MetaVisa Takes on the Future of Digital and Metaverse Identity With Decentralization
The next frontier of the internet and blockchain protocols is the Metaverse. The Metaverse is a brave new world of interconnectivity, promising to be the stage of digital development that makes it possible for large numbers of people to simultaneously experience and interact with enduring digital worlds, platforms, applications, and experiences. Using digital identities that are not limited to the proprietary networks of a single website, service, or blockchain protocol, a person will be able to
A vibrant community of developers, entrepreneurs, artists and crypto enthusiasts chart the future of the Ethereum blockchain as it experiences unprecedented growth. ETHEREUM: THE INFINITE GARDEN is a character-driven documentary film on the challenges and rewards of building a new world.
This essay is the second in a Gnosis Guild series by @keikreutler bridging cryptonetworks, web3, and gaming. The first essay Inventories, Not Identities focuses on collective, composable web3 identity.
Use the Zodiac collection of tools today through the Zodiac App available on Gnosis Safe. Join the Gnosis Guild Discord if you have any questions about Zodiac, and follow @GnosisGuild on Twitter for updates.
It's easy to feel pessimistic. It's easy to argue over what the Metaverse actually means. But most people who use the term mean it as a signal for a better digital future.
“You will probably work for a protocol someday.” These are among the last words I say to students at the end of my course on the crypto economy. When I began teaching the course in 2017, it sounded absurd to many of them. Today, less so. Crypto economies have already begun to shape the future of work. They blend how we play, learn, organize, socialize, and create, with ownership and income generation. In this sense, what is currently transpiring is much broader than work. I’m simultaneously posting an article detailing the components that facilitate this new form of coordination, but in this piece I focus on forward looking applications that convert human labor to income within crypto economies. 45 years ago, economists Jensen and Meckling famously wrote: It is important to recognize that most organizations are simply legal fictions which serve as a nexus for a set of contracting relationships among individuals. The “nexus,” whether it be a corporation, LLC, non-profit, or government, has been required in order to coordinate all of these contracts, and in particular, operationalize the movement of resources between individuals, according to the contractual terms. In the crypto economy, we have nexuses of smart contracts, where the movement of resources is enforced by code rather than an intermediary relying on a legal layer. What this means is that individuals are now able to collectively form complex contracting relationships in the absence of a legal fiction serving as the coordinator. That’s a game changer for human organization. One mechanism to coalesce a nexus of smart contracts is a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO). You can think of it like a shared treasury among the members, with hard coded rules that govern how funds can be disbursed. DAOs can be used for any number of collective pursuits, much like an LLC can be formed to pool resources for any number of objectives. Let’s compare and contrast these two organizational forms using the example of an investment club. Say that 50 friends decide they want to build a shared collection of baseball cards. They form an LLC, open a bank account, each deposit $100, and buy baseball cards off eBay. Here are the logistics for each of those actions: Form an LLC: Draft an operating agreement, distribute and collect signatures from all 50 members. Pay filing fees to the state. Ongoing annual reporting requirements. Open a bank account: Additional paperwork, but more importantly someone needs to be designated as the signer on the account. This requires that all of the other members trust the signers. Deposit funds: If members are located in multiple countries, there is some friction here. Someone needs to reconcile the membership list and deposits. Buy assets: Requires participants to trust that the bank account signer will follow consensus. Internal controls are required for monitoring and enforcement of custody. These issues become even more complicated when the group is 1,000 people. We rely on the legal layer to adjudicate disputes and produce trust in LLCs. Compare the scenario above with Flamingo DAO, a group of 64 collectors, of which I am one, who pooled resources in a DAO to build a shared collection of NFTs. Here are the logistics: Form a DAO: Mostly a function of replicating software. There are tools being built (e.g. Tribute DAO) that will make this easy for anyone to do with a few clicks. No filing fees since it exists only in the cloud. No annual reports since all activity is visible on-chain in real time. Open a bank account: Unneeded. The DAO smart contract acts as a digital wallet. Deposit funds: We all sent ETH to the DAO smart contract. It took 30 seconds for me to complete. Since the smart contract has hard coded rules, I have no concerns that it will be disbursed without consensus. Buy assets: We vote on-chain using signatures from our personal digital wallets to reach hard consensus about what to buy. Once purchased, the assets are held by the DAO smart contract, so there are no concerns about one of the members running off with the assets. Most Flamingo members did not know each other when the DAO was formed, and this was not a problem. Investment DAOs are just one example. DAOs can be used to coordinate almost any activity within digital environments and in time, many physical environments too. Today there are grants DAOs, doing the work of nonprofits and community development funds, protocol DAOs operating numerous decentralized finance applications, media DAOs driving the future of journalism and information dissemination, social DAOs turning social networks into economies, and service DAOs doing work of so many varieties that I can’t even adequately cover them here. DAOs are, or will be, the organizational form for many of the applications I describe in the remainder of the article. DAOs have at least three distinct advantages over traditional organizations: (i) speed of capital formation (ii) voting is transparent and easily executed, and most importantly, (ii) they mitigate the trust requirement around jointly-owned assets. I would also hasten to note that DAOs are not without challenges. Decentralized governance is hard. Free rider and blockholder problems continue to exist. I touch on these issues in the participate-to-earn section below. It’s also worth noting that although the smart contracts relieve us from trusting each other, we now have to trust the code. Using battle tested code is one solution, but we also have an army of shadowy supercoders on our side. These individuals are a feature, not a bug. White hats like Samczsun, Immunofi, IntoTheBlock, and many others are serving as sentries, catching code vulnerabilities on our behalf before they are exploited. Compensation comes in both non-pecuniary reputational capital, but also explicit rewards like bug bounties. Any atomistic coder can join this army, no ID or resume required. They will be part of the future of work story. The best deep dives on DAOs are Aaron Wright’s journal article and Coopahtroopa’s Mirror post, which points to many additional articles if you want to go further down the DAO rabbithole. [ ]-to-earn models Capital and labor are two well-known factors of production. Each can be deployed to earn income within crypto economies. Capital-to-earn models have been around since the day Bitcoin was launched. In proof-of-work protocols like Bitcoin and Ethereum, anyone can deploy capital to hardware and electricity to mine blocks, and begin earning. In proof-of-stake protocols like Solana and Avalanche, anyone can deploy capital to the native asset, stake it, and begin earning. More recently, there have been numerous options to engage in liquidity mining and yield farming, which involves deploying capital to, say, a lending protocol or decentralized trading venue, in order to begin earning. These have historically been the dominant sources for earnings within the crypto economy and they will continue to grow. For example, staking rewards are positioned to become one of the largest categories of fixed-income instruments in the world. But that’s a story for another day. Today, I’m focusing on labor-to-earn models, which are more fascinating because they leverage these new coordination mechanisms to convert human input to capital. This means that earning opportunities are available to a much wider swath of people. It is the democratization of economic empowerment on a scale we have not previously witnessed. I will disclose up front that Collab+Currency has invested in many of the projects I mention below, so I am not an unbiased observer. Rather, we are severely biased. Our view is that these economies will drive the future of human interaction and we are investing in that future. Play-to-earn Axie Infinity is a play-to-earn game that has proven to be the breakout of the year, not just in gaming but in crypto generally. The key feature is that the players own the game. They own the board (Lunacia), they own the characters (Axies), they own the ability to create new characters (breeding), and they own the in-game currencies (SPL and AXS). It is as much an economy as a game. Players can earn the in-game currencies by playing, which is a model that has been around for years. However, unlike in-game currencies of the past, Axie’s in-game currencies can be exchanged for real world fiat currencies. Earning rates vary by skill and how much time you put in, but can reach hundreds of dollars per day for top players. In many parts of the world that dominates other earning opportunities. But, you may ask, where do the earnings come from? And I may respond, where do any earnings come from? The answer is applying capital and labor to generate economic activity. Here’s a non-crypto example: Say I buy a cow and a bull. I apply labor to milk the cow and sell the milk to earn income. Later, I breed them. I’ve created more value (the calf). Perhaps someone wants to buy the calf for milking or breeding, so I sell it and earn a return on my investment of capital and labor. That’s an overly simplistic example, but it’s roughly the same thing with Axies. You buy them (capital), you play them to earn SLP from the game economy (labor) and then you breed them. SLP has value because it’s an input to breeding, and breeding has value because it generates a saleable good. The other aspect to understand about play-to-earn models is that the assets are independent from the game. The players own the assets, not the game developer, which means that other game developers can build games utilizing the same assets. One day I’ll be able to play my Axies in all kinds of different games, further driving demand for Axies beyond the original gameplay. One thing to understand about user growth for play-to-earn games like Axie is that, while people enjoy playing them, they don’t have to be more fun than games like Fortnite to attract new users. They only have to be more fun than work. That’s a pretty lo
Utopia Labs is building an operating system for DAOs – TechCrunch
Decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs, are all the rage at the moment. We’re seeing explosive growth in this sector as people experiment with building companies on top of tokens and smart contracts. And where new organization types bloom, so does the need for infrastructure. Utopia Labs i…
[APPROVED] Seed Club DAO Social Token Track - Bounty Funding Request - Creatives / Createbase - NEAR Forum
TLDR Seed Club is running the Social Token Track during the Open Web Community Hackathon, hosted by Createbase, and co-organized by NEAR, Gitcoin and Dystopia Labs. The Hackathon will run from May 15 - June 6, 2021 and will include bounties throughout, rewarding: Ideation; Presentations; and Video Demos. There will also be a final bounty for selected finished projects submitted on GitHub. Funding is needed prior to the Hackathon for the Social Tokens DAO in order for the DAO to remunerate the p...
Tokenomics - Three things Creators need to know before making a … — Mirror
Hey there! Coinvise is a web3 platform that helps creators & communities build and manage their Social Tokens. You can join the community here. If you find this essay interesting, make sure to subscribe to Coinvise’s newsletter and follow Coinvise on Twitter. Enjoy! 🔥
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