As the world commemorates Labor Day, a moment to be loud about the achievements of workers, let us also cheer for the onchain builders and their quiet contributions to a better tomorrow.

On this day, let’s celebrate all builders pursuing a new internet, against the crowd and against the odds, working relentlessly over the years to pave the way for a more equitable future.

Let’s celebrate all those who were born to build.

Say gm to the onchain builders.

The ones shipping a better tomorrow, not simply hoping for it.

They build their own path, breaking free from the corporate mold. They question the norms, ignore conventions, and reimagine the future.

Where others see obstacles, they see opportunity.

They are driven by curiosity, not corner offices. They don't seek power, but to empower. They are born to build, not to be bossed around.

They keep building, even if their work goes unnoticed. They keep showing up, even when the market is down. They keep trying, even when others quit.

While others applaud the loudest voices, we celebrate the unsung heroes of the blockchain.

The world might underestimate them. Mock their ideals and laugh at their dreams. But they keep building. Not for quick gains, but driven by a need for lasting change.

This is a testament to their courage, resilience, and creativity. We stand beside them, following their vision, supporting their work. You can't quantify their impact in market cap alone, because their legacy is being written in immutable code.

They are the onchain builders. The visionaries of a new era, the rebels shaping the new internet.

And while some dismiss them as naive, we know they are the most undervalued talent today. They are born to build, and that’s why they are changing the world.

Sign the Manifesto ✍️

Join the movement to support onchain builders, and sign the manifesto by minting this Mirror entry for free.

Limited Edition NFT [72h Mint]

This limited edition NFT celebrates the “Manifesto for Onchain Builders” and the first Builders Day.

All rewards from the mint will be donated to BOSS, a community-owned project celebrating builders that won’t be bossed around. BOSS is a meme and a social game, designed to reward builders via onchain nominations. Holders of the limited edition NFT will have an extra budget in the BOSS nomination game.

Supporting Onchain Builders

The “Manifesto for Onchain Builders” is supported by (in alphabetical order):

• Ackee

• Base

• Base Migrate

• Boss

• Celo

• Creed

• Crypto Nomads Club

• Coinvise

• CoUnity

• Eden

• ENS

• Epic Web3

• ETHLisbon

• Degen

• Fjord

• HaloFi

• H.E.R. DAO

• Humanos

• Impact Market

• Kolektivo

• Milk Road

• Mirror

• Moddio

• Myosin

• Neynar

• Passport Protocol

• Privy

• Safe

• Taikai

• Talent Protocol

• Urbe

If you also want to support the Manifesto for Onchain Builders, ping us on Twitter.

• Pectra upgrade is planned for Q1 2025.

• EtherFi opens a waitlist for EtherFi Cash.

• Polymarket settles its ETH ETF prediction market.

• Arbitrum reaches one billion total transactions.

harpie.io/ethdaily

Harpie is an onchain security solution that protects your wallet from theft in realtime. Harpie helps you detect and block suspicious transactions before they execute, safeguarding your assets from malicious attacks and scams. Try Harpie for free at harpie.io/ethdaily.

Ethereum core developers are targeting to launch Pectra, the next upgrade for Ethereum, by the end of the first quarter of 2025. The inclusion of EVM Object Format (EOF), which is a set of about 11 EIPs that introduce an opt-in container for EVM code, is a key component that is pushing the upgrade timeline to 2025. The upgrade is set to feature PeerDAS, a data availability sampling solution that uses existing peer-to-peer components within Ethereum. Developers also agreed to replace the account abstraction EIP-3074 with a newer proposal, EIP-7702, introduced by Vitalik. EIP-7702, enables EOAs to function as smart contract wallets during a transaction. Pectra consists of the Prague upgrade on the Execution Layer and the Electra upgrade on the Consensus Layer.  The final scope of the upgrade is still under discussion, with potential changes like postponing Verkle to the Osaka hardfork.

Waitlist Opens For EtherFi Cash

EtherFi launched its waitlist for EtherFi Cash, the third component of its suite, designed to enable users to spend and borrow against their EtherFi balances. Cash consists of a mobile wallet linked to a Visa credit card, allowing users to either borrow USDC against their EtherFi assets or convert them directly into USDC. EtherFi rewards can also be used to settle outstanding balances. EtherFi Cash aims to eliminate the need to offramp crypto for daily transactions. The Visa cards are expected to be shipped in September. EtherFi also has plans for a Layer 2 solution to enhance payment processing and dispute resolution for Cash. Currently, EtherFi is the largest liquid restaking protocol, managing over $5.5 billion in TVL.

Polymarket Settles ETH ETF Prediction

Polymarket resolved its prediction market for the approval of an Ethereum ETF by May 31st. The resolution followed controversy stemming from the SEC's approval of multiple 19b-4 filings for Spot ETH ETFs, while the necessary Form S-1 filings required for trading remain unapproved. Some users argued that an ETF isn't fully approved until both filings are approved. UMA Protocol, an Optimistic Oracle provider, ultimately determined a "Yes" outcome based on the 19b-4 filings that were approved. Bloomberg analyst James Seyffart noted that a 19b-4 approval historically leads to S-1 approvals. The prediction market had a total of $13.2 million in bets.

Arbitrum Reaches One Billion Transactions

Arbitrum has achieved over one billion total transactions between Arbitrum One and Arbitrum Nova. Over the past month, Arbitrum One has topped the charts in daily active addresses, recording over 3.6 million active addresses in just the last 24 hours. As the leading Layer 2 network, Arbitrum One holds $18.5 billion in TVL, capturing a 40% market share among all rollups.

Other News

• Devcon ticket sales open in June

• Kabosu (Doge) passes away

• Underrated Ethereum repos

• Proposal: Onboard Drop to Lido

Follow us on X, Lens, and Farcaster.

• Vitalik Buterin proposes EIP-7702.

• Velodrome launches on Mode.

• Lyra introduces yield-bearing derivatives.

• Sablier supports zkSync Era.

harpie.io/ethdaily

Harpie is an onchain security solution that protects your wallet from theft in realtime. Harpie helps you detect and block suspicious transactions before they execute, safeguarding your assets from malicious attacks and scams. Try Harpie for free at harpie.io/ethdaily.

