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Hey fam, issue 89 highlights:
▹ Week's Top Signal
▹ FF Creator Residency Program
▹ Linda Xie w/ DAO Learnings
▹ Joey DeBruin on Communities
▹ Molly White w/ Predatory Community
▹ Opensea Seaport NFT Protocol
▹ ... much more
Plus: Market Pill, Member Spotlight, What else is Poppin'
Let’s get into it.
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Let Web3 bloom... This week, Aave publicly launched Lens Protocol, an open-source tech stack that lets developers build decentralized social networking applications. Miguel Piedrafita describes the implications best: "They've basically created the perfect decentralized social storage, indexed by default and with stellar APIs for devs. Wanna recreate twitter, reddit or Mirror? You just need to make a frontend!" Lens has the opportunity to usher in a whole new wave of "web3 social" tools that are truly decentralized and give users full ownership of their data.
Some folks, however, have different visions for "web3 social." For example, Nouns Prop House is "an auction where the lot is ETH and the bids are proposals. At the end of each auction, members of the community vote on which proposal gets funded." Brian Flynn argues that this sort of innovation is truly "web3 social," unlike the more skeuomorphic desire to create a decentralized Twitter or Reddit.
This touches on Joey DeBruin thesis that communities are more like "clouds" than "buckets." Tools like Discord treat communities like walled-gardens, whereas they’re really networks that are often uniquely overlapping for each individual. As a result, "web3 social" must be more network driven, focusing on the people in communities and the connections between them rather than the things that differentiate them from other communities.
TAKE NOTE
Communities like Nouns are already beginning to explore what it looks like to build tooling that aligns with that vision, as we see above. At the end of the day, both sets of tools will be necessary to build the future of the internet. However, it’s important to understand what is needed when, and what roles they fill.
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Communities Aren’t Buckets –– They’re Clouds. Friend of Forefront Joey DeBruin argues that "employers may want people to work for them full time, but employees… will actually prefer to work among multiple communities." That is a strong assertion, but it's supported by a relatively large pool of web3 contributors who are working across a wide variety of communities. He leans into his background in science, specifically the idea of "optimal distinctiveness," to highlight that knowledge workers across disciplines (not just web3) choose to work across many projects, except for founders and core contributors. This is a valuable lesson that all people building DAO tooling must learn – not every "DAO contributor" has the same personal or professional priorities, and its demonstrated in the way they work.
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Key learnings from DAOs. Linda Xie is back again with another great essay on DAOs. She walks through key lessons at every stage of the DAO lifecycle: starting a DAO, operations, culture, and more. Some of these takes are commonly held in the space by now (e.g. small working groups are the way to go) whereas others a bit more against the grain to some (e.g. setup a DAO for long-term sustainability – token doesn’t solve all problems). Across the board, this is valuable advice for any DAO operator or contributor.
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2022 State of Crypto Report. a16z’s 2022 State of Crypto report is a beast. The discussion around "price innovation cycles" is particularly interesting, helping to illuminate where we are on our ecosystem-wide journey. Another highlight was on creator sales: "In 2021, primary sales of Ethereum-based NFTs (ERC-721 and ERC-1155), plus the royalties paid to creators from secondary sales on OpenSea, yielded a total of $3.9 billion." When compared to Spotify, YouTube, and other web2 creator platforms, this leads to a significantly higher per-creator payout than we’ve seen on the internet before. The whole report is worth a read.
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How Web3 apps are building composable trust. Every time a creator or user moves from one web2 platform to another, they’re effectively starting from zero. Reputation and data simply isn’t very portable across these platforms. This essay from Ceramic explains Verifiable Credentials, Decentralized Identifiers, and how Ceramic uses them both to enable Proof of Humanity, financial credentials, and a reputation layer for DAOs. Specifically on the topic of DAOs, they explain how these tools empower DAOs to immediately onboard new contributors and start relationships on shared understanding, leading to better and faster collective decisions. This piece is a great, specific introduction to much of the work being done in the web3 data and reputation space that doesn’t get too technical. Definitely lots to learn.
