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Fresh off the press:
▹ Week's Top Signal
▹ Community Design by Mashal Waqar
▹ Li Jin on Fans <> Creators
▹ a16z "Can't be Evil" NFT Licences
▹ Grand Leasure by Poolsuite
▹ ... much more
Plus: Market Pill, What else is Poppin'
Let’s get into it.
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Headlines were made when Jack Dorsey announced earlier this year that his company Block, and its subsidiary TBD, would be working on an identity system that would only use one blockchain: Bitcoin. The project would be called Web5.
Obviously, many folks in the Ethereum ecosystem took this as a clear jab. “Web5” seemed to be mocking web3, and building the project on Bitcoin seemed to be ignoring all of the work that had been and was being done in the Ethereum community around decentralized identity.
This past week, more information was released by the TBD team about their project: SSI, or Self Sovereign Identity. TBD is developing open source, standards-based software to facilitate Self Sovereign Identity on Web5.
The team outlined 15 standards that they are developing or helping to develop to bring this vision to reality. The team is also focused on community-building, rallying teams of developers and technologists to build some of the first SSI use-cases on Web5. For example, these is a team in the TBD Discord focused on building KYC for the Web5 ecosystem.
The larger project is split amongst two sub-projects: the SSI Service, and the SSI SDK. The Service facilitates all things related to DIDs and Verifiable Credentials. The SDK encapsulates the standards laid out above.
TAKE NOTE
All in all, the project seems to have some steam and (obviously) resources behind it. It will be interesting to see if Bitcoin-based identity projects can compete with the experimentation currently happening on Ethereum, and how the competition to build the best tech will change the ecosystem over time.
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Rethinking Community Design to Build Better Communities. Mashal Waqar has built a career building communities on and offline. In this piece for the FF Journal, she writes that we are currently living in a “golden age of community,” precisely because of the social status and opportunity that they provide. Their increased importance means that we must be far more intentional in how we’re crafting and shaping these communities. For example, Mashal points to engagement and individual responsiveness as signs of a healthy community. One point that really stuck out in this piece is how a member’s individual feelings of guilt for not participating can lead them to associate negative emotions with your community, despite the fact that the community did nothing wrong – the person just feels bad. These are the kinds of small, nuanced occurrences that we must observe if we want to build great communities.
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Fans are the New Creators. In this essay, Li Jin of Variant Fund argues that one of the most significant trends in web3 is the re-imagining of fandom: “the blurring of lines between fan and creator,” and how fan labor is funded and rewarded. More specifically, fans are using new business models & funding sources to create derivative projects, where previously these had been nonexistent. Examples include Jenkins the Valet of BAYC, who has built an entire brand and backstory for their NFT around being a helpful member of the Bored Apes community. CC0 licensing takes these ideas even further, because the business model can be either individually or community driven: you can bet on the community’s growth, or you can bet on your own individual work. A great example of this today is Nouns DAO. We’ve already seen fanfiction sweep the internet for over a decade, but fans had no way to monetize. The world of web3 changes the ballgame.
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The Can’t Be Evil NFT Licenses. Creative Commons licenses have been a core pillar of internet culture throughout the 21st century. With NFTs pushing the boundaries of licensing and copyright, new licenses are welcome to deal with the nuanced and novel issues that are being faced by these communities today. In response to these problems, a16z released the “Can’t Be Evil” NFT licenses, a suite of licenses designed specifically for NFTs and inspired by the work of Creative Commons. Given that most NFT projects don’t have the resources to hire lawyers, the team worked with some of the foremost IP lawyers in the web3 space to design six types of broadly applicable NFT licenses and make them available for all. Great work from the a16z team!
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DAOs & Structural Adaptation Theory. Talent DAO is working on a series on what DAOs can learn from Structural Adaptation Theory, and this is part 2. The piece explores the idea of “asymmetric adaptability,” which describes a situation where, despite two options of change being possible, one option clearly has more friction to reach it than the other. This has implications across the DAO experience: compensation, org design, governance, and more. One of the core insights in this piece is that decentralized decision making is an asymmetrically adaptable change: once you move toward decentralized governance, it is very difficult to move back given the expectation that you have set for community members. All in all, this is a great piece calling on the work of organizational design theorists and bringing the knowledge into the world of DAOs.
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Tokens of Appreciating Appreciation. Friend of Forefront Joey DeBruin believes that there’s a huge opportunity to help projects create long-term community loops that start with tokens of appreciation, and end with other forms of ownership. The term “token of appreciation” commonly refers to some favor or good that a person receives for doing good some time in the past. It is an inherently relationship-driven system. Joey argues that bringing these interactions on-chain is extremely valuable because for most early-stage communities, it is too early to create a fully-fledged community token. Additionally, non-transferrable tokens of appreciation create a richer profile of on-chain identity that doesn’t exist using purely fungible tokens. The team at Backdrop is building the infrastructure for this move with Horizon, and we’re super excited to see how it plays out.
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A Plural Decentralized Identity Frontier: Abstraction v. Composability Tradeoffs in Web3. This paper from Shrey Jain, Leon Erichsen, and Glen Weyl explores the tension between abstraction and composability in decentralized identity systems. The trio dives into Verifiable Credentials (VCs), Soul Bound Tokens (SBTs), and Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs). They examine some of the fears about non-consensual verification (scarlet letters) with SBTs, but also outline how the DID method iterations are not immune to these fears by issuing an innocuous public scarlet letter to a DIDs associated public address for anyone to see. These sorts of problems get at the heart of the abstraction vs. composability debate. The team does not explore issues of cost, scalability, or transferability as these factors have already been discussed in previous papers.
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Digital Cities. “From Babylon to Boston, cities have always been hubs of economic growth and cultural activity.” This piece from Chase Chapman of Metropolis (prev. Orca Protocol) is a tour de force, solidifying the meme that DAOs are digital cities. Digital spaces today, Chase says, are problematic because they are “instantiated on borrowed land.” Web3, on the other hand, enables digital spaces to become sovereign. Unlike physical cities, which are bound by geography, physics, and borders, digital cities have no true bounds. In this way, there is vast potential for digital cities to be hyperconnected to a degree physical cities could never reach, and reach new economic and social heights that we could only dream of with the cities of today. Incredible work by Chase and the Metropolis team.
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Market data on the last 7 days. Last updated Sept 5, 2022
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Updates from the DAO
— We published Rethinking Community Design, a piece by Mashal Waqar for the Forefront Journal.
— A few members of the FF fam – Jihad, Jay, and Aureus – will be at MCON this week! Make sure to come say hi!
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◎ Check out FF Signal for more headlines
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