Hi Friends 👋🏽,

A warm welcome to the 165 new subscribers who joined us last week! If you haven’t subscribed, join 1,163 crypto-curious members by subscribing here:

If you enjoyed last week’s newsletter I strongly recommend checking out Adam Levy’s breakdown of his Web3 creator stack. He expounds on many of the topics I wrote about and gives you the tools he’s used to build Mint into one of the biggest podcasts in Web3.

Bello 🍄

@bellosights

We just dropped our first open-edition NFT on @viamirror highlighting @levychain's new article on the web3 creator tool stack.

The only way to access the article is if you claim our Free NFT granting you access to this gated information.

Here's how to claim.

47

10:54 PM • Nov 18, 2022

Speaking of Mint…the embargo on my piece for their vault has been lifted and I’m able to share my submission.

I was recently listening to Gaby Goldberg on an episode of the Mint podcast. To describe the power of curation, she referenced how the brand equity of the Louvre inherently increases the perceived value of every piece they collect. Start listening from the 22:50 mark to hear her go into full detail of this relationship between art and curation below.

This idea struck me as one which is hidden in obscurity and then, plainly presented, is so obvious you wonder how you never made the connection yourself.

Our lives are curated. What we watch, eat, listen, read, and even think is the result of often invisible forces that architect our available choices. We see only 35,000 of nearly 616,000 owned works by the Louvre at a time. Publications are the final product of countless edits and stories left on the cutting room floor. The sequencing of editorial playlists and radio stations is presented to us without our permission.

The invisible hand of curation is a nudge. Decisions made to architect what choices are presented to us inevitably impact how we interact with the world around us. Brands like the Louvre have an immense role in determining what our culture chooses to value.

With social media, we saw a transition of curatorial power. From brands to service providers. Algorithms are increasingly taking on curation responsibilities—mining ever-growing datasets to harvest our attention or surface the right ad at the perfect time. Don’t get me wrong. These acts are often not malicious. With the amount of information available to us growing at an accelerated rate, it stands to reason we are in desperate need of someone or something to tell us what to pay attention to.

Yet, shouldn’t we, the people responsible for creating culture, be the ones to curate it? I think so and believe on-chain data can get us there.

With on-chain data, culture curation is being decentralized. We collect not only art but ideas. Provenance validates we have been the “man in the arena.” Our verifiable actions build our reputations. Never before have we had a holistic approach to defining one’s taste.

In web2, your actions are permissioned, siloed, and opaque. The data transcribing these actions live in their walled-off gardens and only occasionally come out to play. Maybe I can see a few of the Spotify playlists you make publicly available. Or a regrettable like on your Instagram feed which came about as you were aimlessly scrolling late one night. In Web2, your data profile is like a strip mall. Each shop has its own door and displays its wares. The shops may share walls (i.e., you), but each is unique, and access is limited.

In web3, your data is more like a lego set. Composable, each piece can connect to all the other parts. As more data comes on chain, this interoperability will provide the most accurate representation of who you are.

Curation will become multi-hyphenated. You won’t just be an early collector of XCOPY’s. To the world, you will be a purveyor of CC0 art who participated in early Nouns proposals, wrote about intellectual property on Lens protocol, and collected Fred Wilson’s piece on creator royalties. Individuals could earn curation scores that measure actions, participation, and engagement with one’s ideas over time.

I see the open nature of on-chain data expanding our definition of curation. With every transaction we sign, we leave behind an ever-growing digital fingerprint. Our actions become a blueprint for our identity. Every action we take implicitly curates how we represent ourselves to the world. Knowledge of this fact can be used to lead with intention. Knowing what we say, do, and buy will stand the test of time—forever immortalized in code.

Are you interested in becoming a curator? Here are some actions you can take to begin building out your on-chain footprint.

1. Claim your Lens Profile and start posting. Lens posts are indexed on polygon and are a great way to start publishing your thoughts on chain. I recommend setting up a Chainjet action to publish your tweets to Lens automatically. You’ll have to enable dispatching on your Lens profile first. Make sure to follow me at austin_hurwitz.lens.

2. Publish your blog to on-chain publications like a mirror.xyz and paragraph.xyz. I publish my One Big Idea newsletter on Substack and then syndicate it on mirror. You can also make editions of your post available for others to collect! Speaking of…

3. Start collecting ideas. On both Lens and Mirror, you can collect individual posts from accounts you follow. Creators, myself included, are also experimenting with minting audio from podcasts. Fun fact: Kevin Rose minted the first episode of Modern Finance on Zora over a year ago to little fanfare. Wonder how much that episode would be worth now?

4. Participate in on-chain governance. DAOs like Nouns (and its nounish offshoots) regularly host votes concerning how to use treasury funds with community members. Be sure to check if your community is voting on chain. Compound governance is a famous example of an on-chain voting protocol, whereas Snapshot hosts its votes off-chain.

Now is the time to surface your on-chain signal. And who knows, maybe you’ll become a modern-day on-chain Medici.

Thank you for reading and thank you to Adam for including me in The Vault!