Vitalik Buterin introduced EIP-7702 as an alternative to account abstraction EIP-3074. Rather than adding new opcodes, EIP-7702 proposes a new transaction type that allows Externally Owned Accounts (EOAs) to operate as smart contract wallets temporarily during a transaction, with the state of the EOA reverting to its original condition after the transaction. The transaction type under EIP-7702 includes fields for contract_code and a signature. The approach supports the same functionalities as those proposed in EIP-3074, such as batch and sponsored transactions. Although Ethereum core developers previously planned to adopt EIP-3074 in the upcoming Pectra upgrade, EIP-7702 could change development direction as it could better streamline the transition of EOAs into smart contract wallets.

Velodrome Launches On Mode

Velodrome Superchain, a MetaDEX aimed at becoming the primary liquidity and trading hub on the Superhain, is now live on Mode Network as part of its beta release. This launch features support for both stable and volatile asset AMM pools. Users can now explore liquidity pools, swap, or open LP positions on Mode. Mode launched its MODE governance token today, which has a fully diluted valuation of $576 million. In the coming days, liquidity providers will earn MODE token incentives. Projects within the Mode ecosystem can also enhance liquidity for their tokens by allocating incentives to gauges. Over the next 30 to 60 days, Velodrome will roll out Velodrome Superchain 1.0, an initial version of the MetaDEX that incorporates VELO rewards and Slipstream liquidity pools.

Lyra Introduces Yield-Bearing Derivatives

Lyra Finance introduced a new solution that tokenizes yield-bearing derivatives, focusing initially on basis trade and covered call strategies for Liquid Restaking Tokens (LRTs). The approach enables users to deposit LRTs such as EtherFi’s eETH and Swell’s rswETH to earn yields from ETH funding rates in basis trades and from volatility in options selling. The strategies are packaged into ERC-20 tokens that can further be used across DeFi. In the coming weeks, Lyra plans to release both cash and carry and covered call strategies for LRTs and stETH. Operating as a permissionless options platform, Lyra Finance features smart accounts, cross-margin, and cross-asset collateral, all running on Lyra Chain, which is an OP Stack Layer 2 network.

Sablier Supports zkSync Era

Token streaming platform Sablier now supports streams on zkSync Era. Sablier enables users to create token streams featuring linear, cliff, timelock, and exponential locking mechanisms. Sablier also supports voting power on Snapshot from tokens that are streaming. Sablier now supports streams on a total of twelve chains

Other News

• Starknet seed program

• Orb opens for all

Follow us on X, Lens, and Farcaster.

el niño estrella is a full length multimedia album by artist Xcelencia released as a 6551 on Base. We believe its the first full length album of its kind minted on Base

Week 1: April 5 - April 12

• First onchain album on Base launches on estrella.city offering collectors the ability to collect the entire project in a single transaction across platforms like Catalog, Sound, and Zora. Networks included - Base and Optimism

• April 5 album releases globally across DSPs reaching 450,000 streams incl. previously released singles

• Album collected over 20 times since release and we maxxed out Privy logins 50/50 lol

• Album highlighted on SoundClouds Latin section and two singles trended in U.S. Latin charts

• Chimbita hits #1 on Sound Viral charts achieving over 15k mints in a single week

• Graced the cover of Invest in music playlist on Sound and highlighted on their newsletter

• Over 1k playlist adds across DSPs for el niño estrella album

Week 2: April 12 - April 19

• Featured by Base - Onchain Daily -

• Editorial placement for one of the lead singles from ENE

• Base builder grant (first grant i’ve received in this space since 2020)

• Chimbita hits 20k streams on DSPs

• Every song from ENE hits the viral charts on Sound Xyz

more updates soon…

Art by: Regul Lion

The significance of protecting our smartphones from possible espionage cannot be overstated. The risk of unauthorized surveillance is very real in today’s connected world, so we need to take preventative measures to protect our online privacy.

There are many ways for people to increase the security of their smartphones and protect themselves from prying eyes, from using state-of-the-art detection tools to putting strategic defense methods into place. Come along as we explore a thorough guide on protecting your privacy and safeguarding your smartphone against cyberattacks in the modern era!

Remember: You Could Be a Target! We are a natural target for all sorts of attacks — from garden-variety cybercriminals to competitive spying (sounds dramatic, but it’s real!). That said, it doesn’t really matter what industry you’re in. If you have any sensitive, proprietary information at all (and let’s face it, most people in crypto do), then you could very well be a target. This is a good thing to always keep in mind!

Through the implementation of these measures, individuals can notably improve the security posture of their smartphones and safeguard themselves against the dangers of espionage. In an increasingly linked world, be watchful and proactive in protecting your digital assets and privacy. And hopefully there are a few clues that could point to being spied on:

• Unusual Battery and Heat Behavior: If your device suddenly starts draining battery quickly or heating up without any apparent reason, it could be a sign of surveillance.

• Suspicious Camera and Microphone Activity: Keep an eye out for odd noises or behaviors from your phone’s camera or microphone, as they could indicate unauthorized access.

• Vulnerabilities in SS7 Protocol: Be cautious about potential attacks exploiting the SS7 protocol through anomalous calls or invisible commands and SMS. For example, turning off iMessage on Iphone, makes your messages roll back to SMS which anyone with SS7 access can view.

To assist in detecting and defending against espionage, here are some practical tools and methods that can be invaluable in safeguarding your smartphone:

• Utilize Specialized Detection Tools: There are applications and devices available to detect unauthorized access to your phone, offering an extra layer of protection.

• Setting up Honey-pots: Implementing traps within your device to prompt a reaction from potential intruders can help in identifying unauthorized surveillance.

Tools to Spot Malicious IMSI Catchers

Android IMSI Catcher Detector from Cellular Privacy and Armadillophone provides detection capabilities for IMSI catchers, helping identify potential interception:

• Android IMSI Catcher Detector

• Android IMSI Catcher Detector (2)

• How to Detect IMSI Catchers?

