
When the World Goes Phygital!!!!
The Forefront Journal publishes essays from the frontier of consumer and social crypto. This is a guest essay from Aleksija Vujicic. In the future, fashion and commerce will be phygital (no matter how much you hate the word). It could look a little like this: After purchasing a Staud bag online, it arrives embedded with an NFC chip. A quick tap of your phone mints its digital twin as an NFT in your digital fashion closet (DFC), a social platform where friends & followers can see your fashion ...

Object Histories
Welcome to Folklore, a community exploring the labyrinth of networked worlds. We’re happy to showcase a guest post by Timour Kosters. Timour is an investor and builder working in crypto, governance, and ml. We encourage you to support Folklore by minting and sharing this article. Want to join the Folklore community? Purchase your membership here.If walls could talk I have a vivid memory of a particular moment in 2019: it was a sunny spring day, and I had just picked up the keys to my new apar...

Hope !!!!
Web3 is a strange, ambivalent space. The perception of web3 outside the space is generally negative and viewed with suspicion. And we seem to be happy to fuel this view with weekly news about scams, rug pulls, hacks, and other security flaws. Some critics are happily mentioning the bad news regularly: more proof that web3 is just a giant scam and does not work. Admittedly, the web3 experience could be easier, more pleasant, and more welcoming. Buzzwords like permissionless, ownership, decentr...
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When the World Goes Phygital!!!!
The Forefront Journal publishes essays from the frontier of consumer and social crypto. This is a guest essay from Aleksija Vujicic. In the future, fashion and commerce will be phygital (no matter how much you hate the word). It could look a little like this: After purchasing a Staud bag online, it arrives embedded with an NFC chip. A quick tap of your phone mints its digital twin as an NFT in your digital fashion closet (DFC), a social platform where friends & followers can see your fashion ...

Object Histories
Welcome to Folklore, a community exploring the labyrinth of networked worlds. We’re happy to showcase a guest post by Timour Kosters. Timour is an investor and builder working in crypto, governance, and ml. We encourage you to support Folklore by minting and sharing this article. Want to join the Folklore community? Purchase your membership here.If walls could talk I have a vivid memory of a particular moment in 2019: it was a sunny spring day, and I had just picked up the keys to my new apar...

