Onchain Spaces, Places & Destinations

Smart Contracts are onchain spaces native to blockchains.

A space is a location that’s always fundamentally open to human presence and activity, but not intrinsically or necessarily a home to that as such.

Places then, by contrast, are locations where folks are doing things.

When you go on vacation you go some place. You return to the best places. Places that many return to and desire to go become destinations.

Destinations can be physical as well as digital. IG, TikTok, YT, your favorite blog, site or app are all examples of digital destinations.

Now, let’s return to my initial assertion: Smart Contracts are onchain spaces native to blockchains.

Every crypto asset you’re familiar with - from shitcoins to memecoins to NFTs and everything in between - originates from a Smart Contract.

Despite that, and with the exception of DEXs (i.e. Decentralized Exchanges) like Uniswap, historically, crypto users have very rarely interacted with Smart Contracts. When they do, for example when engaging in a token claim, it’s fleeting and essentially a one-off interaction.

About a half century ago in crypto-time, way back in 2020, DeFi Summer kicked off a new meta called ‘Yield Farming’. Yield Farming required users to perform the blockchain-native action of staking (i.e. depositing & locking a specific crypto asset into a staking Smart Contract) in order to harvest a new crypto token. Duration and amount of crypto assets staked typically corresponded to amount of yield earned.

Yield Farming introduced a new way of relating to Smart Contracts. It incentivized users return (i.e. interact) to the same Smart Contract more than once across a non-trivial time horizon - ingredients necessary to evolve a primitive space into an interesting place.

At the end of 2023, an onchain streak-powered crypto product named StreakPoints launched. Users sign a simple onchain transaction (i.e. interact with a Smart Contract) once every 24 hour period to maintain their streak and accrue onchain points that determines the distribution of a daily $SP token allocation. Simply put, the StreakPoints Smart Contract is an onchain place that users return to daily to checkin onchain.

A couple weeks ago, Cameron launched a thin staking protocol that’s powering Rebase.Finance, a token launchpad built on Base that’s currently incentivizing stakers by distributing a protocol token called $REFI. Folks stake eligible tokens, currently consisting of $DEGEN, $HIGHER, $BUILD, $AERO, and $ETH, and until July 4th continuously earn $REFI. The place-ness of Rebase will grow as the incentive for stakers to return (e.g. when new tokens launch and stakers need to perform an onchain interaction to receive that new token) increases.

My surmise is that in the not too distant future, a massive onchain destination will emerge that leverages multiple onchain places (i.e. Smart Contracts/protocols) by merging them supercontinent-style into a single app UI.

To save time and perhaps for the sake of our industry, let’s agree that apps and clients built atop the Farcaster protocol are all onchain places that folks can go to and do things atop today. Of those onchain places, one client in particular currently stands out as a proper onchain destination that users return to daily.

Part of why that particular client has emerged as an onchain destination is because it looks and feels a lot like popular web2 destinations like X and Reddit. The positive result of that familiarity is that it has made onboarding a larger number of users, relative to what a typical crypto app has been able to attract, easier. The downside, however, is that it’s placed itself squarely in the same war torn battlefied as those popular web2 destinations fighting for the limited resource known as q/daus or quality daily active users.

Onchain destinations can be designed for completely different types of games, though. More importantly, it can reward participants in new novel ways that web2 destinations can’t even begin to conceive of.

A natively onchain “q/dau” could, in theory, look and feel COMPLETELY different from the typical q/daus that return to social media sites. And let’s not not forget about consumer-users.

Let’s take StreakPoints as an example and run a little thought experiment.

Imagine for a second that daily active streakers on StreakPoints jumps up to 100,000 unique onchain streakers. The total wallet value of all those streakers is somewhere in the neighborhood of $10~25 million dollars. That’s an incredibly valuable audience. It’s like a small digital city. Remember, every streaker earns $SP each day they successfully extend their streak.

Now let’s imagine there is space for a single digital billboard on the StreakPoints site that anyone can take out an ad for by paying some amount of $ETH. Where should the $ETH go? Since all the streakers, by virtue of returning to and interacting with the same StreakPoints Smart Contract each day, are the ones adding value to the site literally making it a valuable destination, it makes perfect sense - and is perfectly possible, technically - to split those $ETH payments pro-rata amongst $SP holders.

Are you excited now, anon?

That’s just one simple hypothetical example of where onchain destinations may end up going. To my mind at least, there’s an infinity of instantiations an onchain destination could take. The era of creating, building and living atop onchain destinations is going to be incredibly dank and exciting. So, prepare accordingly and get your onchain passports (i.e. crypto wallets) ready.

subscribe://

Cover image: “BRAVE NEW CIRCUITRY #4/15” by SUTU [Curated by fakewhale]