Traffic Monitoring Tools

Wigle Wi-Fi Wardriving enables users to track and map Wi-Fi networks, contributing to identifying potential surveillance practices:

• Wigle

• F.cking.software

MetaRadar and AT Tracking Detection offer advanced features for monitoring and identifying potential tracking activities:

• Meta Radar

• De.seemoo

Honeypotting Tools and Methods

OpenStego and WhoLeaked provide steganography techniques to conceal sensitive information, reducing the risk of data interception:

• Openstego

• Who Leaked

Eventually, you may also create honeypots on the working device (assuming you keep to this notion), such as CanaryToken or canarytokens.org or IpLogger. You can also create many wallet.dat files or just create a PDF document called, for example, Wallet Seed and hide traps inside. That way, you’ll be notified if anything happens or bad actors trigger it!

Check out as well: link1, link2 — It will work out like a basic SIEM or DLP system. Same goes to your blockchain wallet — alerts are very important! Set them up properly!

Utilizing Canarytokens and Sayhello helps in creating traps to detect unauthorized access to your device:

• Canarytokens

• Sayhello

• Cam Phish

Radio-Monitoring and Defense

PiDense and ESP8266 Wardriving provide tools for monitoring and defending against potential radio surveillance:

• WiPi Hunter - PiDense

• ESP8266 Wardriving

Especially Important Tools

CreepDetector and Little Snitch offer enhanced defense mechanisms against unauthorized access and tracking:

• Creep Detector

• Little Snitch

Web-defense Tips

• Anything on a mobile device uses the built in render, aka, brave uses web kit from Apple on iPhone, or blink on Android. They are just ui wrappers with some functionality built on top. So that, remain vigilant — create a culture of skepticism where they feel comfortable checking twice before clicking a link or responding to a request for sensitive information, and you’ll have a much more secure organization overall.

• Mullvad does a few things differently than most other VPNs, such as allowing cash payments and not requiring an email address to create an account. One may also wonder: Isn’t WireGuard less safe than OpenVPN, since logs are kept for WireGuard at least temporary? Well, If you have multiple users you have to make an additional gateway with additional IP address. Like in Nordlynx. But out of the box you cant say that OpenVPN is more safe. It’s more difficult to configure it so misconfiguration may be an issue. With all said, I prefer mullvad.net + oVPN.

In the end of the day, now you can proactively protect your smartphone and your privacy from potential espionage threats by incorporating these tools and techniques into your security strategy!

If you want to support my work, please, consider donating me:

• 0xB25C5E8fA1E53eEb9bE3421C59F6A66B786ED77A or officercia.eth — ETH;

• 17Ydx9m7vrhnx4XjZPuGPMqrhw3sDviNTU — BTC;

• 0zk1qydq9pg9m5x9qpa7ecp3gjauczjcg52t9z0zk7hsegq8yzq5f35q3rv7j6fe3z53l7za0lc7yx9nr08pj83q0gjv4kkpkfzsdwx4gunl0pmr3q8dj82eudk5d5v - Railgun;

• TYWJoRenGB9JFD2QsdPSdrJtaT6CDoFQBN - TRX;

• More addresses: github.com/OffcierCia/support.

Stay safe!

Dynamic art about erasure and finding the generative in the real.

Released by Fingerprints DAO, in collaboration with Assembly

The act of erasing can involve both destruction and generation, transformation, and reimagining, through which we create new possibilities and new forms emerge.

We live in an era heavily influenced by media representations, simulations, and digital experiences, where the line between reality and these artificial worlds has become blurred. In this context, misha de ridder plays with the notions of loss and recoding, using a blockchain protocol to explore the relationship between the physical and the digital, substituting the signs of the real for the real.

warning toxic glow

Substituting the signs of the real for the real is a concept introduced by philosopher Jean Baudrillard. He argues that in modern society, we 1 have reached a point where our lives are so heavily influenced by media representations and simulations that we no longer distinguish between reality and these artificial worlds. Instead of accepting genuine experiences as they occur in their natural state, people now rely on images or information created through digital technologies to create meaning from what was once considered real-life events. As a result, this process involves substituting signs (such as photographs) for actual reality itself. This phenomenon can lead to an overreliance upon representations instead of direct experience with whatever it is one might be engaging in at any given moment. Additionally, it can contribute towards feelings of disconnection from the physical world around us due to our constant engagement with screens rather than fully immersing ourselves into present moments without mediation by technology.

amnesia breeds repetition

misha de ridder’s collection ‘glitch’ consists of 50 photographs of erased graffiti that have been animated into gifs by inserting liminal afterimages of what was: faces, text, indecipherable symbols resulting in a series of abstract painting-like images blurring the border between photography, painting, animation, digital image, and token art. Information that has been erased becomes information again, randomness as a surrealist technique.

glitch.mishaderidder.com

The blockchain protocol helps to enhance the generative aspects and introduces a new way of value exchange, an alternative for creator royalties. Each trade of a token has different effects on the artwork. The first trade causes the animation to vanish, while subsequent trades fade out the image, and the token eventually points towards a blank placeholder.

Anyone can pay a small amount to refresh the token, restoring it to its original state on the website.

dynamic token mechanics

All 50 1 of 1s in the series are designed to degrade with each secondary market trade or transfer to another wallet. The token’s traits, title and token ID always remain except when you burn the token for a print. Anyone can do a transaction to refresh the token, restoring it to its original state.

1. The initial collector receives an original photo with liminal animation as GIF-file.

2. After the first sale or transfer, the animation disappears, leaving only the photo.

3. After the second sale or transfer the photo fades 50%.

4. After the third sale or transfer the photo will disappear leaving only a placeholder.

ranked auction with rebate

50 1/1s pieces will be auctioned off in 3 days.

Thursday, April 25 at 1 PM EDT / 7pm CEST\ 0.04 Ξ starting bid

limited edition mint

As soon as the auction closes, a limited mint of 510 editions will become available, representing various mosaics of the full collection in randomized order. These images will slowly degrade as more editions are minted, until the last 10 editions in the series are left completely blank. The mint will be open for a week for a fixed price.

