Dear Reader,

Have you been toiling away on decentralized social for tips in meme coins as I have or are you well?

Here are a few things I’ve been up to this past week:

• flying high to the music of indie pop legend in the making and the most recent iridescent wave spotlight artist, Nidia Martinez.

• making new friends & keeping the old at web3 events around the city such as New Internet City.

• reuniting with the MuseMind Conversations X space crew around goals & intentions!

• really digging into these Chappell ballads like the Pisces I am 

After taking a little Farcaster left turn, we’re back on the Read Write Own track! And with decentralized social media apps such as Warpcast and Orb taking off the way they are, the lessons and insight in this book really come through.

So, onward!

Celia

Welcome to iridescent wave: the deep cut (new name alert!), a place for subscribers only! As promised, we continue our stroll down Web3 Lane via the uber popular Read Write Own by Chris Dixon. My goal is to apply this stuff to real life happenings in web3, especially with a creator lens. If you missed the introduction or Part 1 recaps, check them out, and we’ll catch you back here when you’re ready!

“Whereas most technologies tend to automate workers on the periphery doing menial tasks, blockchains automate away the center. Instead of putting the taxi driver out of a job, blockchain puts Uber out of a job and lets the taxi drivers work with the customer directly.” - Vitalik Buterin

HUGE if true, amirite!

We open Part 2 of Chris Dixon’s love letter to web3 (and how rich it can make him, I mean!—) with this quotation, and with Moore’s Law on the number of transistors that can fit on chips roughly doubling every two years, which makes for… the 70,000 IPhone iterations we have lived through, apparently.

Anyway, we then get to the “Inside Out” vs. “Outside In” concept of new technologies, which highlights why blockchains are special: because they have the people — the hobbyists, enthusiasts, open-source devs, and startup founders. Dixon argues that blockchains are an outside-in technology built by these people on the fringes who are passionate about decentralization.

I think of a developer who’s quite known in the web3 music space. He shares openly about his journey — that he didn’t get hired at some of the major web3 platforms, but maybe that’s all the better since he is now essentially getting paid in tokens from various blockchains to do work he actually cares about. I’m not a dev, but hearing this from him helped click these words from the book into place in a real way. Dixon echoes this by saying, “Any developer in the world can write and run apps, ranging from marketplaces to metaverses, on blockchains like Ethereum.”

I don’t think you can really understand web3 without understanding tokenomics — how blockchain creators distribute their chain’s tokens, the different strategies at play, and why that’s so important for creators like me. When we get to the topic of Take Rates, we’ll really come full circle on this stuff, so stay with me!

Blockchains are “massively multiplayer,” says Dixon, since developers can fork whatever existing code and then build upon it. Enter tokens, the ownership layer of blockchains. Whereas ownership of digital assets within corporate networks is “an illusion”  — if you leave that network, you don’t take your Fortnite armor or your followers with you — the decentralized nature of web3 means that your tokens are yours. 

An example of keeping your followers on a decentralized social network can be seen with Farcaster and Lens, two different protocol networks (built on two different blockchains — Ethereum and Polygon respectively!) that users can access via various apps. Switch the app and you keep your peeps (in theory, anyway — for me and friends of mine, the user experience through this is still a little confusing!). 

For both of these protocol networks (Lens and Farcaster), software is in control via blockchain more than the people who built it. And as Dixon says, “through the building blocks of tokens, they give the concept of ownership teeth.” In my view, this statement applies to both $bonsai and $degen, which are “memecoins” or crypto tokens that have become the unofficial currency for users on Lens and Farcaster respectively.

These tokens have also been heavily airdropped to early adopters, which has to play a role in keeping users’ loyalty while also making them money. In a way, if we’re benefitting from these platforms and they do well, then we do well. And if we like our time spent on the platforms, then they do well. It’s an interesting feedback loop relationship that we just haven’t seen take off in (web3) social until recently.

A few words on blockchain networks from the next chapter of that name:

“The internet should feature the same balance between public and private spaces as seen in healthy cities” is an interesting analogy. What these new decentralized social apps are doing, if nothing else, is completely tilting the seesaw away from the major players like Twitter who play by their own rules and charge us increasingly higher fees in the process.

Farcaster’s Season 3 airdrop is live today, and with it, my $degen tips for the month of April, which come out to... an amount! It’s a lot more money than I ever made tweeting.

• “Blockchains are ‘crypto’ not because they enable anonymity (they don’t) but because they’re based on a mathematical breakthrough from the 1970s called public key cryptography.” The more you know!

• A blockchain can resist manipulation! It’s a computer that isn’t controlled by any one entity. “Corporate commitments aren’t reliable,” and Chris Dixon really wants you to know that!

• Dixon mentions digital-physical objects in this chapter, which seem to be picking up steam in web3.

• Digital ownership as a concept is something we are NOT accustomed to, but should be, argues Dixon.

All of this above in simpler terms: artists are being paid in crypto left and right for their participation and posts on decentralized social apps. Compare that to, say, posting on IG or Twitter. I’m still finding my footing on these new protocols (Lens moreso than Farcaster, where I have a strong community and often enjoy engaging with fellow writers), but I think my strategy as a creator on them is something like this: keep creating + posting great videos and music as I always do, and even keep posting that on to IG/Twitter/TikTok (if it survives Republicans in Congress), but then redirect and tailor that content for my Farcaster audience and hopefully a Lens audience, too, and lean my focus towards these new decentralized social apps.

It’s really cool to see the tenants of web3 discussed in this book in action, and to benefit from them! Find me on Warpcast or even Orb and you might get tipped in $degen! 

xo C