Our Mission

Delivering the benefits of Decentralized networks; Privately, securely and resiliently

Web3’s killer app is a peer-to-peer internet of trust. Most people haven’t experienced a decentralized network solving a problem outside of economics, leading to the misconception that Web3 is merely speculative finance with technical rails.

We are changing that.

We’re Solving “find your friends in the crowd”

Totem Grid was founded on a thesis developed over six years to solve a specific, big problem—one you’ve almost certainly experienced. Every decision in our technical and business roadmap is focused squarely on delivering a game-changing product to music festivals, for the festival-goers. The solution happens to generalize quite well.

Our name, Totem Grid, is inspired by the Festival Totem, which festival-goers use to find their friends when communication networks fail due to congestion. Even when communications are working, using text messages and phone calls to find your friends in a crowd sucks compared to using Totems.

Totem Grid digitizes the festival totem with local, offline-first communication and map-localization networks so that people can stay connected in a mobile application with chat and hyper-accurate location to find each other and things at the event on a map and in AR. 

Totem Grid is the killer application IPFS, UWB radios, and Web3 have been waiting for, collectively.

The Master Plan, in a nutshell

  1. Build a constrained use case MVP with minimal messaging and location features, launching at festivals and concerts.

2. Scale that MVP and user base into a decentralized physical infrastructure (DePin) network & flagship app with robust social features and location services. 

3. Scale that network and experience into sports stadiums, business conferences and trade-shows.

4. Scale that network into a global network providing edge communications and location services for rural areas, airplanes and beyond.

Our Team

Jeremy Mundell
Chief Connection Officer

Jeremy is a recruiting and business development leader with a vision to solve a problem at festivals using the latest breakthroughs in decentralized networks. An autodidact, Jeremy developed extraordinary expertise in building world-class applied sciences teams while playing foundational roles at Facebook AI, Aurora Innovation, Protocol Labs, and Eigenlayer.

Building upon his expertise and connections, his mission is to "connect the network” and bring Totem Grid to life as a service that benefits humanity, solves a problem for himself, and redefines what’s possible with recruiting as a side effect.

Ryan Betts
Staff Designer

Ryan is a zero-to-one design and product leader who sweats the UX of data, security and safety. His 20 year career has spanned frontier tech (Proxxi, Fission),  developer experiences (W3C, Adobe, PhoneGap), and service delivery, from backstage through to polished customer touch points (AT&T). He loves making a tough problem look easy.

A systems-thinker at heart, Ryan’s engineering and business counterparts often joke that he’s “just a designer.” His contributions to UCAN, WNFS and IPVM (Fission, Protocol Labs) and web3 wallet standards (CASA, WalletUncon) have helped shape local-first and self-sovereign experiences from the protocol up.

He brings a unique perspective to Totem Grid, having lived the challenges of music festivals as both a participant and performer.

Alf Watt
Radio & iOS Lead

Alf is a hands-on engineering leader with over a decade of expertise in Wireless Networking & iOS/Mac applications, with experience leading end-to-end development in both zero-to-one apps for startups and large enterprise systems with Apple, Mapbox, and Lucid Motors.

Alf cut his teeth in a decentralized network as the founder of Masu Networks. He has long seen the potential of these technologies as utility networks, believes an edge-first internet is the future, and is motivated by the moral elements of scaling these systems.

Our Advisors

Will Scott
Technology Advisor

Will is an engineering leader, applied scientist, and startup advisor with interest & expertise in the frontiers of networking, security, and privacy. After receiving his PhD from the UW, Will blazed a trail across Google & Oasis Labs before becoming an instrumental leader on the team developing IPFS and related technologies in the Protocol Labs Network.

Will believes that Internet access should not be hampered by explicit censorship from government and corporate entities, by integrity failures in online services, and by services that are not yet implemented.

Marta Geater
Governance Advisor

Marta is a seasoned Leader in Web3 Community Governance & Incentive Design, Open Source Ecosystems, and Team Leadership. Recognized for her public speaking and mentoring, Marta has received accolades such as “Most Influential Person in Blockchain” and “Coindesk’s Top 100 People in Blockchain.”

She’s a key member of the W3C Blockchain Community Group and a former Chair of the Sovrin Technical Governing Board. Her background includes serving as the Director of Web3 Strategy at ConsenSys and currently as the Executive Director at FIDL—Filecoin Incentive Design Labs. With a Ph.D. in Computer Security and Privacy, Marta has helped enterprises and startups navigate AI, quantum computing, and blockchain, understanding their transformative impacts.

Her career spans The Linux Foundation, Hyperledger, Balancer Labs, Blockstream, Deutsche Telekom, and Apple and consulting with startups like Totem Grid. Marta believes in the potential of Totem Grid’s Collective framework, which, while experimental, is likely to be the right way to build a company.

