FREEDOM

It doesn’t matter if you’re talking ganja or guns, AOC or Trump, or even swearing in the first 15 seconds of your video (gasp!)…you should have the right to have a voice as a digital citizen. Not only is this right codified in the First Amendment of the US Constitution, but it’s also in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as Article 19. 

This right is increasingly difficult to exercise as the content policies of our primary platforms (Meta, Google, ByteDance) become more and more restrictive…and blurry. In addition to real crypto scams, there have also been Web 2.0 rug pulls: creators who have spent years of their lives helping to build a platform, only to have their audiences and voices stripped because of something they believed, said, or did.

web3 not only allows you to be a digital owner…but a digital citizen as well. You have a digital identity that is truly yours and independent of any particular centralized platform. This also means you can have opinions independent of platforms as well. Censorship resistance is a feature…and a real use case.

A lot of people talk about crypto/web3 as being decentralization in search of a use case. To me, the use case IS decentralization. To have a system that is distributed among its participants, globally, and that cannot be controlled by any singular party, is a truly revolutionary concept. It is something that has never been possible before in all of human history.

There is clearly a growing public sentiment that the powers of today are undesirable. This is evidenced by the backlash against Facebook, the backlash against Twitter, even the backlash against our political parties. The average person is dissatisfied with these highly centralized pillars of society, but there has been no alternative.

I believe that if given the option, the average consumer would choose a decentralized alternative to a centralized one, if all else was equal.

Let's say you love TikTok, but you recognize that it is owned and run by a single private corporation called ByteDance. They are collecting a lot of data about you, and they are accumulating profits as the result of your continued use of their product.

Now I present to you SchmikSchmok, a decentralized alternative that is exactly the same in all the ways you care about– same UX, same app mechanics, same creators, same content, same friends are there, etc. But SchmikSchmok is not owned by ByteDance. It is owned instead by the entire network of users. Governance is shared, ownership is shared, and profits are shared. When an advertiser pays to show its ads to the network, the network itself, the users, get that money.

Try to suspend disbelief and just take it as a fact that there is perfect parity between the two, that all the logistics have already been solved about who actually runs and maintains the product and the business day-to-day– just imagine it's all been figured out and is perfectly executed. Two apps, identical in every way, except one is centralized, and one is decentralized. Which one would you opt to use?

It is hard to imagine any justification to use the centralized version once the decentralized version is made available to you. It is appealing at both the level of the ethos of the distributed model, but also on the level of practicality and incentives– in one scenario you do not make any money yourself, and in the other, you do!

I think about it like organic food. When I was growing up, organic foods were only available at boutique "health food" stores and were much more expensive than their non-organic counterparts. The conventional wisdom at the time was also that healthy foods tasted worse i.e. had a worse UX.

Today, when I shop at the grocery store, I see regular hummus and organic hummus side-by-side, and for the most part they are identical, except that I know that the organic option is better for my health. Assuming that they are similar in price and taste, why would I ever choose the non-organic option? Parity has been reached, and now the better choice has become clear.

This is the future I see for web3. Once we get to parity, it will be hard to justify using any centralized app.

Crypto's killer use case, to me, is decentralization itself.

Economic relationships can be split into 3 categories: Assets, Actors, and Agreements

We have a ton of assets (ERC20s, ERC721s, etc) and actors (individual users, DAOs, investment firms, companies) onchain today.

We have very few agreements. Some of these agreements are large and complex, such as Uniswap, and some are simple like custom token vesting contracts.

Onchain agreements have already been shown to be significantly cheaper and more transparent than traditional agreements. They’re also far more actionable. If something goes wrong, your recourse is immediately available in the code for only the cost of gas. This is in stark contrast to traditional legal systems where the friction of enforcement is expensive legal fees and potentially years of time.

So I’m excited about the future where we’re able to generate more sophisticated agreements over time because they dramatically decrease the cost and effort of enforcing your agreement, especially for folks without a ton of time, resources, and legal literacy.

Blockchain has the ability to revolutionize the way we organize and coordinate at scale, by allowing us to create more efficient, transparent and democratic organizations. Which in turn will allow us to create the mega corporations of the future.

Tom and I initially called Arkive "the last museum". Not because others won't exist, but because Arkive, as a project, will reach a level of involvement and size that spans the entire world at a scale that would have been unimaginable in the past.

The longer how:

One of humanity's biggest achievements is our ability to successfully rally masses of people around a shared purpose and cause. We've historically done that with a mix of faith, fear, rewards and shared incentives. The biggest and most successful societies and organizations have managed to either overly index on a few of these or score high on all of them. However, as a society or an organization scales, balancing all of these and staying efficient starts to suffer.

On a simplified linear scale, the more balanced and democratic a system is the less efficient it is.

Decentralized and autonomous governance allows us to retain trust, transparency and efficiency in decision making. While distributing both the responsibility and the rewards of success among a much bigger group of people. I'v Which in turn, allows us to scale beyond the biggest corporations we see today.

Starting new countries.

REAL-WORLD ASSETS (RWAs)! 

