One more thought about utility
If you didn’t catch yesterday’s piece about utility, check it out. There’s a cool upside triangle framework.
Plus, Chris Dixon from a16z said it was interesting 🤷🏻♂️
From Farcaster!
When you go to a car dealership, you don’t look at a car and ask “What’s the utility?"
You look at a car and ask “What are the features?”
That’s how we will look at Web3 and Crypto in the future.
Following the car analogy we’re at the point where some of us understand what a car can do, but maybe haven’t driven it yet, or don’t believe they’re safe enough to drive.
In the future, we’ll stop worrying about if there is utility, but rather what kind of utility, is this Web3 product going to help me solve my problem? Why this Web3 product vs. that Web3 product.
Have you driven a car before? If so, share or subscribe!
DAO Corporate Code
I tuned into the Rug Radio Law Line Twitter Spaces yesterday, as I find those conversations more interesting than the most NFT ones these days. Who knew legal was so interesting?!
One of the topics was about DAO corporate code, as one of the lawyers in the space is working with a US state to draft up the regulation.
Obsessed with NFTs and likes suing people? Dangerous combo.
I’m not a legal professional, so my take is limited. That said:
It’s great to see legal professionals that actually understand the space work with government entities. We need more people who get both sides to help find the middle ground between regulation and the maintaining core Web3 principles.
Themes for State: Revenue, innovation and business reputation, consumer protection
Themes for DAOs: Protecting anonymity, removing liability, governance flexibility (or should I say interoperability 😏)
Whichever state this is (someone on the Space speculated Wyoming, which would make sense) will set a blueprint for other states, and possibly the federal government.
Magic Eden’s 🌶 Spaces
A couple evenings ago I was looking for a Twitter Spaces to listen to while going on my evening walk. I happened to come across one with Hyperspace, a Solana NFT marketplace.
It was spicy. The founders of Hyperspace were accusing Magic Eden (the top Solana NFT marketplace) of DDOSing their website and obtaining Hyperspace API keys to disrupt their operations.
TLDR on DDOS: A Distributed denial-of-service attack is a cyber-attack that sends so much traffic to a website it shuts the website down indefinitely.
The accusations are pretty serious if true, as Magic Eden is a $1.6 billion company.
The timeline based on my world-class investigative Twitter analysis.
11:49AM PT: Hyperspace schedules a Twitter Spaces for later that day
Hyperspace ✨ Solana NFT Marketplace & Aggregator @hyperspacexyz
3:10PM PT: Hyperspace Eng makes accusations
Kam | Hyperspace ✨🧑🚀 @0xKmafia
4:25PM PT: Magic Eden tweets response to accusations
6:30PM PT: Hyperspace Space begins
Hyperspace ✨ Solana NFT Marketplace & Aggregator @hyperspacexyz
7:00PM PT: Magic Eden Space responding to Hyperspace accusations begins
MY GOODNESS. This was like turning on the TV out of boredom and stumbling upon a new favorite show.
Not saying I like drama…but I was more motivated to listen and take notes 😉
I hopped over to the Magic Eden Space because I was curious to hear how they would respond to the accusations.
Spaces Takeways (Magic Eden = ME, Hyperspace = HS):
DDOS is a criminal offense so it would be silly for ME to do that considering their standing in the ecosystem.
ME claims that the HS accusations were a dirty marketing tactic to harm their reputation and draw more users away from their platform.
After addressing the accusations, the questions shifted towards ME and what they were doing for the broader community. As a result the leadership team openly shared their thoughts about shortcomings and what some of their roadmap looked like (eg: they will be open-sourcing smart contracts over the next few months).
The leadership team even threw an accusation back HS, claiming that one of their team members assaulted a ME team member at a recent conference.
Time will tell if anything comes from this.
However, there were some interesting themes as the paradigm shift of Web3 takes place:
Speed of how the scenario unfolded
If my Twitter timeline is correct, this situation happened over the course of ~4 hours. I’m not sure how many companies would react with this speed, this is a $1.6B company we’re talking about. Not to mention the way ME responded to the accusations.
The rawness of the leadership team
It’s raw like 🥩. The CEO and CTO dropped f-bombs multiple times and you could hear the passion in their responses. Quite refreshing honestly.
Transparency
As the conversation transitioned from responding to the accusations to addressing questions from the community, the leadership team openly admitted their mistakes multiple times.
Specifically, they expressed regret around expanding horizontally (to the ETH ecosystem) instead of focusing on their core product, the marketplace. Because of this business decision they’ve had reliability issues recently.
There were also questions/complaints around MagicDAO, and the Head of Marketing openly shared the ideas they were thinking about in response.
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As Magic Eden matures as a company, I expect there will be more formal responses to these scenarios. However, these themes around speed of response, type of response, rawness, and transparency can be viewed as case study.
In the era of community-led growth, the above approach is likely more effective vs. a more formal approach. The community has a keen sense of smell, especially for BS.
A survey from Meta
I was poking around a points rewards app earlier this week and came across this survey.
Digging into it a bit more, I learned that this is a study for Meta.
What are the participants doing?
Why is this interesting?
This is a longitudinal study, not a one-off
Participants will actively participate by creating avatars and completing activities
IMO this means Meta isn’t focused on getting users to adopt VR avatars, they probably already have a fleshed out strategy for that.
They’re looking to learn more about perceptions over time after the initial onboarding, aka: How do we get users to be engaged after onboarding? How do we get users to find the ‘a-ha!’ moment for avatars and VR?
…Or maybe not and I’m thinking too highly of their strategy 😂
See you tomorrow folks :)
BTW I’m going on a Twitter Spaces to talk about utility. Hop on if you wanna chat!
Social Media Examiner @SMExaminer