Julien Boedec
GTM, Partnerships & BD Advisor

Julien is a seasoned entrepreneurial leader and advisor with expertise in all phases of GTM. Julien has led the areas of BD, Partnerships, and Community growth for Boost, Optimism, Uber, and LinkedIn at the company level. An entrepreneur and founder from Paris now living in Silicon Valley, he is passionate about tech, startups, and partnerships.

An engineer by training and experienced as a technical founder, Julien enjoys prototyping new ideas and making breakthroughs like Totem Grid come alive.

Joao Fiadeiro
Product Advisor

Joao is a seasoned product and engineering leader with expertise in translating new technologies into practical applications. Joao has proven ability to build and lead scrappy teams to rally around a strong thesis and ship products in emerging technologies with leaders in AI (Google Research, Netflix) and Web3 (Protocol Labs, Jump Trading), while always remaining data-driven to the core. 

Joao is passionate about live music and DJs as a hobby; he is motivated by the dream of one day using the Network himself.

Developing & Validating Totem Grid’s Thesis:

Our search for the solution at the intersection of mesh networks, radio localization, social media, and event experience applications was sparked by a hackathon-winning project with groundbreaking potential and unsolved problems, primarily in the areas of Multi-hop routing, RF congestion, Node Participation, Localisation, and Operational Scalability.

Our interest in Named Data Networking led to discovering IPFS & Lib2p and a subsequent deep dive into building a better internet for humanity. The answer we discovered combines open-source innovations from Web3’s R&D explosion, a clever radio system, and a go-to-market strategy that incentivizes tremendous adoption and network effects. 

Web3’s solutions to decentralized network problems addressed not just the local multi-hop routing problems we came for:  they brought global network scalability, distributed hardware operations to event operators,  enhanced the security and privacy, made everything easier  with open source ecosystems, and provide a mechanism to drive the network flywheel.

Before founding, our thesis underwent an extensive validation process with luminaries and leaders in our key areas. Only two changes were made to our roadmap: 1) An updated radio scheme centered on OTS hardware enabled a fast launch with low capital requirements 2) We’re swapping out iroh’s network stack for Rust libp2p to implement our own Delay Tolerant Networking while keeping iroh’s data layer.

Our two most notable validations were: 1) Juan Benet’s assessment that our plan to use IPLD compatibility to enable IPC-coordinated locally spawned ephemeral proof of relay networks operating anywhere globally and using Iroh in place of IPFS for its performance and battery life benefits should work. 2)  Jon Santon confirms UWB’s resistance to interference in dense crowds with predicted degradation in location accuracy from 10 centimeters to 1-2 meters in a Coachella scenario.


The three final puzzle pieces unlocking our feasibility were: iroh.computer for mobile performance, Interplanetary Consensus for globally scalable decentralized network coordination, and Firm.org for our development collective.

We Believe:

  1. The internet needs networks that prioritize privacy and transparency, which users can trust through openly verifiable systems and community ownership.

  2. There is a massive, unsolved problem at live events with hundreds of millions of potential users and billions of dollars in potential revenue in festivals alone.

  3. This problem is an ideal application for new breakthroughs in decentralized networks.

  4. By solving the problem in this way, we will tangibly demonstrate the utility-value of web3 networks, transforming their global perception.

  5. We can build a transparently operated social network that is privacy-preserving, censorship-resistant, and completely funded by utility revenues.

  6. We are playing an infinitely positive sum game

Our culture is collective:

Our Development Collective is structured as a non-hierarchical Holacracy operating in a DAO-ified company using firm.org as a foundation. While innovative, our structure is just a new combination of existing great ideas in a complimentary pattern that equips startups with a better way to build distributed teams. We are moving the needle on transparency and trust while improving our operational efficiency, collaboration, and decision-making systems.

By blending the best elements of Holacracies, DAOs, and startups, we’ve created a structure where the complementary components amplify one another in a system designed to evolve as we do. This design ensures that every team member is not only part of the process but an empowered owner in the decisions that matter most to them. It retains speed in local decisions, enhances group decisions with quadradic voting, provides automation & efficiency, improves company records, and sets a new standard for operational trust and transparency.

Delivering on our mission holds the potential for global impact. Decentralized communications resilient to censorship, surveillance, and interruptions will improve safety and privacy and ensure people remain connected, informed, and empowered. We are committed to accelerating the adoption of an internet where digital human rights and personal data sovereignty become daily standards.

Our Values:

1) Operate with Transparency and Trust 2) Deliver Excellent Service 3) Make Valuable Connections 4) Practice Decentralization 5) Balance Kaizen with Ikigai