More specifically, bringing the Voluntary Carbon Market (VCM) on-chain. The issue historically has been the opaque, over-the-counter (OTC) market for carbon credits, which restricts access and hence scale. The VCM is poised to be the first real-world MARKET to come on-chain in a meaningful and holistic way, starting with the bridging of legacy carbon credits on-chain, which has had a flurry of activity (and VC funding) so far. The industry is currently undergoing public conversations and consultations about what this bridging should look like, and, ultimately, what native carbon credit issuance should look like, with the goal being a robust, liquid, transparent on-chain spot market for carbon credits. 

Simultaneously, people are working on bringing forward contracts for carbon credits on-chain as a means to help fund projects in advance of credits being issued. 

When all of these are combined, together with RWA financing vehicles like Centrifuge - which Flowcarbon has been using to fund forward contracts on-chain - you start to develop a scale decentralized capital market for carbon financing in a modular, transparent, trustless way. This allows for the creation of complex financial instruments and derivatives, built on top of a liquid spot market and a robust set of on-chain forward contracts, that can leverage all of the existing DeFi tools and protocols. 

Practically speaking, I like any use case that invites new markets into crypto and enables new models for collaboration, self-examination, and social value creation. Things like hypeshot, an NFT gated streaming platform built on Ethereum. It's brilliant because if you think about who does all the "crypto-native" stuff without any of the infrastructure, it's gamers and streamers. Running contests with their fans, awarding points and stickers, using Discord, etc.

Until recently, these communities had a lot of reasons to hate crypto (environmental concerns, buying up all the GPUs). But now that ETH2 is a thing, there's a genuine window of opportunity opening to onboard millions of new players into crypto.

I mean, think about it: who's more likely to succeed in launching a token world than a streamer with nothing better to do than sit around and pump the trollbox?

My favorite crypto use case is unlocking access to fair, flexible financial services that put people in control of their financial destiny. Our legacy financial system has excluded too many people for far too long. Blockchain gives us new tools to provide financing for entrepreneurs to grow their businesses, provide for their families and communities, and build wealth and prosperity by becoming owners in a new more equitable and inclusive economy. Smart contracts rewriting the social contract.

My favorite crypto use case is the blockchain time machine.

If you think about it, the blockchain is quite literally a machine that prints time, keeps time, sends time, saves time. It is the natural evolution of the clock, the greatest coordination system humankind has ever invented. Its impact on our societies will be orders of magnitude greater than the stone tablet, the abacus, the compass, the wristwatch, the printing press, the camera, the graphing calculator, the personal computer, the smartphone, and the world wide web combined.

Historically speaking, crypto has been used in statecraft. To win world wars. To keep nuclear winter at bay. To enforce boundaries of space and time. To keep our deepest, darkest secrets away from prying eyes - this is how humans use crypto.

It's natural then for crypto to continue on its worldbuilding path into the darkness, towards increasingly intelligent, expansive, and partially virtualized worlds. Machine-readable probabilistic blockchain time sets humanity and whatever comes next on a course towards the stars, and into the beating heart of the metaverse.

Web3 loyalty! NFTs and social tokens will help creators & brands build direct relationships and deepen engagement with superfans, and fans will be rewarded in return for that loyalty. However, I expect a trend towards less financial/speculative value, and more utility and access, as the basis for these rewards; think loyalty points over equity. Starbucks Odyssey, Reddit Avatars, and more web3-native examples like music & podcast NFTs are pushing the envelope here.

NFT communities are enabling a new frontier for belonging and culture. 

NFT communities, their brands and avatars attract a certain persona that is attracted to their niche culture. With some initial common ground (the nft), members find their people.  

NFT communities have scarce avatars. Avatars and other community objects are also investable and ownable cultural asset. This all results in higher frequency wavelength of member engagement and growth. 

As the central brand and lore grow, the community becomes more decentralized and stratifies into trait based collectives, interest based sub communities, regional groups and group chats. 

NFTs incentivize these sub-communities to not only curate culture but own it and cultivate it. 

Status seeking groups remix the central lore and create their own brands, product and media that further the main storyline. 

I’m seeing this trend in the “pfp” projects taking advantage of the bear to build. 

It’s both a deeper form of community and a novel engine for culture. As these avatar projects execute to become characters in our physical and digital worlds, I’m excited to see how their decentralized sun-communities paint our spaces.  

A lot of otherwise smart folks incorrectly assume that digital ownership means being able to control and defend the property at hand. And in a world of scarce resources (financial resources, land, etc.), this is an important property of ownership - it’s yours and only yours. Applying this perspective to a digital world is near-sighted & naive at best but actively detrimental to creators at its worst.

But in the digital world, there are resources that are abundant, not scarce: knowledge, information, cultural objects. Not only is there a near-infinite amount of these resources, but these things inherently want to be shared and multiplied, not withheld and defended. 

Being an owner of an abundant resource doesn’t mean “controller”, it means “originator”. 

In today’s meme and remix culture, it can mean that originators get left behind (“where'd I first hear that song?”, ”that photo is gorgeous - I want a print - is it yours?”, “who broke that news?"), and a lot of the value accrues to sharers not sources. 

Digitally owning something means that you can claim the private origination of an otherwise public good: art, music, information, etc. And this is a massive shift for today’s creatives who currently publish on platforms built for sharing, not sourcing, in the hopes that value will accrue back to them.

I personally can’t wait to see more platforms that treat the digital ownership that web3 provides as a value accrual mechanism for creators. They were the source of that song, that learning, that artwork, and should be rewarded appropriately for the social, cultural, and financial capital that it generated.