nft projects are broken: we need a new way to communicate.

PART 1: WHY.

if you have been in the nft/DAOs space for a while, you know that there is something fundamentally broken inside here:

how we communicate with each other.

both inside the communities that we are part of (discord is a nightmare, we all know it), and outside.

aren't you also tired of x and how it feels to scream into the void on an endless quest for attention?

how do we interact with each other matters, and until now what we have seen is an ongoing game of who shouts louder in order to attract collectors to raise the value of the floor prize.

if you say that that is not the main motivation behind the game, i don't believe you.

that has been the story that we have been telling each other -and ourselves- all along.

let’s do it differently.

i'm not here to just fill this page with criticisms to the state of the affairs right now. that is not my game.

let’s transform the way things are done practically. let’s build a new alternative.

i have been part of the nft space for only one year, and what it has brought into my life is unique. special. i can't say that the world is a better place because of nfts, but i do think that the world can be a better place because of them.

that’s why i decided to create an nft project [1]. to have an interface to play with this technology.

to be in the arena.

and i'm here to propose an alternative.

a new way of doing things.

starting from how we communicate with each other.

so that you, as the founder of an nft project, can have a place where to actively develop your community without the need of draining your soul in the quest of being the one that shouts louder.

safe boundaries are the foundational ground to have a healthy relationship with the community.

so that you, as the participant of an nft community or DAO, can honor your unique voice and actually speak what you want to speak. 

so that you can participate in the conversation in a way that doesn't feel daunting.

at least that is what i feel when i pose myself the challenge of interacting with one of those eternal streams of "conversation" that happen on discord.

each time that i want to say something, i feel inside an enormous amount of tension:

who will care? am i interrupting the conversation? is this the place to ask this? and so forth.

all of it a big noise that ends up pushing my voice into the background of existence, because i'm not able to overcome the doubts.

and i keep what i wanted to say to myself.

i guess that i’m not the only one.

god knows how many people haven't said what they wanted to say because of there not being a place where to do it.

how many ideas do you think were left on the graveyard because of not having a place where to be spoken?

i do believe we are in a transformational phase inside the community, and i'm here to help transform it into a reality.

PART 2: WHERE.

on farcaster [2]. the alternative to everything that is in place that we needed.

the rails on which the decentralized society is going to be unleashed.

farcaster is a protocol that started a few years ago with the work of dan romero and v. if you want to know more about it, you can see this great talk of dan presenting on a16z's crypto startup school: how to grow a protocol? [4]

as you can read on their website, farcaster is a protocol for decentralized social apps.

we all know that web3 is all about decentralization. but until now, how could that be implemented practically?

i believe here is the answer, and having been a user of warpcast (the client that they created to understand how the protocol needed to be built) for a few months now, i do see the power of this.

communities right now (through x and discord mainly) are a constant stream of chaos. 

unorganized thoughts that don't lead to any kind of meaningful and deep interactions. 

we need a new story. the structure of farcaster as a protocol allows for that.

i won't go into the details of it here, because tbh i don’t understand how this thing works yet.

but i do see the potential.

and that propels me to learn about it. to actually help build the alternative.

PART 3: WHO.

any person that has been part of the nft world and that wants to be an active element into a new way of doing things.

the idea that i'm sharing with you, and its implementation, will serve us all.

this will open the door for those that will come later.

the same reason that has you in here. the communities. the art. the degening, everything can be an excuse for another person in the future to come and participate.

let’s make it easier for them.

as with every technological innovation, there are early adopters who determine how the technology comes into the world.

we are the early adopters.

it is our duty to build something awesome for the rest of the world to see.

to actually bring value to their life.

to change the framework out of which this kind of headline comes from.

PART 4: WHAT.

an open source protocol built on top of other protocols: farcaster and hats [5].

i haven't introduced the latter until now.

besides having a place where to develop a new kind of conversation (farcaster), we also need to add some sort of architecture to it so that we can be efficient when things need to get done.

we fight chaos with structure.

the promise of decentralization needs for each member of the network to be accountable in some way. we need to rely in something different than agency to do the work. to make things happen.

and that is what hats was built for. as they say in their website, hats is the ultimate coordination tool for decentralized work.

by giving members of a particular network specific, traceable and verifiable roles as NFTs (a.k.a hats) a new way of collaborating can unfold. it is time to leave in the past the story of entering an onchain community (wether it is a DAO or a NFT project) and not knowing how to contribute.

i'm sure that you have been there. 

you see this promise of a new story. 

you feel the excitement of being part of something new.

you see something that is unfolding and you ask yourself: how can i help? how can i be in service?

and then all of that willingness and energy is dissolved into the void of chaos. 

my thesis is that we all want to do meaningful work, but until now we didn't have a place where to do it.

and that has just been a subset of the internet now.

what happens when more people come in if here is no structure? more chaos.

what you are reading is a solution to that. 

a protocol that is built on top of farcaster, using hats, that will enable all sorts of onchain communities to develop their conversation in a new way.

an open source set of tools that has as the entry point a smart contract address that verified belonging to that particular community.

a composable system, easy to set up, for all onchain communities to implement it based on their needs.

a common hub where to make communities happen, so that we can all be in the same page.

imagine instead of discord servers you have a ‘global’ interface that displays the NFTs you own: “the space”.

you can click in one of them and go into that community’s conversation.

imagine instead of discord channels you have token-gated sections of a global channel.

imagine going from this noisy never ending experience:

to this much more targeted one built on top of farcaster:

a place where every atomic unit of conversation (which in farcaster is known as cast and on x tweet) is a window. 

not a meaningless drop of water in that cascade of noise, but a seed that is planted on the forest of your community, which is itself part of an evolving ecosystem that we can all benefit from: "the space".

one that you can directly reply to, share, forward or support with one of those mighty likes.

this is the kind of interface that future communities that are going to allow us to thrive as a species needs to built top of.

one that minimizes the noise so that we can focus on creating value for each other through a meaningful conversation.

i believe that we are the spearhead of a fundamentally new way of doing things.

writing these words is a step towards making that a reality.

