Welcome to our very first weekly HUG!

2 months ago, HUG was introduced to the world and today, we are officially minting our very first HUG NFT! We couldn't think of a better time to reintroduce ourselves and to celebrate all of the incredible things we have done to date.

What is HUG?

HUG was founded by Randi Zuckerberg and co-founded by Debbie Soon to create the world's friendliest community for curators and creators to build, collaborate, and embrace Web3.

Our vision is to build the inclusiverse 🌎✨ — an uplifting, inclusive universe where everyone is welcomed into Web3 with open arms, and where you'll come across creators, collectors, resources, tools, and of course, an abundance of hugs!

We have 3 growth and community initiatives:

In the past 2 months, we have:

• Expanded our team, making hires directly from the community — head curator Lorr, community manager Riji, and content manager Caitlin

• Brought on trusted advisors Lori Grace and Dr. Hans with a DEI focus to help us continue building HUG with inclusivity and accessibility in mind

• Refreshed our branding and website, which you can now view on thehug.xyz

• Announced and kicked off groupHUG #0002 which is made up of an incredible list of women-led projects - Wow Pixies, Sacred Skulls, Sad Girls Bar, Eyes of Fashion, 8sians, Meemo's World, Girlies, and our very first Solana project Infinity Labs

• Launched a groupHUG 1/1 artist-in-residence program that provides a grant to 1/1 artists to help them launch their first generative collection. Our first 1/1 artists-in-residence are the extremely talented Power of Women, RJ from Chipped Pixels, and Coco.

• Grown our community from the ground up, from the 350 founding community curators for HUGhub to the 18k following we have on Twitter — thank you for being here!

But this is just the beginning...

Last month, we began building our DYOR community discovery and research platform, HUGhub. Thanks to our community curator club, we now have a database of 300 high-quality projects from women and diverse creators, neatly filed across dozens of categories.

Today, we are ready to open up our community curation efforts to the broader community! Our HUG Membership Pass NFT features huggable, collectible artwork by our artist Lisa Chow (how cute are they?), and grants you exclusive access to the HUGhub community on Discord and HUGhub community research platform.

The minting of our HUG Membership Passes is officially LIVE. If you are on the mint list, head on over to mint your NFT here between today and April 22, 10am PT. If you're not, don't fret! We will be opening up more minting windows in the future or you can always get one on secondary on OpenSea.

What's next for HUG?

We have many things planned but for starters, here's what you can look forward to:

• The opening of our Discord to HUG NFT holders on April 20

• Applications open for groupHUG #0003 and hedgeHUG on April 18 (more information will be shared on that day itself)

• More community events on Twitter Spaces, Discord, and soon... IRL or even somewhere in the metaverse..?

In the meantime, happy minting, have a wonderful weekend, and we can't wait to meet all of you soon!