Sunday, April 28 at 1 PM EDT
 / 7pm CEST\ 0.025 Ξ fixed price

burn & redeem fine art print

For the burn & redeem of the physical fine art print Fingerprints DAO collaborates with Assembly.

Assembly will offer large scale museum quality fine art prints for collectors who choose to burn their 1/1 token to purchase a physical print.

All prints are produced on Canson Rag Photographique 310gsm paper with Canon Lucia Pro ink, and come in 40 x 50 / 40 x 60 in. sizes, based on the image aspect ratio.

 large scale museum quality fine art print

After the auction when you have received your 1/1 token please join the token gated group on Warpcast for glitch 1/1 collectors.

about the artist

misha de ridder is a visual artist making conceptual photo and video work concerned with perception. His quiet images evoke contemplation and intimacy and invite viewers to look anew at what we consider known and to rethink our surroundings. Reality as an act of deep imagination.

de ridder's work has been exhibited internationally at institutions such as Foam Photography Museum, Museum of the City of New York, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and many others. His work has been acquired by both private and major public collections. de ridder has also published seven monographs a.o. Abendsonne (Schaden 2011), Falaise (Roma 2016), and high up close by (Roma 2019).

misha de ridder entered crypto space in 2020. He started out with NFT on Foundation and ‘hic et nunc’. Among his celebrated drops are ‘high up close by’ 2021 on Foundation in collaboration with Assembly Curated and ‘generative by nature’ in 2022 on a self-build marketplace on Tezos. In 2023 he released a limited edition ‘grass’ on Optimism.

de ridder is an active member of several DAOs and web3 communities like Kiwi News, Obscura, Purple and Trust, curating art and writing about philosophy, art, technology and blockchain.

copyright

The glitch animations are Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license\ Prints are Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY NC) license

Gm!

WASD is making moves.

My goal when I began this journey over 8 months ago was to onboard as many people as I could into onchain games.

That mission has not changed (my bullishness on this space has grown exponentially since), but my tactics have.

I feel now that in addition to content, the best way I can onboard people into the space is by, well, playing the games.

As a result, I’ve been laser focused on turning WASD into the world’s largest onchain gaming guild and community.

Today, Akina and I will give you a look at what we’ve been up to in our first-ever “State of WASD.”

These monthly reports are intended to provide insight into what our guild is playing, and to highlight the accomplishments of our members.

I hope you enjoy them, and that by the end you’ll want to join us!

One last thing…

…our guild is no longer called “WASD Guild.”

Just “WASD.”

I'm way too proud of this meme lol.

Now…let’s get into it!

-FaultProofBen

If you’re interested in joining WASD to play Primodium, Sky Strife, Tarochi or any onchain game please DM our official X account or FaultProofBen!

What We’re Playing: Primodium

The game we’ve focused our efforts on the most in March was Primodium.

Primodium is a fully onchain space MMO and resource management game. In it, your goal is to score points by producing resources, building factories, and battling other players.

The game’s latest release, v0.10, is live and playable on a Caldera testnet.

We’ve been covering (and playing) Primodium since way back in August 2023. It’s improved dramatically since – And so has our alliance!

Our two squads, WASD & WASD2, sit at 3rd and 5th for v0.10 respectively, with the former having captured the second most asteroids of any alliance.

The state of galaxy of as of writing.

We’ve also doubled our total member count since last round from ~20 to ~40.

As in v0.09, this round we’re distributing Optimism tokens to alliance members who reach a minimum of 100 million points.

Individual allocations are not yet final, but so far we’ve had 19 players qualify for these rewards!

Lots of WASD in here. You love to see it! - Source: primodium.ordengg/map

In addition, starting in v0.10, we introduced the opportunity to earn additional OP by completing in-game quests and bot bounties.

The fight’s not over – But I’ve had a ton of fun playing with everyone this round.

Although we’re haven’t (yet) reached out goal of finishing in first, we’ve leveled up considerably.

I can’t wait to continue improving and to keep things rolling when v0.11 drops!

What We’re Playing: Sky Strife

Sky Strife is a MUD-based RTS developed by Lattice.

In the game, you compete in 2-4 player, PvP matches where you have to capture opponents bases while protecting your own.

Sky Strife just wrapped up its final testnet season (0.3), which ran from March 19-29 on Redstone Holesky.

This was the final persistent, playtest for the game on testnet!

Like Primodium, we’ve been Sky Strifing since August 2023, and it’s been remarkable to see how far it’s come.

In prior seasons, we hosted competitions, like “The WASD Cup” and “World Sky League.”

While there were no WASD events in 0.3, our guild members were nonetheless active.

GG James - Source: skystrife.worlds.online

One, James.eth, even had the highest win rate (70.9%) of any player during the season who competed in at least 20 matches!

More ggs to everyone!

Furthermore, he, along with fellow WASD teammates Hope, iNoob59, and ProofOfJoker, each placed in the Top-20 in total matches won across all testnet seasons.

Gg to them and all WASD members who are cleaning up in Sky Strife.

I can’t wait for everyone to keep battling when the game launches on mainnet!

What We’re Playing: Tarochi

A new game that we started playing last month was Tarochi.

As discussed last week, Tarochi is an onchain RPG built by Paima Studios with the Paima Engine.

Deployed on XAI, in the game, you’ll explore, complete quests, capture, and battle monsters.

Tarochi is currently in the midst of Season 1, its first mainnet release.

WASD has begun gearing up for the upcoming Guild Event teased by the team, and so far has brought 5 players into the fold.

Games On Our Radar

While we’re having a ton of fun with Primodium, Sky Strife, and Tarochi, we want to establish a presence in every onchain game world.

Beyond these three, we’re also looking at playing:

• Words3

• Force Prime Heroes

• Duper

• Loot Survivor

• Pirate Nation

Member of the Month: Hope

I’m very excited to announce our first member of the month: Hope!

Hope joined us during this Primodium round and has been crushing it.

She’s our top-ranked player, and as of writing is the 4th highest scoring player in the entire game!

She’s also been dominating in Sky Strife, and has the second most wins all-time of any player at 113, and with a win rate of 77.03%.

GG and great job Hope!

