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Fresh off the press:
▹ Week's Top Signal
▹ Reversible Transaction on Ethereum
▹ Metropolis x Other Internet Governance Forum
▹ a16z Miles Jennings on Apps Regulations
▹ Variant' Alan Levin on Token Launch
▹ Tyler Hobbs $17m NFT Drop
▹ ... much more
Plus: Market Pill, What else is Poppin'
Let’s get into it.
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They say you’ll never have trouble finding the crypto people at a party – they’ll be sure to let you know. The joke rings even more true for Urbiters.
Over the last few months, Urbit has found its way into many more conversations across the crypto world, despite existing for around a decade.
Urbit is a decentralized, peer-to-peer network and operating system. Instead of users, the community consists of owners governing digital real estate: ships, planets, stars, and galaxies represent different tiers of stake in the network. Tlon, Uqbar, and Vienna Hypertext are some of the companies building the Urbit ecosystem. A flourishing ecosystem some say.
Urbit is weird. Its founder is deeply controversial and so are some of its top investors. The scene Urbit has developed has gained a reputation for being edgy and even somewhat discomforting. Yet its philosophy is deeply relevant to the world of web3.
Today, one of the biggest criticisms of web3 is its reliance on centralized middleware. How can decentralization ever be truly achieved if the software we build is still dependent on centralized servers and middlemen at the infrastructure level. To the Urbit community, the need for middleware to connect components on-and-off the chain is a symptom of a deeper problem: the lack of a sensible, unified execution environment shared between applications. In summary, crypto needs an OS, and Urbit can be that OS.
Zora Zine published a write-up on Assembly, the second annual Urbit conference in Miami. The author, Madeline Cash, does an incredible job of capturing the feeling of the moment and the culture of the community. It is certainly worth a read.
TAKE NOTE
Regardless of your thoughts on Urbit’s values or utility, it is clearly gaining steam amongst an incredibly passionate community that is increasingly overlapping with “mainstream” web3. It is worth a look for every web3 builder.
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Reversible Transactions on Ethereum. A group of Stanford researchers recently proposed ERC-20R and ERC-721R, reversible versions of the two most common token standards on Ethereum. The proposal is meant to combat the harmful effects of theft on the blockchain, especially things like hacks where there is undeniable evidence of malicious intent. The team describes a “decentralized court of judges” that vote to freeze assets until a ruling can be made on the legitimacy of the accusation. The proposal has made headlines across the Ethereum ecosystem with many folks (like foobar) arguing that finality is a necessary trait for Ethereum. They argue that “money should move at the speed of the internet, not the speed of the postal service.” Instead, @0xfoobar highlights several issues with this model and proposes custodial escrow as an alternate solution that is more crypto-native and solves the same problems.
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The Gate-Gain Community Framework. The team at Jericho believes that every community in web3 has a gate and a gain. Based on where you are or want to be regarding the gate & the gain, your community-building strategy across the funnel will vary. By gate, the author is referring to what draws folks into your community. By gain, the author is referring to what keeps them around. A 2x2 is then made exploring the different combinations of gate and gain, and how each type of community should think about taking advantage and structuring various aspects of the funnel, from social media strategy to ownership model and more. The framework is analyzed across three dimensions: acquisition, activation, and retention. This is a great way for community builders across the ecosystem to think deeply around how they’re engaging with key stakeholders.
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Web3 Governance Learning Forum Recap. In early August, Other Internet and Metropolis (prev. Orca Protocol) co-organized the Governance Learning Forum, bringing together web3 governance practitioners and experts on governance and coordination beyond the crypto ecosystem. While the event was invite-only, the team released notes and recordings of all of the event’s lectures from scholars across various universities and institutions. Some of the topics covered include participatory budgeting, credible and liberal neutrality, nonprofits and cooperative governance, decentralized community rule-formation, and much more. These videos are packed with insights for DAO operators and contributors alike. Huge shout out to the organizing team, including Forefront core contributor Jihad!
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Blockchain and Interoperability: Globalization 3.0. The teams from Treehouse and Spartan Labs co-authored this piece arguing that interoperability stands out as the next most probable dominant narrative, as it brings currently segregated blockchain ecosystems together, just like how globalization forged the world economy into one. They call this Globalization 3.0. Today, they write, crypto resembles the world economy before globalization, with segregated ecosystems (countries), each trying to excel at every single element of the economy’s value chain (different DEXs, money markets, aggregators, etc.). They believe that interoperability is not only beneficial, but necessary to unlocking crypto’s full potential. This is an intense deep dive into the subject of interoperability with a technical lean. If you can stomach the length, you’ll undoubtedly walk away with a solid understanding of the intricacies of the interoperability debate and much of the road ahead.
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Regulate Web3 Apps, Not Protocols. a16z’s Miles Jennings is back with another call to regulators and policymakers: regulate apps, not protocols. He observes that early proponents of the internet advocated for it to remain free and open in perpetuity, a borderless and regulation-free tool for all of humanity. Despite significant regulation over the last couple of decades, protocols such as HTTP (data exchange for websites), SMTP (email), and FTP (file transfers) have remained as free and open as ever. Instead, regulators chose to crack down on apps, the entities that the vast majority of users interact with, rather than protocols themselves. Jennings argues that the same logic should be applied to web3. Rather than regulating DEXs, borrowing/lending protocols, and incentivized networks, regulators should instead look to wallets, websites, and applications for opportunities to protect users. This logic extends to technical justification as well: cracking down on protocols may prove infeasible given the nature of the blockchain.
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When to Launch a Token. Variant’s Alana Levin has written some great pieces recently on tokenomics. This essay gets to a more fundamental question: when should you even launch a token? Quite simply, she argues, the more necessary a token is for the product to function, the earlier it should be released. On one end of the spectrum is L1s: Ethereum, Bitcoin, and Solana’s tokens were launched at the outset of the ecosystem, and the blockchains couldn’t exist without them. For NFTs, communities, and other consumer applications, tokens might lean more adjacent to the core value. As a result, it makes more sense to wait to launch a token until PMF is found and there is some level of network stability. The easier it is to imagine the product functioning without a token, the less urgent it may be to launch a token at outset. Great insight from Alana and the Variant team!
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Market data on the last 7 days. Last updated Oct 3, 2022
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Updates from the DAO
— The Forefront “Infinity” merch drop is here with a fresh hoodie and t-shirt, in partnership with Metafactory (Sales end October 5th). We’re giving away a free edition on Twitter – go RT now!
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◎ Check out FF Signal for daily top web3 social headlines
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