Web3 Wednesday: ENS Mixtapes, The Decentralization Debate, Surviving Crypto Downturns, & More 🔥 📉💎
Issue #3
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My goal is to bring diverse minds together to accelerate our web3 education to build a better future. My hope is that these recaps will be in service of that objective.
Here is today’s roadmap:
Tweet: Meek Mill dropping heat 🔥
Article: Is web3 really decentralized? 🤔
Podcast: Markets down, are we gonna make it? 😢
P.S. If you are new here, take a look through this web3 starter guide to get caught up to speed:
Tweet:
2021 was the year crypto went mainstream. Artists were able to sell their work for millions of dollars. Writers began experimenting with issuing equity in their blogs. I’m now looking forward to how musicians will enter the space.
This week, rapper Meek Mill tweeted that fans will need an ENS domain to get his new mixtape. How this would work is murky, but here’s my best guess:
Fans purchase their ENS domain name
Fans connect their ENS domain name to their MetaMask
Meek Mill launches a website requesting to connect to fan’s Metamask
Meek Mill distributes his new mixtape into the wallets of his fans directly
The entire web3 space is in experimentation mode. Builders and creators are testing things. Meek Mill may not find success in this project, but other artists will come after him, learn and tweak things for their future benefit. Just because things may not work now does not mean they won’t be remixed and work in the future. As Packy shared last week, web3 is a digital laboratory:
“Web3 is less about decentralization and censorship-resistance, and more about rapid experimentation of governance and incentive models. It harnesses greed and speculation for good.
In this view, web3 is a global, real-money economic and social simulation, a digital laboratory for complex problems.” - Source
It’s the early friends, let’s keep playing.
Article:
I believe that it is important for people to first learn about web3 before criticizing it. Once you dive in, understand how things work, and discover some of its potential, then challenge it. People will pay attention if you have an educated perspective vs yelling on social media. The Founder of Signal (Moxie) exhibited this approach,which led to this article making its rounds across the community last week.
In this article, Moxie wrote about his qualms with web3. Here are a few takeaways:
He describes how many aspects of blockchain ecosystems are not decentralized, and unlikely to be in the future. This is demonstrated today by the most used web3 platforms today being centralized (e.g. Opensea, MetaMask, Alchemy, etc).
To get to full decentralization, users need to run their own servers and they do not want to do that. You use Gmail to send emails, Twitter to share your thoughts, and Shopify to manage your e-commerce stores. You can technically set this up yourself, but the level of effort required is nearly impossible.
We should take notice that from the beginning of this ecosystem, these technologies tend towards centralization through platforms and that most participants don’t even know or care about it.
Most crypto projects start centralized then become decentralized. In the early days of Bitcoin, a small subset of developers were the only ones running it. Ethereum started with a small group of developers, and even today its Founder Vitalik Buterin, who replied to Moxie’s article here, has an outsized influence on the project’s roadmap - albeit less so over time.
Web3 has new technologies that can solve user problems. Creators are able to monetize through alternative methods, developers can build more open protocols, governments can track economic activity, and individuals can express themselves through novel forms of identity, amongst many others.
I find web3 interesting not only because of its vision of being decentralized but because of the new technologies that have been created. I believe decentralization can be better in some cases, but thinking that our society will move quickly towards this idea may be short-sighted and dismissive of how the world tends to work.
Podcast:
How to Survive in Crypto | Cobie
Cobie is quickly becoming one of my favorite thinkers in web3. He is pragmatic, not overzealous on any specific technology, and seems to be grounded by reality rather than idealism. This podcast demonstrates that thinking well.
Listen to it on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Bonus:
A few other articles and Twitter threads from this week:
LooksRare Token Drop - Moon Overlord
Declarative Statements - Katelyn
That does it for this week of Web3 Wednesdays.
Till next time,
Jay 💕