Bullish WASD

As you can see, March was a big month for WASD.

We had ton of fun playing Primodium, Sky Strife, and Tarochi, and can’t wait to see what April has in store.

I’m very proud of what our members accomplished, and want to thank everyone for their contributions.

I’m incredibly bullish on this guild and think building something special.

GG – And here’s to another great month! 🫡

If you’re interested joining WASD to play Primodium, Sky Strife, Tarochi, or any other onchain game, please DM our official X account or FaultProofBen!

Fire Eyes is a leading organization for onchain governance.

They are active players and contributors to onchain games, and care deeply about furthering the development of the Ethereum and DAO ecosystems.

Fire Eyes is a great outlet for any team looking for in-depth feedback on community sentiment and token design.

If you’re interested in getting in touch with 🔥_🔥 - DM them on X!

Thanks for reading!

If you liked this piece, you can collect it at the top of the page!

After you do, hop in our WASD Collectooor Telegram chat to meet other collectors, enthusiasts, players, and degens!

Finally, to stay current on all things WASD, subscribe below, follow us on X, hop in our Warpcast channel, and join our WASD Republic Discord server!

See you all Friday for The WASD Weekly!

Since its inception, Scroll\_ZKP has been steadfast in its mission to integrate the fundamental pillars of the DeFi ecosystem, ensuring widespread access to revolutionary financial tools. In just under five months following Scroll's mainnet launch, significant milestones have been achieved, including successful collaborations with notable entities such as Aave, Uniswap, and now Compound Finance.

Scroll_ZKP's Collaboration with Compound Finance:

The recent partnership with Compound Finance marks another significant stride towards realizing Scroll's vision of establishing a scalable, accessible, and cost-efficient hub for Ethereum's leading DeFi ecosystem. As the pioneering zkEVM supporting Compound Finance, Scroll is facilitating an initial USDC market during the early launch phase, with plans to introduce additional markets in the near future.

Compound III: Enhancing DeFi Borrowing:

Compound III represents a streamlined iteration of the protocol, prioritizing security, capital efficiency, and user experience. Through strategic simplification, Compound III has emerged as the most effective borrowing tool within the DeFi landscape. Departing from the pooled-risk model, which posed inherent vulnerabilities, Compound III introduces a paradigm shift by featuring single borrowable assets in each deployment. This approach not only mitigates risks associated with collateral rehypothecation but also enhances capital efficiency by providing clarity on the borrowed asset upfront.

Key Features of Compound III:

• Redesigned risk management and liquidation engine enhance fund safety while ensuring borrower-friendly operations.

• Implementation of market-wide limits on collateral assets minimizes risk exposure.

• Decoupled interest rate models for earning and borrowing provide governance with full economic policy control.

• Advanced account management tools facilitate novel UX patterns and applications atop the protocol.

• Exclusive utilization of Chainlink as the price feed ensures compatibility with EVM chains beyond Ethereum.

• Simplified governance structure empowers the community to oversee and manage protocol parameters effectively.

Security Measures:

Compound III undergoes rigorous security evaluations, including audits by reputable firms such as OpenZeppelin and ChainSecurity, along with formal verification in collaboration with Certora. As a proactive measure, the protocol initiates with conservative collateral limits to safeguard user interests while encouraging community scrutiny before broader scalability.

Community Ownership and Governance:

Central to Compound III's ethos is community ownership and governance. COMP Governance exercises exclusive control over deployed markets and future iterations. The protocol's codebase adopts a business source license, subject to modifications and usage grants by COMP Governance, ensuring alignment with community interests and values.

Conclusion:

The synergistic collaboration between Scroll_ZKP and Compound III exemplifies a pivotal advancement in the DeFi landscape. With a shared commitment to innovation, security, and community empowerment, both entities are poised to redefine the parameters of decentralized finance, fostering a more inclusive and resilient financial ecosystem for all.

To get started using Compound on Scroll_ZKP , simply head over to the Compound Dashboard, connect your wallet, and choose from the available lending/borrowing options.

Until the next innovation!

Stay tuned for more exciting updates!

Website | X | Discord | Mirror

• Ethena Labs USDe mainnet launch.

• Starknet DeFi Spring campaign.

• Zaros introduces dual-restaking.

• Gearbox leveraged EigenLayer restaking.

Listen on: Apple | Castbox | Spotify | YouTube | Lens

harpie.io/ethdaily

Harpie is an onchain security solution that protects your wallet from theft in realtime. Harpie helps you detect and block suspicious transactions before they execute, safeguarding your assets from malicious attacks and scams. Try Harpie for free at harpie.io/ethdaily.

Ethena Labs announced the public launch of USDe on Ethereum Mainnet. USDe is an overcollateralized stablecoin that offers yield and is backed by stETH and balanced positions in derivatives markets. Ethena describes this stablecoin as an "Internet Bond," reflecting its intention to mirror U.S. treasury bonds. Ethena Labs also raised a $14 million seed extension funding round. sUSDe is a value-accrueing token, representing the value of staked USDe. Ethena also launched the Shard Campaign, a points program for early adopters. The program includes multiple epochs spanning three months, during which users can earn shards by engaging in liquidity provision, bridging to certain Layer 2s, and holding specific governance tokens. USDe has already reached a $270 million marketcap.

Starknet DeFi Spring Incentives

The Starknet Foundation unveiled the Starknet DeFi Spring Campaign, a program that allocates 40 million STRK tokens in incentives. The campaign adopts a dynamic allocation that rewards participating DeFi protocols based on their activity levels. The campaign starts on February 22nd and will last six to eight months. The campaign includes a series of quests hosted on Intract, offering 15 quests until March 22nd. The initial phase focuses on DEXs such as Ekubo, Jediswap, and Nostra Swap. Subsequent phases will focus money markets and derivatives. A reserve of 10 million STRK tokens is set aside for further incentives in late 2024.

