I loved this anecdote from Jesse Walden’s post about the ownership economy:
(…) When BitTorrent first became popular, Netflix was still mailing DVDs in the mail. Meanwhile, the peer-to-peer technology enabled consumers to access music, movies, software, and video games instantaneously, as if the files were already on their hard drives. By 2004, BitTorrent comprised one-third of all internet traffic.
Consumers’ passion for torrenting signaled that they wanted to access the world’s media at their fingertips, but for many, BitTorrent wasn’t a user-friendly experience; trackers were moving targets, cluttered and difficult to navigate.
One person who saw an opportunity through the noise was Daniel Ek, founder of Spotify. As CEO of µTorrent, one of the most popular BitTorrent clients, Ek understood that piracy wasn’t about stealing—it was about access. The winning formula was providing access to the world’s music in a clean, well-designed product.
It is true that most users value access over decentralization (i.e. ideology), see Moxie’s post as a starting point. In contrast to how Web 2.0—and Spotify—operates though, with Web3 there can be a lot of interfaces/front-ends for one back-end.
I think it's important to differentiate between Web3 front-ends/interfaces and Web3 back-ends. The back-end will (hopefully) be very decentralized, so that for example when the front-end provider is delisting an asset or deplatforming a party, they can just "switch" (in lack of a better term) to another provider, because their actual assets are their own, i.e. when OpenSee freezes NFT assets on their platform, users can still interact with and trade them on other platforms (Coinbase's soon-to-be launched NFT marketplace will work this way as well).
We need interfaces—clean, well-designed products—with great user experience though to onboard the millions of people. The front-end "war" is just about to start.
m3taOnchain
Words matter. “The limits of my language means the limits of my world,” Ludwig Wittgenstein famously wrote. This is one of the reasons why I welcome the recent discussion about words to describe end-user use cases and technological developments in the crypto community. Crypto – do we still use that word? (Yes.) https://twitter.com/jessepollak/status/1764742947218858477 Base has recently started using ‘onchain‘ to describe many of the phenomena previously associated with the term 'web3&ap...
m3taConsumer Product Moment
One reason centralized exchanges have flourished is because of the high access barriers today's self-custodial solutions, wallets and hardware security devices, still have. We have seen where this approach has led us. Self-custody software interfaces are still rudimentary, can be confusing and current hardware security devices are clunky, look like USB sticks (which can distort the perception and make it look like the owned assets are actually stored on the device, like a hard drive) and...
m3taThoughts on Wolf Game
Recently, Wolf Game launched their second mini-game (or pre-game): Cave Game. This is their first 3rd-person-view game, after the previous mini-game Alpha Game was interface-only, where users could stake their NFT assets in one of several Wolf Packs to compete for $WOOL — the game's native currency, which can then can be used to buy digital objects within the game’s internal economy in the yet-to-be released full game. Risk-based NFT Games Wolf Game was a pioneer in combining NFT and DeF...
I loved this anecdote from Jesse Walden’s post about the ownership economy:
(…) When BitTorrent first became popular, Netflix was still mailing DVDs in the mail. Meanwhile, the peer-to-peer technology enabled consumers to access music, movies, software, and video games instantaneously, as if the files were already on their hard drives. By 2004, BitTorrent comprised one-third of all internet traffic.
Consumers’ passion for torrenting signaled that they wanted to access the world’s media at their fingertips, but for many, BitTorrent wasn’t a user-friendly experience; trackers were moving targets, cluttered and difficult to navigate.
One person who saw an opportunity through the noise was Daniel Ek, founder of Spotify. As CEO of µTorrent, one of the most popular BitTorrent clients, Ek understood that piracy wasn’t about stealing—it was about access. The winning formula was providing access to the world’s music in a clean, well-designed product.
It is true that most users value access over decentralization (i.e. ideology), see Moxie’s post as a starting point. In contrast to how Web 2.0—and Spotify—operates though, with Web3 there can be a lot of interfaces/front-ends for one back-end.
I think it's important to differentiate between Web3 front-ends/interfaces and Web3 back-ends. The back-end will (hopefully) be very decentralized, so that for example when the front-end provider is delisting an asset or deplatforming a party, they can just "switch" (in lack of a better term) to another provider, because their actual assets are their own, i.e. when OpenSee freezes NFT assets on their platform, users can still interact with and trade them on other platforms (Coinbase's soon-to-be launched NFT marketplace will work this way as well).
We need interfaces—clean, well-designed products—with great user experience though to onboard the millions of people. The front-end "war" is just about to start.
m3taOnchain
Words matter. “The limits of my language means the limits of my world,” Ludwig Wittgenstein famously wrote. This is one of the reasons why I welcome the recent discussion about words to describe end-user use cases and technological developments in the crypto community. Crypto – do we still use that word? (Yes.) https://twitter.com/jessepollak/status/1764742947218858477 Base has recently started using ‘onchain‘ to describe many of the phenomena previously associated with the term 'web3&ap...
m3taConsumer Product Moment
One reason centralized exchanges have flourished is because of the high access barriers today's self-custodial solutions, wallets and hardware security devices, still have. We have seen where this approach has led us. Self-custody software interfaces are still rudimentary, can be confusing and current hardware security devices are clunky, look like USB sticks (which can distort the perception and make it look like the owned assets are actually stored on the device, like a hard drive) and...
m3taThoughts on Wolf Game
Recently, Wolf Game launched their second mini-game (or pre-game): Cave Game. This is their first 3rd-person-view game, after the previous mini-game Alpha Game was interface-only, where users could stake their NFT assets in one of several Wolf Packs to compete for $WOOL — the game's native currency, which can then can be used to buy digital objects within the game’s internal economy in the yet-to-be released full game. Risk-based NFT Games Wolf Game was a pioneer in combining NFT and DeF...
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