Newsletter: What Comes After the Creator Economy ❤️‍🔥

Welcome to Issue 118: Week's Highlight, Scott Alexander Thoughts on Crypto, Yancey Strickler w/ "Onchain Era", Nichanan Kesonpat on Web3 Identity Stack, Mainstream weekly recap and more.

Welcome to Issue 118:

▹ Week's Highlight
▹ Scott Alexander Thoughts on Crypto
▹ Yancey Strickler w/ "Onchain Era"
▹ RedDAO on "Physical"
▹ Nichanan Kesonpat on Web3 Identity Stack
▹ Mainstream Weekly Recap
▹ ... much more

--- Let's get into it!

Week's Top Signal

What comes after the Creator Economy

This week, Metalabel and co—matter dropped a zine entitled "After the Creator Economy." A limited edition NFT run was released, which also granted collectors a physical copy of the zine. There are a few really cool ideas that came out of this drop.

First, the content itself is directly relevant to much of the work we're doing at Forefront around tokenized communities and creator economic models. The zine includes a short history of the creator economy, a discussion of the word "economy," platform risk, virtual influencers, and much, much more. You can read the whole thing -- which is beautifully designed -- for free online.

Additionally, the drop itself was a product of Metalabel's new tools. The team reinvented the "record," creating a new format that creates a meaningful value exchange between artists and fans around any kind of creative output --- physical, digital, conceptual, performative, ephemeral, live, exclusive, mass, or niche. Records are digital containers for creators to issue, sell, and share editions of media, drops, invitations, experiences, physical creations, and other creative works in a collectible, permanent, and tradable form.

What's interesting about records is not the underlying technology -- this is essentially a custom NFT drop, which has been possible and successfully executed for a while now. However, records are a new, creator-friendly terminology and form of expression that is likely much more palatable to the masses. The experience of collecting a record felt very different from what I've usually felt collecting an NFT, despite the fact that I still needed to connect my wallet.

TAKE NOTE
Metalabel is doing some really cool stuff, but their work in popularizing web3 tools by making them more palatable for the creator class is a necessary space to explore for anyone working at this intersection. Indeed a really innovative experiment to produce, distribute and monetize creative work paired with fresh takes for what might come after the creator economy. Fantastic release.

What's Poppin'

Why I'm Less Than Infinitely Hostile To Cryptocurrency. Blogger Scott Alexander of Astral Codex Ten wrote this essay explaining why he is "less than infinitely hostile" towards crypto. In other words, he doesn't think it's a complete scam, which he believes is becoming a pretty rare position. His argument is focused on global crypto adoption, highlighting the fact that Vietnam, India, and Pakistan have significant adoption due to poor banking infrastructure. "66% of crypto users live in the developing world. More people own cryptocurrency in Africa than in North America," he writes, "of course a technology centered around avoiding governance and banking failures will be centered in the countries with the most governance and banking failures!" He also argues that while crypto scams consistently make headlines, big crypto projects are very rarely scams. The vast majority of projects are actually very safe, regardless of your view on their usefulness. All in all, this is a very balances perspective on the state of crypto today.

The Onchain Era. Yancey Strickler, co-founder of Metalabel, begins this piece by writing: "This year people watched the crypto world burn." This was the end of the Crypto Era, an era marked by technical infrastructure where the defining product was crypto itself---cryptocurrencies, crypto-infrastructure, crypto-investments, crypto-organizations, and, at the end, derivatives of the infrastructure like NFTs. Yancey believes that the successful transition to Proof of Stake Ethereum marks the beginning of a new era: the Onchain Era. The Onchain Era will be defined as the period during which much of the world's creative and cultural output, shared histories, and information infrastructure will become established, stored, and accessed onchain. The defining product of the Onchain Era will be digital histories and identities becoming more secure, more useful, and more centralized---but also more decentralized than ever before, producing the end of Web2's real killer app: platform lock-in. This is an incredibly simple yet important piece that may change your worldview and perspective on your work in web3.

The Ghosts Of Internets Past. In this piece, Drew Coffman calls on us to reflect on an older internet where BBSs (Bulletin Board Systems) were more commonly used. BBSs were text-based portals where users could play games, share files, and chat with other community members. Like web3, the decentralized nature of BBSs allowed them to be used for both good and evil. However, the bad use-cases got the most press in the '80s focused as stories about neo-Nazi groups coordinating via BBS, or servers becoming home to illegal file-sharing of scanned magazines like Playboy were widespread. Drew believes that we must advocate for our technology and our communities by telling compelling stories about these tools and the future that they make possible. Additionally, he discusses the importance of names, drawing parallels between "BBS" and "DAO" or "NFT." This is an interesting survey of a specific period and phenomenon in internet history, one that we should all be aware of while we build.

Towards Digital Self-Sovereignty: The Web3 Identity Stack. If you're looking for a comprehensive overview of the web3 identity landscape, Nichanan from 1kx has you covered. The piece begins by covering some core concepts in decentralized identity, such as DIDs and PKI. Different networks are discussed, from Ethereum to Cosmos. Additionally, there is a conversation around decentralized data storage and its impact on identity. Wallets, authentication, access control, and most importantly, privacy, are all covered in detail as well. The piece concludes arguing that just like how crypto catalyzed DPKI development and adoption, composable reputation which grants online/IRL access privileges will be the catalyst for decentralized identity infrastructure. Decentralized identity is a megaproject that is much bigger than one team. It takes an ecosystem-wide effort to converge on standards, iterate on primitives, and check one another on the implications of design decisions.

Announcing Crypto x AI by Forefront. Developments in AI are taking the world by storm, and many believe that it has become the new "fad" that will overtake web3 in the cultural zeitgeist. At Forefront, we believe AI will be the yin to web3's yang, a balance between cultural abundance, economic scarcity, and cryptographic identity. Beginning in January, we're launching a new newsletter exploring the intersection between crypto and AI, curating some of the best ideas from across the web covering these developments. The newsletter will be open to the public, while discussion and events will be gated to Forefront Membership Pass holders. We're super excited about this new project -- drop your email at the link above to stay in the loop!

Latest on Mainstream...

This week, some (good and bad) crazy stuff happened. First, a report outed The Block as having been secretly funded by Alameda for over a year, with over $16M being sent to the CEO. It seems as though nobody at the company was aware of this financial relationship outside of the CEO, who has been publicly exposed and has stepped down.

On the other hand, Goldman Sachs is looking to spend millions of dollars buying crypto companies in light of the FTX collapse. Goldman executives seem to believe that companies are now "priced more sensibly" given the state of the market. 

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What's on Signal

▹ Read - Beyond Phygital
▹ Opinion - Undesigning a DAO
▹ Deep Dives - Mapping Community w/ FWB
▹ Mainstream - The State of CBDCs in 2022
▹ NFTs - Opensea Launches CORI
▹ Watch - Circles UBI w/ Martin Koppelmann
▹ Listen - Collective Intelligence Roundable 01
▹ Interesting - Nouns Airdrop
▹ Techy - Paradigm Open Sources Reth
▹ Tooling - Manifold Marketplace Blocker

◎ Check out Signal  for daily top web3 social headlines

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The information in this newsletter is not intended to constitute legal, financial or investment advice and should not be construed or relied upon as such. Any opinions reflected are the opinion of the author(s) of the newsletter only and not necessarily of Forefront. Please DYOR.