Zaros Introduces Dual-Restaking

Zaros, a perpetuals DEX native to Arbitrum, introduced dual restaking vaults, enabling liquidity providers to deposit Liquid Restaking Tokens (LRT) for earning both restaking yields and Zaros trading fees. This initiative builds upon the LRTfi ecosystem, which comprises of protocols that use LRTs. Initially, the feature will support EtherFi's eETH, the largest LRT with $1.25 billion in TVL. Like LSTs, LRTs provide the staking yield, but with the added benefit of restaking yield from EigenLayer once actively validated services go live later in the year. Zaros is yet to deploy its perpetual DEX to mainnet.

Gearbox Launches Leveraged Restaking

Leverage defi protocol Gearbox launched leveraged EigenLayer restaking, allowing users to gain exposure on up to 10x leverage on their collateral. The launch features an initial integration with EtherFi for leveraged EIGEN and EtherFi points. Gearbox Protocol uses a Credit Account system that allows users to deposit collateral in isolated smart contracts that can be used to execute leveraged orders across DeFi protocols.

Other News

• AltLayer raises $14.4m

• Argent introduces a portfolio dapp

• Vitalik looking forward to Verkle Trees

• EIP-7623: Increase calldata cost

• RSS3 mainnet update

• Safe grants round 1 writeup

• Collective DAO Catalog

• Worldcoin bug bounty

Subscribe

🔗 Website | 🎙️ Podcast | 🎥 YouTube | 🐦 X | 🌿 Lens | 🟪 Farcaster

My Gallery profile at https://gallery.so/elle

The deadline for the edition was short, as Christmas was only two weeks away. But I started getting ideas and dropped everything else to focus on it.

I don't really make many holiday themed works. It can be difficult to make something that's not just a disposable thing that people enjoy in the moment and never look at or think about ever again. So I wanted to pull together elements that felt in season but not too cliché or direct. For example, I didn't want to write a Christmas song. I had been listening to a lot of City Pop lately for no particular reason, specifically remixes on YouTube, and that sound struck me as very holidays-sounding with its dreamy and sparkling synths. So I started with that.

You may not like it but this is what peak recording performance looks like

I made a simple drum beat to find a tempo I liked – I wanted something a little more up tempo than the average City Pop song just to give things more manic internet energy. I picked some random seventh chords that made a nice sounding progression, seventh chords being the sound often associated with City Pop and also Kawaii Future Bass. I did this in GarageBand on my iPad. Most of the software and hardware I use is the basic ware that come with my devices. I like the challenge of trying to make interesting things with the most common tools that everyone has access to. I suppose that's why I'm interested in the open internet and blockchain as mediums that empower the individual.

After I had the beat and chord progression, I needed to think about the lyrics some more. I knew the video loop would likely be 30-40 seconds long like my other videos, so I had to find the right words that wouldn't get too annoying in a loop. So while I let that stew, I went over to Blender to work on the 3D model on my Mac. (Blender, an open source software that is, again, easily accessible to anyone.)

This isn't even my final form

The model I've been using in my music videos began as one of my Rainbow World Citizens by Adworld. Over time, I've been doing a Ship of Theseus on the model and slowly replacing all the parts with my own. For this piece, I made a chunky Christmas sweater to go with the festive theme. I drew the design with my pixel art tools in Procreate on my iPad, putting in references to Gallery, VIP, and the classic broken internet image icon. I exported the sweater model from Blender and imported it into Procreate to place the patterns. Then I brought it back into Blender and used particles to make it all fuzzy.

Sweater weather

I also added ribbon bows to the hat to suggest a wrapped gift but it is also a callback to the Milady Migoko trait. BTW, I'm doing all of this while listening to the 40 second drum and chords track on repeat to drill it into my head in hopes that a melody and lyrics will emerge.

Pretty ribbons and bows

Once I finish the new parts of the model, I head back into GarageBand and add in the bass, the high chiptune synth (I like putting computer/video game sounds in my internet music), and flesh out/complicate the drums a bit more. At this point, I start recording different lyrics in Voice Memos on my phone, which is my preferred basic ware recording method (I like really imperfect and fuzzed out vocals – like Juliana Chahayed's phone mic recording techniques.) I don't listen to the music track when I record vocals because I feel like it makes my singing sound more robotic and less natural. At this point, I have the tempo and key pretty much memorized and I just need to find the words that fit.

Admirers

I was thinking about the ways I use Gallery and I kept coming back to the way the platform calls "liking" a post "admiring." There is something very charming about that. I remembered one of my posts on Gallery about looking at internet pictures and that all came together with the music as "I'll admire your picture on the computer." The line has a nice open meaning that could refer to the Gallery platform or just about having an internet crush. I recorded myself singing that line a lot of different ways until it had a good flow. After I had that, I brought the voice memo into GarageBand and arranged it on the timeline and layered it multiple times, adding reverb, echo, telephone filtered sounds, and other random tweaks for the ethereal sound I was after. I also did some vocal chopping to add some percussive punctuation. Most of my process for making things is intuitive and instinctual, trial and error. The track was done and bounced after that!

Featuring art by Ed Marola

Now that I had the final track, I could move on to the animation and choreography. The Rainbow World models are already rigged to use the Mixamo motion library so I selected some basic dance moves and imported them onto my model. I used a combination of editing the moves themselves in Blender and cutting up the timeline in iPad Final Cut to create the flow to go with the music. For the dance I wanted contrasting movements between very small shy dancing and occasional big spins and fancy footwork. Then I threw in some glitchy cuts to go with the percussive moments. I also snuck in a slight reference to Charlie Brown Christmas-style dancing at the 17 second mark for fun.

I always think about the silly Peanuts dances when I think about Christmas

I built a small set with the Gallery brackets as the backdrop. I made a particle emitter to create the snow loop. Since this song was about "likes" and "admires", which is essentially a "click" in computer terms, I used computer cursors as the snow like an admiration snowstorm. I knew I would be deploying this on both Ethereum mainnet as well as Zora L2 and whenever I release an edition on multiple chains, I like to alter the piece to be specific to each chain. For a brief moment in the video, you will see it snowing either crystals (Ethereum) or orbs (Zora), depending on the version you have! Finally, I put a subtle CRT video filter with light chromatic aberration/ghosting on the whole thing to give it a bit of texture and that wraps it up!