Hope !!!!
Web3 is a strange, ambivalent space. The perception of web3 outside the space is generally negative and viewed with suspicion. And we seem to be happy to fuel this view with weekly news about scams, rug pulls, hacks, and other security flaws. Some critics are happily mentioning the bad news regularly: more proof that web3 is just a giant scam and does not work. Admittedly, the web3 experience could be easier, more pleasant, and more welcoming. Buzzwords like permissionless, ownership, decentr...
Share Dialog
Share Dialog
Together with members of Geometry - Tom Walpo and Ben Levy - we’ve been thinking about how we upgrade the Internet and build Web3 directly into the Web, such that it is available by default in every webpage.
Every web app could become a financial app, enabling:
Micropayments - content creators can directly monetise, paywalls can offer one time payment options
Seamless web purchases - assets can be bought and swapped within web articles
Digital content integrity - the authenticity of all digital content would be verified
An artificial separation Web3 today is artificially separate from Web2.
To use a “Web3 app” or “dapp”, you first need to install a wallet and setup a browser extension, such as in Dawn’s Safari Extension. The extension injects a connection to Web3 into the webpage.
This way of connecting to the blockchain however is messy and stunts the adoption of Web3. To simply integrate payments into a web app, a developer needs to learn about esoteric Web3 concepts such as providers, signers and transaction receipts.
Further, it means that every Web3 protocol has to be accessed through a custom built UI. These protocols are actually fundamental financial primitives - sending value, swapping assets, taking out loans - and we believe should be available natively to every web app.
Indeed, the early Internet designers thought it obvious that the Internet would have a native digital cash layer. They left behind the 402 Payment Required HTTP error code.
Block space and AI Taking a step back, there are two technology exponentials that we think will play a large role in shaping the next generation of the Internet.
Block space is going to $0 Only a couple of years ago, a simple swap on Mainnet would cost several dollars - putting Web3 firmly out of the reach of most.
Now, rollups are rolling off the production line and have lowered this cost to the mere 10s of cents. Sending a payment on a rollup costs an order of magnitude less than the Stripe minimum fee.
AI will start to interpret the world around us AI and LLMs are continuing to advance and will start to play a role in interpreting our finances, helping us to secure and execute our digital lives.
Dawn AI is an early attempt to show what is possible right now, giving you a deeply competent financial copilot by your side to help you interpret the Web3 world.
It is also clear that the proliferation of powerful AI will raise challenges. It will soon be impossible, if it isn’t already, to discern human generated content from AI generated content. All human generated content will need to be signed, humans will “Sign Everything”.
HTML+ So how can we build Web3 direct into every web app? This would enable micropayments across the Internet, new mechanisms to fund digital content and bring hardened, trusted data to the Web in the Age of AI.
We think that the browser and wallet need to take on a much larger role. Tom Walpo came to us recently and discussed this idea - HTML can be upgraded to be Web3 enabled - HTML+.
The idea is to introduce a limited set of new HTML tags, where each tag represents a core primitive of Web3. A “Web3 ready” browser would interpret and execute these, whilst a non-enabled browser would simply ignore.
To make this concrete, consider the below collection of tags and a use case:
Together with members of Geometry - Tom Walpo and Ben Levy - we’ve been thinking about how we upgrade the Internet and build Web3 directly into the Web, such that it is available by default in every webpage.
Every web app could become a financial app, enabling:
Micropayments - content creators can directly monetise, paywalls can offer one time payment options
Seamless web purchases - assets can be bought and swapped within web articles
Digital content integrity - the authenticity of all digital content would be verified
An artificial separation Web3 today is artificially separate from Web2.
To use a “Web3 app” or “dapp”, you first need to install a wallet and setup a browser extension, such as in Dawn’s Safari Extension. The extension injects a connection to Web3 into the webpage.
This way of connecting to the blockchain however is messy and stunts the adoption of Web3. To simply integrate payments into a web app, a developer needs to learn about esoteric Web3 concepts such as providers, signers and transaction receipts.
Further, it means that every Web3 protocol has to be accessed through a custom built UI. These protocols are actually fundamental financial primitives - sending value, swapping assets, taking out loans - and we believe should be available natively to every web app.
Indeed, the early Internet designers thought it obvious that the Internet would have a native digital cash layer. They left behind the 402 Payment Required HTTP error code.
Block space and AI Taking a step back, there are two technology exponentials that we think will play a large role in shaping the next generation of the Internet.
Block space is going to $0 Only a couple of years ago, a simple swap on Mainnet would cost several dollars - putting Web3 firmly out of the reach of most.
Now, rollups are rolling off the production line and have lowered this cost to the mere 10s of cents. Sending a payment on a rollup costs an order of magnitude less than the Stripe minimum fee.
AI will start to interpret the world around us AI and LLMs are continuing to advance and will start to play a role in interpreting our finances, helping us to secure and execute our digital lives.
Dawn AI is an early attempt to show what is possible right now, giving you a deeply competent financial copilot by your side to help you interpret the Web3 world.
It is also clear that the proliferation of powerful AI will raise challenges. It will soon be impossible, if it isn’t already, to discern human generated content from AI generated content. All human generated content will need to be signed, humans will “Sign Everything”.
HTML+ So how can we build Web3 direct into every web app? This would enable micropayments across the Internet, new mechanisms to fund digital content and bring hardened, trusted data to the Web in the Age of AI.
We think that the browser and wallet need to take on a much larger role. Tom Walpo came to us recently and discussed this idea - HTML can be upgraded to be Web3 enabled - HTML+.
The idea is to introduce a limited set of new HTML tags, where each tag represents a core primitive of Web3. A “Web3 ready” browser would interpret and execute these, whilst a non-enabled browser would simply ignore.
To make this concrete, consider the below collection of tags and a use case:
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