Newsletter: Towards on-Chain Multiplayer Communities 🌟

Welcome to Issue 119: Week's Highlight feat Twitter & decentralized social media, Seed Club SC05 Demo Day, Gnosis Guild team piece on composability in decentralized organizations for MIT’s computational law publication, PartyBid Launch by PartyDAO, Trump NFTs and more...

Welcome to Issue 119:

▹ Week's Highlight
▹ Seed Club Demo Day
▹ Gnosis Guild <> MIT on DAOs
▹ New PartyBid Launch
▹ Trump NFTs....
▹ Latest on Mainstream
▹ ... much more\

— Let’s get into it! oh congrats Argentina 🇦🇷

Week's Top Signal

The most talked about thing on the internet (aka Twitter) this week? Twitter.

Okay not really, but sort of. Elon continues to be the cause of discourse on the now infamous social media platform.

To set the stage, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey published a piece highlighting some of the current issues with social media especially related to content moderation and censorship. The former Twitter CEO also called for an "...urgent push for a foundational core technology standard to make social media a native part of the internet."

This happened to be very timely as earlier this week, Musk decided to block links to Mastodon, a decentralized Twitter competitor. Later, on Sunday, a new policy (now archived) was announced during the World Cup Final, stating that links to alternate social media platforms such as Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, and a select few others, would lead to account suspensions.

Folks were obviously outraged. Paul Graham even got suspended for protesting the policy.

Later in the day, Elon asked a random Twitter user what a better policy might be. He then reversed the policy, and put up a poll asking folks whether he should step down as CEO of Twitter. The poll ended with 57.5% of voters saying that Musk should step down, a result which he has promised to abide by.

All of this is to say, Twitter is a mess and Musk is proving just how fragile our life on rented land can be. Conversation quickly shifted toward decentralized social media alternatives and their future. Some web3 folks even noted that no web3 social apps were considered relevant enough to have made Elon's ban list.

TAKE NOTE
Obviously, Forefront is bullish on the future of web3 social. We're all-in on tokenized communities and building tools like Pulse to help folks curate the internet with their communities. But Farcaster, Lens, and many others are looking much more attractive as well in light of their theses coming true: centralized social media is a fickle creature, and to build a truly free internet economy, we need truly free social media.

What's Poppin'

Forefront Membership: The Next Chapter. A couple of weeks ago, Forefront launched the FF Membership Pass, the new access pass to the Forefront ecosystem. The pass will live alongside the $FF token, which will continue to be the sole governance token in the Forefront ecosystem. To share more about our thought process, design decisions, and the road ahead for Forefront, our core contributors wrote this essay. If you haven't already, you can mint here.

Composable Expansion Packs for Decentralized Organizations. The Gnosis Guild team published a piece on composability in decentralized organizations for MIT's computational law publication. The piece argues that to nurture the vibrancy and experimentation of the increasingly vast ecosystem of decentralized organizations, what's needed is not necessarily more tools, but greater flexibility in the composition of tooling. The team then introduces the Zodiac Protocol (hello Zodiac Governor) as an answer to this call. They then dive into the various core design aspects of the protocol which, together, allow organizations to develop composable governance systems that are flexible enough to evolve in response to community needs and resilient enough to accommodate progressive decentralization. For folks who aren't already familiar with Zodiac, and even those who are but are looking to get some questions answered, this is a fantastic primer to some of the ecosystem's most critical technology.

The all New PartyBid. The all new PartyBid launched this week, and it's an impressive piece of work. Parties can now do anything together as a group, coordinated on-chain. The entire PartyBid experience now features on-chain memberships called Party Cards, which act as governance, ownership, and a dynamic interface for party activity. Given their onchain flexibility, PartyBid has essentially become a DAO launcher for folks group-buying NFTs, the potential for which has barely been explored. Additionally, PartyBid is powered by the Party Protocol, an open protocol for on-chain group coordination, which means new integrations and additional functionality can be added over time. Congrats to the PartyBid team!

Why We're Excited About Crypto by a16z. Some of the investment team over at a16z Crypto published a (very timely) list of things they're excited about in crypto. Noah Citron, for example, emphasized blockchain's "mobile moment" and the introduction of "light clients" to the mainstream, bolstering decentralization. Michael Zhu discussed onboarding developers to ZK systems, and Valeria Nikolaenko touched on ZK in her discussion of privacy-preserving blockchain tech. Also discussed are fully onchain games, non-transferrable tokens, and much more. The list is a good mix of consumer applications and technical developments, and gives a solid perspective on where the industry is headed, at least to some degree. We are excited for many more of these lists and articles to be published, reminding folks why we are building and the opportunity that still lays ahead of us.

SC05 Demo Day. The Recap. As usual, Seed Club Demo Day was an absolute hit. The event closed with the launch of Club Launch, a brand new product from SC that allows you to discover the most exciting new onchain projects coming out of the Seed Club ecosystem. The projects span from outdoor gear brands to GenZ clubs to communities exploring the future of music. The roster of projects is stacked, and we encourage you to check out all that Seed Club has published about them across the board. If you're looking for a place to start, just scroll through the Seed Club Twitter feed for the latest project announcements and impeccable vibes and reviews from folks who pitched at and attended Demo Day!

Trump NFTs... As if the year couldn't get any weirder, these last days of 2022 had more in store for us. Donald Trump launched an NFT collection... on Polygon and with a special commercial. The 45,000 item collection sold out within hours, and as of Sunday evening ET, has generated over 6,000 ETH in volume and netted Trump (and its creators) over $4.5 million. Buying an NFT automatically entered the purchaser into a sweepstake, with prizes including a group cocktail party at Mar-A-Lago, a dinner in Miami or a golfing trip with the former president, or a group Zoom call, plus other "perks". If you thought NFTs weren't pumping in a bear market, think again!

Latest on Mainstream...

And that brings us to the headlines that your grandma is seeing...

First off, SBF was finally arrested in the Bahamas. Finally! It remains to be seen when a case will be brought against him and what his fate will be. Second, Coinbase law enforcement requests jumped over 66% in the past year, with the vast plurality coming from the US, Spain, and Germany. The majority of these were related to criminal enforcement matters. Finally, Elizabeth Warren unveiled a bipartisan bill to crack down on "crypto money laundering," citing FTX as yet another reason regulation is necessary. However, the bill fails to address the core problems that led to FTX, and would be crippling for the DeFi ecosystem.

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Signal Bites

▹ Read - The Laws of Lorecore
▹ Opinion - On Trust and Sovereignty
▹ Deep Dives - Zee Prime on Crypto Products
▹ Mainstream - Metamask x Paypal
▹ Cool - Bonfire Public Launch
▹ Interesting - Meme Value vs Book Value?
▹ Listen - Charles Broskoski (are.na) on FF CI Series
▹ Web2 - E2E Encryption for Gmail
▹ Techy - TAM for "Decentralized Blockspace"?
▹ DeFi - Aztec $100m Raise

◎ 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.