Crystals and Zorbs

I hope you enjoyed this look into my process! I'm sure I forgot a lot of stuff since working on this was kind of a whirlwind and I had a few sleepless nights to finish it on time (⌒_⌒;) If you use Gallery in 2023 or have VIPs*, you can pick up your own copy of this for free for the next few weeks to display in your own gallery! Happy Holidays! ♡

----------

*To access the free allowlist if you qualify, please mint using the Zora frontend:

Ethereum version
Zora version

Combining elements of chess gameplay with NFTs for item ownership and collecting, the game is free to play and currently available for download on the App Store, Google Play Store, and Epic Games Store.

Gameplay

In Knights of Cathena, players are matched with opponents of similar rank, engaging in turn-based battles on a grid-based battlefield. The objective is to strategically position a team of Warriors, Archers, Priests and more to face off against the opponent. The game focuses on exploiting weaknesses and strengths in troop composition, with a 15-second time limit per turn to formulate effective strategies. Victory is achieved by annihilating the opponent's troops.

Gameplay

Tokenomics and Earnings

The integral token driving the Knights of Cathena ecosystem is $CGO, representing Cathena Gold. While not yet live, $CGO is slated for use in purchasing items and weapons, as well as facilitating sales within the game. This token serves as the reward for each match, constituting the earnings for players. Earning in the game is tied to achieving high ranks and securing a position on the leaderboard, thereby gaining a higher percentage of the daily fixed prize pool in $CGO. Interestingly, both winners and losers in each match receive a portion of the prize pool.

Marketplace

First Thoughts

Upon downloading the game on my phone, the signup process proved a bit challenging as it redirected me to the browser for email and registration. Upon returning to the game, I had to restart the game to start. The lack of a tutorial also meant I had no choice but to navigate the game without a basic understanding of game mechanics. In my first game, I randomly clicked on elements in the battlefield and my troops.

POV

The visuals and animation were a little rough around the edge, and the command responsiveness is slightly delayed, which impacts the overall fluidity of the game. But given that the game’s just launched a few months ago, there’s certainly potential and room to improve.

TL;DR

Knights of Cathena draws parallels to chess, offering a unique take with actual troop representations. The game showcases magical attacks and melee warrior assaults, creating a war-like scenario. I do think that players being able to earn tokens regardless of the match outcome should be eliminated.

It’s a fairly new release, and the user experience could be enhanced, particularly in terms of offering a more comprehensive tutorial and smoother experience. A chess game should provide thrilling exchanges, and refining these aspects would contribute to a more engaging player journey. While I appreciate the potential of Knights of Cathena, there's room for improvement, and with enhancements, it holds the promise of evolving into a commendable turn-based tactical web3 game.

For Week 48, we tackle the following questions:

• Who are the authors from whom people have collected the most?

• Which entries were the most collected?

• Which authors generated the most revenue?

• Which entries generated the most revenue?

• What was the networks/chains usage?

• Who caught our attention this week?

⚠️ Note: The number of collections/mints of some entries might have changed at the time I’m writing.

Let's begin to analyse 1411 entries collected from Week 48.

⚠️ Note: On this week, some entries are missing for the dates of 1st and 2nd December.

The number of times an entry has been collected/minted serves as a valuable metric to understand an author's popularity on Mirror. The “Author“ is the publication/newsletter on Mirror, some authors such as protocols and ecosystems have several contributors that write to their publications. Let’s take a look at the top 10 authors whose work has attracted more collectors.

Bar chart showing the top 10 authors with the most collections

There’s a significant difference between the first three authors/publications and the rest, in terms of mints/collections. Linea, a layer two solution, won first place with more than 750 free collections, followed by Layer3 which delivers engaging web3 quests, that can give you some interesting rewards. On the third place is Base another layer two. TapiocaDAO generated the most revenue among the top 10 authors/publications with the most collections.

Below is the list of the Authors with the most collections on Week 48:

1. Linea

2. Layer3

3. Base

4. Onchain Summer

5. 1337 Skulls

6. Safe

7. William M. Peaster

8. TapiocaDAO

9. domconex

10. Earn Alliance

⚠️ Note: Some of the links above, are from the contributors to the publication.

2 - Which entries were the most collected?

Some authors publish several times in a weekly period, which grants them more collections than others. But we need to take a look at entries individually, to see which ones perform better. These are the top 10 entries:

1. Building the Multichain Gateway

2. Base is bringing Art Week onchain

3. The Importance and Mechanics of Lending & Borrowing in DeFi

4. Mendi Finance: A Decentralized Lending Protocol on Linea

5. Onchain Daily | Week of 11-20-23

6. One Year in the 1337verse: A Skull-a-bration

7. Pimlico & Safe: Advancing Account Abstraction with Launch of ERC-4337 Module

8. R.I.P. Liquidity Mining: Abridged

9. Official Roadmap: #DeCats goes DAO & ecosystem

10. AETHER: The Dark Fantasy Card Game for Esports & Your Satisfaction

Bar chart showing the top 10 entries with the most collections

Layer3 dominates, with an entry about the Multichain Gateway. The second place goes to an entry about art, yes Base is bringing art on chain. Linea gets the third place, with an informative article concerning the mechanics of lending and borrowing in DeFi. For the gamers, the 10th position goes to an entry about AETHER delivered by Earn Alliance a web3 game aggregator.

3 - Which authors generated the most revenue?

Revenue serves as an indicator of one's ability to attract and retain people to mint their content. Here we’ll take a look at the top 10 authors that generated the most revenue from minted entries, and how it correlates with collections.

Bar chart showing the top 10 authors that generated the most revenue

This chart shows clearly that not every week the collections correlate with revenue. Oliver JL Renwick generated the most revenue this week with only 5 collections. Followed by TapiocaDAO and Linea Ecosystem. In the 7th place, we have popek1990.eth as a non-English author and yes, Post3 in the 8th place.

nft://undefined/undefined/undefined?showBuying=true&showMeta=true

Below is the list of authors with the most revenue:

1. Oliver JL Renwick

2. TapiocaDAO

3. Linea Ecosystem

4. zkSync Ecosystem

5. dontfeedwolf.eth

6. BSC Ecosystem

7. popek1990.eth

8. Post3

9. Earn Alliance

10. 𝐒𝐜𝐫𝐨𝐥𝐥 📜

⚠️ Note: Some of the links above, are from the contributors to the publication/newsletter.

