gm fam, fresh off the press:

▹ Week's Top Signal
▹ WEF on DAOs
▹ Packy McComick with Web3 Use cases
▹ Kyle Samani on NFTs Marketplace
▹ Shopify Tokengated Commerce
▹ ... much more
 
Plus: Market Pill, What else is Poppin'

Let’s get into it.

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Mainstream brands continue to make moves into web3, and they’re getting more meaningful. This week at NFT.NYC, Gucci announced that they purchased 150,000 $RARE tokens to join SuperRare’s DAO. This wasn’t Gucci’s first NFT play by any means, but joining an existing DAO and becoming a positive actor in the space is a step in the right direction for existing brands looking to get involved.

Meanwhile, eBay acquired NFT marketplace KnownOrigin. This announcement was quickly followed by Shopify announcing tokengated commerce features for their stores, allowing admins to enable wallet connect features and gate certain products based on token holding.

But it’s not just the web2 companies trying to break in – Uniswap Labs also announced their acquisition of Genie, the NFT marketplace aggregator. This is a massive step for Uniswap, which seems to be looking to compete as the marketplace protocol for all digital assets, not just fungible ones.

All of this is to say: The NFT ecosystem remains extremely active. Companies big and small, web2 and web3, continue to build and innovate on the foundations laid in the last two years. As NFT liquidity gets unlocked and more people get onboarded by these web 2.5 solutions, it’s inevitable that innovation and growth will continue. The question is: how do things evolve? What will be the key use-cases coming out of this excitement and consolidation?

TAKE NOTE
They say bear markets are for builders, and it looks like everyone is taking that sentiment to heart. It’ll be exciting to continue to watch how the ecosystem unfolds, and what projects rise to the top.

Beyond Verticalization of NFT Marketplaces. So far, much of our conception of “community-owned platforms” has been limited to iterative approaches to ownership. For example, we’ve gone from using shared marketplaces to owning shared marketplaces. Taking things a step further, Kyle Samani asks: what if every community had their own marketplace? Samani argues that there’s no reason to believe that sufficiently mature communities should be using OpenSea and other marketplaces that offer nothing but discoverability – these communities are already “discovered.” Instead, communities should explore the ways to integrate the community experience into the marketplace itself (or vice-versa). With open source and composable software, this is more possible than ever.

Web3 Use Cases: Today. After all of the web3 hit-pieces we’ve seen recently (and after a rough response on a recent podcast), Packy takes a swing at answering the simple question: what use-cases exist for web3 today. He first responds to the argument that the energy around web3 is “wasteful.” In his eyes, there are fewer web3 developers than there are employees at Google – it’s just a lot louder. He then takes a firm stance: NFTs, DEXs, and DeFi are use-cases in and of themselves, in the same way the NYSE is a use-case or Instagram is a use-case. Oftentimes, the “what use-cases exist for web3?” question is really asking “how can I use this in my current lifestyle?” While these are answers to that too, web3 is building for where the puck is headed, not where it’s at today.

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations: Beyond the Hype. The World Economic Forum is writing about DAOs. The report covers everything from a brief history of DAOs all the way through key risks and operational best practices. Additionally, the report actually addresses the nuance between organizations that govern activities and protocols vs. organizations that allocate funds toward community initiatives. Their “DAO Taxonomy” includes 9 different categories, arguing that there are actually three types of Social DAOs depending on the specific means through which they’re created. All-in-all, this is a great report to share with folks new to the space and a great signal that DAOs are catching on outside of the Twitter sphere.

NFTs Are Gamifying Fashion: What's in the Wardrobe? Leigh Cuen writes for ZORA Zine: “While there may be few cases where fashion NFTs offer IRL functionality, they don’t need much more justification beyond the excitement they inspire.” Fashion doesn’t have utility outside of cultural signaling. Likewise, NFT fashion won’t either. NFTs are another canvas, packed with business model innovations, that allow creators to reach consumers and express themselves in new ways. We’ll continue to see new and interesting ways for creators to capitalize on this fresh canvas. In fact, the piece highlights some artists who are already using protocols like ZORA to do just that.

Shopify Tokengated Commerce. This week, Shopify went live with their official announcement of tokengated commerce features. Shopify store admins will be able to enable users to connect their wallets and only unlock certain items for purchase if they hold a certain token. This is a massive unlock for communities, creating a “commercial geography” around global brands. In fact, Nir Kabessa and Joey DeBruin wrote about this opportunity back in June 2021 for Forefront, expanding upon the idea for SaaS models, and coining “web3 freemium.” As mentioned above, web3 is a business model innovation at its core. Embracing these features will enable a Cambrian Explosion of new businesses, big and small, with different models of operation, to pop up over the next decade and beyond.

Supreme Court Overturns Roe v. Wade, Eliminates Constitutional Right to Abortion. The US Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade, and the web3 community is finding ways to support. UnicornDAO, a collector DAO founded by Pussy Riot, created a multi-sig at LegalAbortion.eth which routes all funds towards 7 different pro-choice organizations setup on Endaoment. Choice DAO is a DAO that gives donors governance power in where the funds go after a planned raise of $1M beginning next week. At the bare minimum, web3 infrastructure creates a quick and easy way to send funds to the people and organizations that can use them most, without having to go through hoops or spending time on discovery. Not to mention the transparency of the blockchain to ensure funds get where they need to go.

Solana's Web3-focused Phone. Solana Labs is launching a new arm aimed at building mobile application technology. To begin, Solana devs are building a crypto-native phone. The phone will feature a 6.6-inch display and 512 GB of storage as well as private key security measures built into the device, all on Android foundations. The phone has been dubbed “Saga.” The Solana Mobile Stack is an SDK that allows developers to build on top of the phone in ways that would be impossible using iPhones and even traditional Android phones. While there aren’t many details as to what new features such a phone would hold, “web3 mobile” definitely sounds like a step in the right direction.

Market data on the last 7 days. Last updated June 27, 2022

Updates from the DAO

— The proposal to officially onboard CPTNSkeletor as a part-time contributor PASSED! We’re super excited to continue working with CPTN and grateful for all he does for FF.

— W3CR kicked off this week with some incredible discussions and events. Check out the Firelight section for a more in-depth summary. Terminal by Forefront is LIVE! Feedback has been great so far! Check it out at Terminal.co

Firelight

Forefront's Web3 Creator Residency has launched with our first cohort of Resident Creators: Alex, Allie, and Entes.

Each Monday, they'll gather for our weekly Open Studio, a space to collectively summarize their work so far, reflect, and explore what is to come. Here is a link to the first episode from last Monday.

Additionally, each week we’ll publish a synthesis of the previous week’s Residency experience. You can find this week’s here, which highlights:
 - Introductions of each Cohort 1 creator.
 - Allie’s Morning Pages exploring the anxiety of sharing and her philosophy heading into the month.
 - Alex’s take on grieving as a necessary part of the creative process and being human.
 - Entes’s live portraits with the FF community and the parallels he draws between web3 art and graffiti.
 - What is "playful decentralization"?

▹ Read - Axes of the DAO Innovation Space
▹ Crypto - Hedge Funds bet against Tether
▹ Opinion - Staying Positive
▹ Deep Dive - The Garden of Magic Eden
▹ Mainstream - Metaverse Standards Body
▹ Listen - Community Roundup EP36
▹ Drop - Ronaldo x Binance NFT
▹ Cool - Signature Economies
▹ Raise - Doodles Funding Round
▹ Interesting - Airdrops are killing web3
▹ Thread - Web3 Spotify
▹ Tooling - Backup your NFTs

◎ Check out FF Signal  for more headlines