Welcome to Issue 113:

▹ Week's Top Signal
▹ Nouns Builder Launch
▹ NFTs Coming to Instagram
▹ FWB team on Brand Partnerships
▹ Subsidized On-chain Public Goods by Cosanostra
▹ Latest on Music NFTs
▹ ... much more

— Let’s get into it!

Art Gobblers is a decentralized art factory owned by aliens.

The project have managed to bust through the bear market. But what are Art Gobblers, and why are they so interesting?

Art Gobblers is a self-sustaining decentralized art factory launched as 2,000 Gobbler NFTs. Gobblers produce Goo tokens which are used to make blank pages that can be used to create art. This art can be fed to Gobblers to add it to its “belly gallery” or sold individually as 1-of-1 NFTs. Gobblers exist mainly to gobble art. Gobblers eat art that artists create using the draw tool and can be transformed into unique ERC721 NFTs using an in-game process known as gamification.

The project was launched by Paradigm in collaboration with Justin Roiland, the co-creator of Rick and Morty. Within 24 hours, it did more than 8,000 ETH (~$12.5 million) on the platform, and at the time of writing has done 9,723 ETH (~$15 million). The project was so successful that the NFT marketplace Blur surpassed OpenSea in terms of ETH volume for the first time ever, largely on the back of Art Gobblers’ popularity.

However, the launch was not without controversy. When Art Gobblers launched, several people in the broader NFT community noticed that well-known figures like Pranksy, Andrew Wang, Zeneca, and Farokh minted free Art Gobbler NFTs, with some flipping theirs almost immediately for a substantial profit.

While some had a problem with the whitelist model, others (like Punk4156) argued that the model was the best we have to distribute NFTs more widely across a large audience until we have better sybil resistance.

Regardless, the Art Gobblers project is interesting not just for its volume, but for its mechanics. We’ve written in previous Forefront Newsletter edition about the dual-token model that Gobblers innovate on, with NFTs producing “Goo,” an ERC-20 whose volume is determined by the amount of Gobblers you hold and how long you hold them.

TAKE NOTE
Paradigm continues to innovate with Art Gobblers. This project not only proves that much more innovation is to come across the NFT space, but also that bear markets can create meaningful markets with enough interest.

Launch of NounsBuilder. The team at ZORA has officially launched Nouns Builder: a “nounish” DAO creator that allows anyone to create an NFT auction-powered DAO in a few easy steps. The Nouns DAO model has been praised by some as the future of DAOs, and a tool like Nouns Builder will make it possible to test this thesis across a wide range of new organizations. The ZORA team has put up a proposal for 1000 ETH to fund the development of Nouns Builder and seed the DAO, and as of this newsletter it looks like the proposal will pass. Some new DAOs have already been formed using Builder. One example is Purple, the Farcaster ecosystem DAO whose mission is to propagate the Farcaster meme by funding projects building on top of the protocol. This space is definitely one of the most active and interesting in crypto today, Forefront is excited to continue to support launched DAOs via our core products such as Terminal and Pulse (Beta).

Web3 Credentials Deep Dive. Chapter One’s research program has produced some fantastic content, and this piece from Nancy is no different. This write-up covers web3 credentials from top to bottom, hitting everything from introductory material to the current landscape and how to earn web3 credentials today. Nancy defines web3 credentials as the next iteration of traditional credentials, which differ from traditional credentials in that they are not controlled by centralized authorities and are issued through tokens. Verifiable credentials, soulbound tokens, and traditional NFTs can all fall under the umbrella of web3 credentials, depending on their use case. The piece also covers some key problems with the space, including lack of interoperability, marketing woes, and more. In summary, the majority of Web3 credential projects are still in nascent stages of development, while more mature protocols, like POAP, continue to thrive and assert themselves as mainstays of the decentralized identity and credential stack.

Decentralizing Brand Partnerships. Last week, Friends with Benefits DAO (FWB) launched Cafe 11, a partnership with Hennessy to reimagine the free-thinking cafe society of 1920’s Paris with a series of blockchain-enabled events at the most relevant cultural fairs around the world. The team wrote about their experience with this partnership, and their broader partnerships strategy as a DAO working with traditional brands. Essentially, FWB runs a centralized partnerships team that builds the initial relationship with brands, alongside some select key community members with relevant domain expertise. FWB then opens up specific opportunities for community members to get involved with the partnership, either through consumption, contribution, event access, or more. This is a playbook that many other DAOs are exploring in the space. It will be interesting to see how this model evolves as brands become more comfortable and familiar with DAO collaborations.

NFTs Coming to Instagram. This week, Instagram announced that creators will soon be able to mint and sell NFTs directly on the platform. This is coming on the back of its recently launched Digital Collectibles feature, allowing users to connect to their digital wallets and showcase NFTs that they either created or bought. The new feature is built on Polygon, another massive win for their BD team. As this feature rolls out, we will surely see more “Reddit-type” NFT initiatives, with communities and creators broadly distributing tokens for little to no cost in order to bootstrap token-powered ecosystems. This level of adoption will be absolutely critical for the industry, and other social media platforms will surely follow Instagram’s lead.

Rousseau's Breadcrumbs and the Blockchain Leviathan. Jon Hillis of Cabin DAO is back with a political philosophy lesson. He begins by recapping the viewpoints of Hobbes and Rousseau, the “grandfathers” of today’s political Right and Left, respectively. Jon then goes on to argue that what is fundamentally interesting about blockchains is that they refactor the basic assumptions of Hobbes and Rousseau into a technology that doesn’t require human administrators. By allowing people to self-organize into capture resistant small pods of effective coordination, blockchains rewrite the basic assumptions about the necessary scale of governance. Without the need for any additional sovereign entity, anyone can now create an organization that provides immutable rights of governance to members and, if they want, create an independently controlled currency for the organization. This is an extremely interesting conclusion that will prove to have enormous impacts on society in the coming decades.

Models for Community-driven Creation. Li Jin explains how web3 enables co-creation where fans exert significantly more influence on the creative process, powered by shared ownership & new monetization models. She covers three primary models: 1) Constrained / directional fan influence, 2) Fan licensing, and 3) CC0 fan creation. Mad Realities is a premier example of constrained influence in web3, while Loot and Nouns are great examples of CC0 in action. Unlike traditional media wherein fans lacked viable business models for their derivative creations, in web3, fans owning tokens representing the original IP creates incentive alignment between the original creator & fan-creators.

Subsidized On-chain Public Goods. This essay from Cosanostra explores subsidized on-chain public goods, specifically in the case of mechanisms for subsidizing end-user gas fees. With the use of EIP-2771 contracts can support secure native meta-transactions. One individual can build and sign a transaction while another executes and subsequently pays for the transaction cost. The team introduces Badge Bound Forwarders, which bring a new conduit of funding to the existing spectrum. Importantly, this differs from others in that it may be implemented in a way that empowers funding by anyone with full certainty of asset usage. This level of exploration at the technical level of crypto UX will be extremely important for mainstream adoption moving forward.

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

▹ Music NFTs - How Crypto Changes Music
▹ Deep Dives - Death of Decentralized Email
▹ Crypto - CZ vs Alameda
▹ Mainstream - India's CBDC Pilot
▹ Web2 - The Problem With Verification
▹ Interesting - Tim Berners-Lee on Web3
▹ Cool - Quadratic Funding Social Network
▹ Resources - Web3 Music App Landscape
▹ Thread - DAOs and the Law
▹ Techy - ZKPs in Web 3
▹ Tooling - Nouns Builder

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