Hi Friends 👋🏽,

A warm welcome to the 165 new subscribers who joined us last week! If you haven’t subscribed, join 1,163 crypto-curious members by subscribing here:

If you enjoyed last week’s newsletter I strongly recommend checking out Adam Levy’s breakdown of his Web3 creator stack. He expounds on many of the topics I wrote about and gives you the tools he’s used to build Mint into one of the biggest podcasts in Web3.

Bello 🍄

@bellosights

We just dropped our first open-edition NFT on @viamirror highlighting @levychain's new article on the web3 creator tool stack.

The only way to access the article is if you claim our Free NFT granting you access to this gated information.

Here's how to claim.

47

10:54 PM • Nov 18, 2022

Speaking of Mint…the embargo on my piece for their vault has been lifted and I’m able to share my submission.

I was recently listening to Gaby Goldberg on an episode of the Mint podcast. To describe the power of curation, she referenced how the brand equity of the Louvre inherently increases the perceived value of every piece they collect. Start listening from the 22:50 mark to hear her go into full detail of this relationship between art and curation below.

This idea struck me as one which is hidden in obscurity and then, plainly presented, is so obvious you wonder how you never made the connection yourself.

Our lives are curated. What we watch, eat, listen, read, and even think is the result of often invisible forces that architect our available choices. We see only 35,000 of nearly 616,000 owned works by the Louvre at a time. Publications are the final product of countless edits and stories left on the cutting room floor. The sequencing of editorial playlists and radio stations is presented to us without our permission.

The invisible hand of curation is a nudge. Decisions made to architect what choices are presented to us inevitably impact how we interact with the world around us. Brands like the Louvre have an immense role in determining what our culture chooses to value.

With social media, we saw a transition of curatorial power. From brands to service providers. Algorithms are increasingly taking on curation responsibilities—mining ever-growing datasets to harvest our attention or surface the right ad at the perfect time. Don’t get me wrong. These acts are often not malicious. With the amount of information available to us growing at an accelerated rate, it stands to reason we are in desperate need of someone or something to tell us what to pay attention to.

Yet, shouldn’t we, the people responsible for creating culture, be the ones to curate it? I think so and believe on-chain data can get us there.

With on-chain data, culture curation is being decentralized. We collect not only art but ideas. Provenance validates we have been the “man in the arena.” Our verifiable actions build our reputations. Never before have we had a holistic approach to defining one’s taste.

In web2, your actions are permissioned, siloed, and opaque. The data transcribing these actions live in their walled-off gardens and only occasionally come out to play. Maybe I can see a few of the Spotify playlists you make publicly available. Or a regrettable like on your Instagram feed which came about as you were aimlessly scrolling late one night. In Web2, your data profile is like a strip mall. Each shop has its own door and displays its wares. The shops may share walls (i.e., you), but each is unique, and access is limited.

In web3, your data is more like a lego set. Composable, each piece can connect to all the other parts. As more data comes on chain, this interoperability will provide the most accurate representation of who you are.

Curation will become multi-hyphenated. You won’t just be an early collector of XCOPY’s. To the world, you will be a purveyor of CC0 art who participated in early Nouns proposals, wrote about intellectual property on Lens protocol, and collected Fred Wilson’s piece on creator royalties. Individuals could earn curation scores that measure actions, participation, and engagement with one’s ideas over time.

I see the open nature of on-chain data expanding our definition of curation. With every transaction we sign, we leave behind an ever-growing digital fingerprint. Our actions become a blueprint for our identity. Every action we take implicitly curates how we represent ourselves to the world. Knowledge of this fact can be used to lead with intention. Knowing what we say, do, and buy will stand the test of time—forever immortalized in code.

Are you interested in becoming a curator? Here are some actions you can take to begin building out your on-chain footprint.

1. Claim your Lens Profile and start posting. Lens posts are indexed on polygon and are a great way to start publishing your thoughts on chain. I recommend setting up a Chainjet action to publish your tweets to Lens automatically. You’ll have to enable dispatching on your Lens profile first. Make sure to follow me at austin_hurwitz.lens.

2. Publish your blog to on-chain publications like a mirror.xyz and paragraph.xyz. I publish my One Big Idea newsletter on Substack and then syndicate it on mirror. You can also make editions of your post available for others to collect! Speaking of…

3. Start collecting ideas. On both Lens and Mirror, you can collect individual posts from accounts you follow. Creators, myself included, are also experimenting with minting audio from podcasts. Fun fact: Kevin Rose minted the first episode of Modern Finance on Zora over a year ago to little fanfare. Wonder how much that episode would be worth now?

4. Participate in on-chain governance. DAOs like Nouns (and its nounish offshoots) regularly host votes concerning how to use treasury funds with community members. Be sure to check if your community is voting on chain. Compound governance is a famous example of an on-chain voting protocol, whereas Snapshot hosts its votes off-chain.

Now is the time to surface your on-chain signal. And who knows, maybe you’ll become a modern-day on-chain Medici.

Thank you for reading and thank you to Adam for including me in The Vault!