, and will give back to those communities along the way. It will also fund projects that create art, apps, games, and systems atop the Places protocol.

Let's explore together.