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Fresh off the press:
▹ Week's Top Signal
▹ Elon Musk X App
▹ Joey DeBruin on Community Ownership
▹ Yancey Strickler "How Culture is Made"
▹ How Brands Monetize Culture by Mason Nystrom
▹ Crypto Market Fit by Jeff Morris Jr.
▹ Gitcoin announces Grants Protocol
▹ ... much more
Plus: Market Pill, What else is Poppin'
Let’s get into it.
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In the wake of Elon Musk’s Twitter deal nearing a close, he tweeted something rather noteworthy this past week: “Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app.”
While Musk didn’t elaborate on what X would look like, many believe that he is aspiring to replicate WeChat, which over the past decade has virtually become the everything app in China. Even if this speculation is true, it remains to be seen what a Musk-led WeChat might look like. One theory is that it will be a unification of open protocols.
Friend-of-Forefront Nir wrote a piece last year entitled “The Super DApp Thesis,” where he argued that The West’s WeChat (an all-in-one app that can do everything) will be a “Super DApp” consisting of one/few web3 apps/platforms integrating with a growing set of permissionless protocols, standards, and cloud solutions.
As opposed to the misaligned incentives of web2, Nir argues that web3 technology offers a new way to achieve super-app-like dominance and versatility with lower barriers to entry and horizontal integration. Released text messages show Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey arguing to Musk that Twitter should be an open protocol stewarded by a foundation. Musk himself has shared an idea for Twitter that would require each tweet to be coupled with a crypto micropayment.
At the same time, some would argue that Twitter is too far gone to ever be the foundation of a “super dApp.” Alternatives like Farcaster and Lens, which are open ecosystems from day 1, could over time offer the same UX as Twitter while giving developers and users complete freedom to build on top of their respective protocols.
TAKE NOTE
The move toward web3 social is not just happening in DAOs in existing protocols – founders and leaders across the tech ecosystem are thinking about what a world might look like with open social platforms as well. This would unlock a completely new world, but the incentives need to be right for this reality to come to fruition.
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Community Ownership is a Self-fulfilling Prophecy. This week, Friend-of-Forefront Joey DeBruin wrote one of the most insightful pieces on community ownership in recent history. He argues that there are two primary reasons why community ownership is good. First, it’s good for business: as the cost of creation goes to zero, and as distribution and trust shifts towards individuals, people that build with and for their communities will be increasingly successful. Second, it’s good for you: community feeling is basically the meaning of life for humans. He outlines how much of the “ownership” in DAOs manifests itself through transparency of social contracts. Those social contracts, he says, are arguably more important than any of the underlying tech. This is a must read for anyone building in web3 today.
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How Culture is Made. “As individuals our powers are limited. But in groups, we become exponentially stronger.” This piece from Metalabel co-founder Yancey Strickler highlights four stories, including the Royal Society and Dischord Records, to explain their thesis around metalabels and multiplayer creativity. Yancey points to an interview he did for the Creative Independent where journalist Adam Curtis argues that “We’re encouraged just to talk about ourselves and our feelings towards others. We’re not encouraged to see ourselves as part of anything.” Seeing yourself as part of something – of a squad – is where power and creativity are truly unlocked. This piece acts as an incredible series of case studies for the work that Metalabel is doing. Huge shout out to the team on their most recent release!
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Crypto Market Fit: Redefining Product Market fit in web3. Jeff Morris Jr. of Chapter One coins a new term in this piece: Crypto Market Fit. He argues that it’s unreasonable to evaluate crypto companies and protocols on the success metrics of web2 startups. Finding PMF in crypto probably looks a lot different, and thus deserves a different term. Crypto protocols are not social networks, he says, but industry pundits are still very critical of user base population sizes within crypto. There is an expectation that crypto protocols need to hit “mainstream” appeal to be considered successful, when in reality they can just be used a lot by a smaller population of people. Uniswap is used as an example, not quite hitting Robinhood volumes, but extremely successful and useful nonetheless. This piece is the first in a series where Jeff plans on further defining his idea of Crypto Market Fit.
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How Media Franchises & Brands Monetize Culture. Mason Nystrom poses a simple prediction: like the major brands that came before them, PFP collections will monetize their brands through merch. Some PFP projects have started to issue physical merchandise and goods like Cool Cats clothing, Doodles collectibles, Pudgy Penguins, and Nouns Coffee. However, Mason argues that in order for these brands to truly bring their merch – or any other vehicle for monetization – to the mainstream, they’ll need their “cultural moment” that shoots them into the zeitgeist, not just the “speculative moments” of their launch. In a way, PFPs themselves can be viewed as merch, so it’ll be interesting to see to what extent this prediction comes true.
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Moonbirds DAO to Launch With $2.6M in Funding. This week, Moonbirds founder Kevin Rose announced Moonbirds DAO launching in early 2023 2ith $2.6M in ETH and NFTs in the community treasury. The goal of that DAO is to “empower creatives that are building towards furthering the Moonbirds ecosystem, reputation, and lore,” which would classify it as a tokenized community according to our definition at Forefront. This is an interesting example of a “retroactively formed DAO”: the founders had no obligation to form the DAO, yet viewed it as a step towards community ownership for NFT holders. However, many folks on Twitter saw the $2.6M as not meeting expectations given how high the Moonbirds floor price currently is and the revenue it has previously generated. That said, we will certainly be seeing more tokenized communities pop up across the NFT ecosystem and beyond – stay tuned.
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Looking for a way to support Forefront? We’re opening up the FF Newsletter to sponsors interested in sharing their company, project, or community with +10,000 of web3’s most curious minds.
If you are interested in becoming a sponsor, check out our Sponsorship Page.
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No Hard Reset: Against the Crypto Utopia. This essay from Alice Bucknell explores “blockchain cities” as a subset of the broader smart cities movement, their potential, and their realities. Many of the promises of smart cities – data privacy, voting technology expansion, governance reform, etc. – may depend on blockchains depending on chosen implementation. Some cities, such as “The Line” set to be built in Saudi Arabia, plan on building the entire city’s digital infrastructure on the blockchain. Still, questions remain as to whether these plans of “blockchain utopia” are practical, or even good. Alice does a great job laying out the context and specific examples of where utopian visions might fail in addition to alternative viewpoints.
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Kim Kardashian Fined $1.3M for Crypto Touting. This week, Kim Kardashian agreed to pay the SEC a $1.3M fine to settle charges related to an Instagram post she’d made promoting alt coin Ethereum Max. The fine is not for the ad itself, but for the lack of disclosure that she had been paid $250k to post about the coin. She was also barred from promoting crypto for three years. The most interesting part about this story is the scale of the punishment: crypto rugpulls happen almost daily, but "Kim K" is a symbolic figure that the SEC chose to single out, despite the fact that a $1.3M fine is a slap on the wrist for the Kardashian family. Given the increase in regulatory pressure from the SEC and other US agencies, it will be interesting to see how the landscape plays out and whether other “crypto influencers” will be charged for their malicious promotions. A Warm up?
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Market data on the last 7 days. Last updated Oct 10, 2022
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Updates from the DAO
— Sales for Forefront “Infinity” merch drop closes October 13th, so make sure to grab swag before then!
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◎ Check out FF Signal for daily top web3 social headlines
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