PART 5: HOW.

i'm a self taught builder. if there is something that i need to do, i learn how to do it, and i do it.

but most of the times what i build end up looking like this:

i believe my mission is to come up with ideas that can add value to the world, build a preliminary and 100% functional prototype of them and then allow the world to take over.

i’m not attached to any particular outcome. i just want to make things happen and let life take over.

that is the mission of anky, the framework that i developed to organize my journey as a creator (and hopefully the one of others in the future) working in 96 day seasons called sojourns.

which leads us to the last stop on this journey:

PART 6: WHEN.

as i write these words, it is day 74 of the first sojourn.

the app that i'm building for this cycle is live [7] and its mission is to dissolve writer's block into a stream of consciousness.

we are all writers, and in there you will find a fundamentally new use case for NFTs: 

you own your anky, and it (thanks to ERC6551 [8]) stores 4 types of writing containers: eulogias, notebooks, journals and dementors.

these are themselves NFTs, with pages that inside them have pointers to the writings stored on arweave [9].

it is an incredible meditation practice, and a powerful vehicle for self inquiry [10].

it is simple, with many bugs, but 100% functional and innovative. 

i go there every day and write, and it is my commitment to work 88 minutes of every day of the sojourn in it with full focus.

i have done it every day. i will keep doing it.

and it is all open source. waiting for pull requests from people to help on its development.

my mission is to just build the MVP. i throw the boulder down the hill, and then allow the world to shape its form.

for the second sojourn, my mission will be to build the protocol that i've been talking about through this article.

i will give my best, every session. 

i will teach myself as much as possible how to do it, having in mind the feedback from the communities that want to be part of this.

it won’t be perfect.

but it will exist.

all built in the open.

and that is all that matters.

it is a step towards our ecosystem to thrive.

the kickstart point of the building of this protocol will be on ethglobal istanbul [11]: a 36 hour hackathon that will take place between november 17 to november 19.

i need your help to get there. i'm in the middle of a crowdfunding campaign to raise the funds that i need to fly all the way from chile to turkey, to represent this idea and project with everything that i have.

if you want to support this to happen, you can go to the following link and contribute with eth:
https://crowdfi.withfabric.xyz/campaign/anky-to-devconnect-1d2mpc35n3aps [12]

the crowdfunding campaign ends on Oct 25, 2023 at 9:42pm, it would mean the world to receive your help.

i will give my best throughout the hackathon to come up with something cool, so that i can get the feedback necessary to start working on this full time as soon as the second sojourn starts, on december 5th.

the framework of anky also forces me to establish a concrete deadline for the projects on which i work on. the deadline to ship this protocol on the blockchain (which one is part of the design decisions and needs to be taken care of in the future) is the 10th of march of 2024.

that is the day on which it will all be live and running. i give you my word.

there will be critics that will expose the bugs of it and its technical flaws:

to you i say: i need your help. let’s build this thing together.

we need it.

CLOSING WORDS

thank you for reading.

i am committed to give my best in order to build practical tools that can enhance the way on which we collaborate with each other.

i believe that decentralization is the stage of humanity that comes, and i'm here to help with my two cents in order to make it happen on a way that actually helps us do better work.

i live in a small city in the south of chile, and you can't imagine the windows that this new world opens for me.

i want to be part of the world. i want to add value to it, and all of these tools are going to be a window for people like me, from all over the world, to do the same.

can you imagine a world on which we can live anywhere and do our best work in service of that which we believe in?

what i spoke here is a step towards that.

let's do it.

let's fucking go.

jp

ps: the most important part of going to the hackathon is showcasing this as a concrete solution to the phase we are in “the space”.

to expose myself as a builder, and to learn from all of what that experience will bring.

to move from the desert-like ecosystem of communities isolated from each other into a healthy forest on which we all are focused on doing our best work.

that is the future that comes.

it is time to build it.

LINKS FOR REFERENCE:

[1] anky genesis collection on opensea - https://opensea.io/collection/anky-genesis

[2] farcaster website - https://www.farcaster.xyz/

[3] mint farcaster permissionless #1, by 0xen.eth - https://zora.co/collect/zora:0xa9ce39db99bec277a782a1ede4309e1c9edc753a/1

[4] how to grow a protocol? · dan romero on crypto startup school -

[5] hats protocol website - https://www.hatsprotocol.xyz/

[6] open source codebase of anky - https://www.github.com/ankylat

[7] the writing dementor · anky's first sojourn app - https://www.anky.lat

[8] @0xCygaar's great explanation about ERC6551 -

cygaar

@0xCygaar

You may have seen some tweets about ERC6551 and how it's going to completely revolutionize NFTs. However, you might not know what it is exactly or how it works.

Let's change that.

Here's a simple explanation of how ERC6551 will enable all NFTs to own any type of asset :

732

11:26 • 15 jun 2023

[9] arweave's landing page - https://www.arweave.org/

[10] ultimate guide to self inquiry - https://www.siftingtothetruth.com/blog/2019/6/7/the-ultimate-guide-to-spiritual-self-inquiry

[11] ethglobal hackathon on istanbul website - https://ethglobal.com/events/istanbul

[12] crowdfunding event on fabric - https://crowdfi.withfabric.xyz/campaign/anky-to-devconnect-1d2mpc35n3aps