Fresh off the press:

▹ Week's Top Signal
▹ Life After Lifestyle by Toby Shorin
▹ Luca Prosperi on DAOs
▹ Li jin on Web3 Creator Playbook
▹ Nicole Froio on Cyberspace Harrasment
▹ Doodles $54m Raise
▹ ... much more
 
Plus: Market Pill, What else is Poppin'

Let’s get into it.

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This week, Patagonia’s founder placed his and his family’s share of the company into a trust dedicated to allocating dividends and continuing to drive the company’s actions toward combating climate change. The trust will receive 98% of financial share and all of the voting stock in the company. The move is rather unprecedented, especially for a company valued at over $3B, and is particularly interesting for folks in web3 interested in community ownership and exit-to-community.

In Other Internet’s piece from last year, Positive Sum Worlds, it’s argued that “public goods are enacted by social institutions that reproduce patterns of behavior in the public interest.” The team points to a need to expand definitions of “public” to ensure positive externalities for folks outside of company or organizational boundaries who align with our values.

Patagonia’s founder chose his definition of public – Earth itself – and chose a long-term structure to support it in perpetuity.

What is interesting about the trust model is that its long-term existence has parallels to crypto protocols. The unstoppable existence of the protocol ensures that tokenholders can play long-term games with the profits/brand once there’s some level of stability in the market. This is why some have argued that handing over the company to a trust focused on climate change is the web2 equivalent of handing the company over to a climate-focused DAO.

DAOs will need to decide whether their goal is active ownership of a protocol (via decentralization), capital allocation towards a common goal, or something else entirely. In doing so, we can better understand how we can create positive-sum outcomes for all stakeholders, including non-tokenholders.

TAKE NOTE
This is an incredible move on behalf of Patagonia’s founder, and a great example to learn from for both web2 and web3 founders alike. To change the world for the better, we will have to experiment with new ways to produce the positive outcomes we want to see. Kudos!

Crypto Pulled off Its Big Upgrade, The Merge. The Merge has arrived. After years of anticipation of everything from the details of the Merge to an official upgrade date, Ethereum has officially shifted to proof-of-stake, effectively slashing 99.9% of its previous annual energy usage. This piece from the Washington Post discusses some of the details of the Merge, in addition to some of Vitalik’s future visions for the Ethereum ecosystem. Soulbound tokens are debated, and folks like Glen Weyl point out that while the blockchain itself may be more environmentally friendly, that does not mean that everything happening on said blockchain is all rainbows and sunshine. We have a long way to go before we reach the visions of the future that blockchain advocates are building for. Nonetheless, the Merge is a fantastic social and technical feat.

Life After Lifestyle. Toby Shorin of Other Internet is back again with another absolute banger. This piece is an adaptation of a talk that Toby gave at FWB Fest. He argues that we are moving from a world of “lifestyle brands” to one of “profitable cultural belief systems that produce ‘types of guy.’” Toby describes a world where culture is intentionally crafted not only to produce new outcomes, but also to produce new personalities. Culture is learned between individuals and groups who are aspiring to build it, whether or not they realize. This quote towards the end of the essay sums things up well: “The further from goods and services you go, the closer you get to ideology and belief. If it’s the case that the goods and services are a means to a different end rather than the other way around, the question is: what are you leading your subscribers towards?” Absolutely fantastic work all around.

Jumpstarting Communities Through Tokens. Just as web3 networks can leverage tokens to bootstrap growth and overcome the cold start problem, web3 creators are creating a new playbook as well: leveraging tokens to bootstrap audiences & capital, kickstarting the creative flywheel. Li Jin of Variant Fund writes that creators on web2 platforms face a cold start challenge: in order to make money, they need to have an audience, but in order to grow their audience, they need to have the resources to fund content creation. This is a classic issue across the creator economy, and leveraging tokens is one way to give fans early “stake” in your success as a creator while raising the funds to sustain your work and create high quality content from day one. As usual, Li highlights the massive benefits this brings to the table for creators in the ecosystem and beyond.

Tribes & Endgames: DAOs Stretching Themselves. This piece from Luca Prosperi, MakerDAO contributor and author of Dirt Roads, covers the looming votes in the MakerDAO community and the saga that has led us to this point. According to Luca’s summary of the situation: “Maker would, de facto, move its focus away from smart contract-based CDP product deployment, towards a Fei-like PCV management model.” While that may mean very little to many, the gravity of the situation for Maker – and the larger DeFi ecosystem – cannot go unstated. This would fundamentally change the way that Maker DAO functions, arguably moving away from it being a “DAO” at all. Luca believes the alternative, and better, plan would be to simplify the DAO structure and return to profitability by slashing costs 30%. The Maker DAO situation is a great case study for DAO politics, and we’ll have a lot to learn from the aftermath.

Web3 Network Effects: Leveraging Power Users. This essay from Sangeet Paul Choudary provides a teardown in one of the most important web3 strategies: leveraging power users. Sangeet lays out 6 strategies to do so, including piggybacking web2 social graphs, NFT signaling, and structuring power governance for power users. Leveraging power users in web3 has been one of the clear use cases since the rise of NFTs, and it is only becoming more fruitful as we develop and implement new best practices. Sangeet’s guiding philosophy here is simple: while the promise of web3 is user-ownership, it will help folks who are already looking to monetize on web2 platforms first, before it can ever be effective for large audiences.

Trouble In Cyberspace. VR promises a seductive image of a utopic space where we can escape the ills of modern society. But when we buy into this rhetoric, whose experiences are we choosing to ignore? Nicole Froio writes for FWB’s WIP about the world of VR and the opportunities for it to proliferate and overcome gender-based violence in the metaverse. Nicole writes that “Though gender-based violence can feel inescapable on the internet, that doesn’t mean that the technology for empowerment and transcendence isn’t there.” This is an incredibly thoughtful piece on an under-discussed topic in the world of VR and the metaverse, which Nicole tactfully weaves with the underlying literature on the subject.

Nouns is a Tokenized Community. Forefront core contributor Jihad Esmail has been down the Nouns DAO rabbithole, and this piece was a great encapsulation of his thesis around Nouns and tokenized communities. Jihad argues that the excitement around Nouns is primarily due to the fact that it is the first well-resourced tokenized community. Nouns DAO's gift to the world wasn't introducing the one-a-day NFT auction – it was opening people's eyes to the power of a community-run treasury funding community-run projects. Funding those projects – the core function of a tokenized community – unlocks the value of the community itself while putting the power into their hands like never before. Nouns is accomplishing that today, but there will be many, many more tokenized communities that sprout in the coming months. Forefront aims to be at the frontier of these communities’ development.

Market data on the last 7 days. Last updated Sept 19, 2022

Updates from the DAO

— We published a new essay on the FF Journal entitled Digital Rest: Blockchain Leisure Culture.
— We will have a Season 2 recap post coming out this week, alongside some special announcements for community members.
— "a new sun is rising on the horizon"—SOONᵀᴹ - Mint for Free

▹ FF Library - Blockchain Leisure Culture
▹ Read - What The Merge Means
▹ Mainstream - Starbucks <> Polygon
▹ Opinion - Music NFT Scarcity
▹ NFT - OpenRarity
▹ Raise - Doodles $54m Raise
▹ Listen - Pet3rpan: Minimizing Governance
▹ Fresh Take - Free (to Own) is Good
▹ Interesting - Nouns Dynamic Quorum
▹ Cool  - Humanbound Tokens
▹ Resources - Zero Knowledge Canon
▹ Tooling - Coinvise Airdrop V3
▹ Thread  - Aave Stani on Lens
▹ Techy - VRGDA NFT Issuance

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