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Virtual Beings: A New Internet-Native Medium for Shared Storytelling. Much of the mainstream imagination of the metaverse includes virtual beings. Virtual beings are entities or characters that exist entirely in the digital domain, crossing over to our world via social media interaction, shared mediums like games and Internet-native spaces, and hologram technology. This piece explores the history of virtual beings thus far, and how web3 has ushered in a whole new era of innovation around the space. From AI to 3D modeling to synthetic media, there is a lot that goes into building truly useful VBs that people want to use. The team at 1kx gets into the weeds – great read.
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Navigating the Frontier of Crypto Regulation. The team at Blockchain at Berkeley uses this essay to provide an overview of current and potential crypto regulation. They begin with some landmark cases, including the Kik ICO, Ripple, and BlockFi. They then provide an overview of relevant securities laws, from KYC to AML and more. The team then dives into certain events and concepts like the DAO hack and Howey Test and their implications on the ecosystem thus far. While obviously not comprehensive (it would take a team of lawyers a lot of time to get close), this is an incredible introduction for anyone looking for a birds eye view of crypto regulation from a US perspective. Anyone working in the space should definitely make sure they are familiar with the material here.
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Predatory community. Molly White opens a much needed conversation around the predatory use of "community." She highlights many examples of identity fraud in NFT projects, such as "Fame Lady Squad" which ended up being founded by three white men, and "Crypto City Girls Club," which was supposedly founded by the same group of men. But that’s not the only problem – much of web3 has become focused on identity, despite not actually being inclusive of the vast majority of folks who share that identity. While good intentions are abundant, Molly argues that it largely doesn’t matter. Molly has been a loud critic of NFTs (and crypto as a whole) in the past, and this essay is definitely worth the read as a wake up call to those building community in the space.
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Every week, Forefront publishes a weekly newsletter (this one!) curating insights and news across web3 social. Our ~10,000 readers are founders, contributors, builders, and explorers interested in the future of DAOs, social tokens, and crypto-powered social experiences.
Do you have a product or service to promote? Sponsor an issue by reaching out at hello@forefront.news.
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Market data on the last 7 days. Last updated May 23, 2022
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Updates from the DAO
We're stoked to present you with the very first cohort of Web3 Creator Residency Finalists! You can check out the full list of names at the link above. We also want to h/t all of the applicants who took the time to apply. You made our curation work exceptionally difficult! Stay tuned for more updates to come, and stop by the Discord if you want to stay involved with the W3CR!
Our Social Token Alliance Swap proposal has been posted to Snapshot. Social Token Alliance is a voluntary, permissionless multi-token swap alliance aligning communities, providing all participants treasury diversity through each other’s communities and laying the foundation for future collaborations.
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Member Spotlight — Nate | @nathansvan
This week’s Forefront Member Spotlight is FF DAO contributor Nate.
What got you into web3?
My fintech professor gave two excellent lectures on blockchain. Then a few months later I came across a company called Banqu that is empowering smallholder farmers through supply chain transparency, which expanded my view beyond finance into the broader implications of web3.
What community are you keeping an eye on?
I find what Meta Angels is doing really interesting, building a community around the ideals of generosity, transparency, and accessibility. And I am also really interested to see how communities are forming around characters and storytelling, like the Aku community.
Who’s one person you look up to?
I look up to different people for different reasons: some people for their heart of service and care for others, others for artistic brilliance or leadership. But, to pick one person here, I’ll say Bryan Stevenson, who I find pretty inspiring..
What’s next for the space? What are you excited about?
I think some unexpected things will soon be coming out of DAOs and social tokens. Maybe some will look similar to companies or platforms of web2, but others might be more amorphous movements of creative energy that can expand/contract/grow/move and replicate: more akin to social or cultural movements, but with tokens.
Retroactive public goods funding. Seems like a lot of things still need to be figured out, or could go wrong. But IF it can work, it has amazing potential to incentivize innovation around public goods.
Follow Nate on Twitter
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