4 - Which entries generated the most revenue?

Just like in collections, revenue must be studied individually. People might be loyal to their favourite authors, but in the end, they will mint what they really like or find useful. Studying entries individually is important for writers to understand what kind of content people are willing to mint, and at what price. Below, are the top 10 entries with the most revenue:

1. "I wouldn't want to throw you into the deep end at your first anarchist co-op"

2. R.I.P. Liquidity Mining: Abridged

3. DeFi Voyage: Wave 4 - Dive into the World of DeFi with Lending and Borrowing

4. Join the zkSync Voyage Boost Camp to share 200,000 $TFT & 20 IPoints

5. Who Cares About Rarity #

6. OPBNB & BNB AIRDROP MARATHON WEEK 8: 1,800,000 Dmail Point & $30,000 NFT Passcards

7. 🧙‍♂️ Gridnet OS - Co to takiego? 🤔

8. Mirror Entries Spotlight: Week 47 in Review

9. ZKvote: Revolutionizing DAO Governance in a Multi-Chain Future

10. Paralle Season 5

Bar chart showing the top 10 entries that generated the most revenue

It seems that this week’s revenue was mostly generated from single entries. Oliver JL Renwick is once again in the first place with his entry. Followed by TapiocaDAO and Linea Ecosystem articles.

5 - What was the networks/chains usage?

Understanding the usage of L2 chains for minting NFT articles, is key for writers to decide which network should they use. The following pie chart only compares the usage, other metrics should be taken into account, such as the type of articles that are being published in each chain and so on.

Bar chart comparing the usage of the L2 chains

Optimism is clearly the winner in terms of L2 usage with 98.3 % of the entries having it as the minting network. In this week’s second place, we have Base with 0.9 % usage and finally Linea with 0.8 %. Both are very close to each other. It would be interesting to analyse how these percentages evolve in the following weeks and witness the arrival of new chains to Mirror.

6 - Who caught our attention this week?

Post3 looks at several catching titles from the sample gathered and takes a deep read into the content. There’s no particular field that Post3 prioritises, we embrace all topics. Let’s see who caught our attention this week:

1. About Politics and Crypto: Thumbs' Update: Pillars of Support by Thumbs Up

2. The EFP: The Ethereum Follow Protocol 🤝 by William M. Peaster

3. About Airdrops: A Deep Dive into Airdrops: Challenges, Innovations, and the Path Forward by CYIT - Cyborg is Thinking

4. Environment: Effective Environmentalism by Sollee

There’s no particular order in the entries mentioned before. There is much more interesting content in the dataset, which Post3 delivers to you in the form of NFT data. Let’s see how you can access it in the following topic.

7 - Accessing Week 47 Entries Dataset

Post3 encourages you to explore the dataset and uncover more gems or generate your own charts and insights. It is available at the Ocean Market, which is a web3 data marketplace brought by the Ocean Protocol.

The dataset contains the following features:

• title

• description

• recipient_wallet

• link: this is the mirror's link for the entry

• arweave_link: the JSON link

• wallet_author

• author

• date: this is the post date

• collections: how many people have minted the entry at the moment the data was extracted

• supply: how many people can mint the entry

• price

• network: L2 solution to mint the entry

• revenue: collections times the price

You can find it here.

Final Notes

With your support, Post3 can expand the scope of the weekly analysis and bring broader insights such as textual analysis and comparisons with previous weeks. To learn more about Post3's mission and how it intends to contribute to the Web3 Publishing ecosystem, please refer to the following entry:

onchain culture is a euphemism for the next generation of internet communities, it is the beating heart of crypto. It is what created the blockchain world we are in today, and it will be pivotal in the formation of the decentralized web we build tomorrow.

onchain culture is what turned a forum post in 2009 into a trillion dollar industry.

onchain culture is what made a young prodigy from Canada network with droves of cryptographers, publish a magazine, and ultimately create Ethereum.

OGs!

onchain culture is what allowed for a globalized force to be spawned in record time to create shared rules, co-invest, and build out a DAO to bid for the US constitution.

onchain culture is what took the world by storm through the creation of non-fungible-tokens that allowed people to express their values & identity in new ways to create communities around shared beliefs

onchain culture is what led to the rise of decentralized social apps like farcaster and lens, which have paved the way for novel friendships and collaboration away from the walled gardens of Web2.

onchain culture is what brought you here.

and now..

It is time to turn it up a notch.

It is time to sync nodes, load up charts, post blogs, send attestations, release art, collect work, bridge assets, send XMTP messages, fund public goods, and design +ve incentive structures.

It is time for onchain

Find me on farcaster @binji

Other mirror posts: contributor highways

We’re launching a collaborative effort to contextualize EVM transactions. You can check out the repository here.

Introduction

Blockchain transactions are hard to understand. The challenge is that transactions are strings of bytes, a complex structure that lacks real-world context.

The responsibility of extracting relevant data from transactions and determining how best one can express what happened falls on the shoulders of the developers. Composability is a core value of blockchains, however, new protocols don’t have a good way to enable their transactions to show up in a similar way across wallets, browsing tools, and data aggregators. This creates fragmented and frustrating experiences for users.

This can be much easier than it is today. Our goal is to work with the broader community to create a standard library for contextualizing transactions which can be used by a wide array of applications.

Problems & Challenges

Without context, we lose the significance of discontinued applications like Leeroy, and we lose the ability to understand recent platforms like Fren Pet outside of the app.

Leeroy

Leeroy was an innovative social dApp on Ethereum that launched in 2017. It was similar to Twitter but with a twist where the creators could receive tips for their posts. Leeroy showed the transactions on their smart contract in a clear way within their own app. If you were a user, your posts are lost in the inscrutable bytes of the blockchain. This represents a loss of a piece of Ethereum's story, akin to missing chapters from a history book.

Fren Pet

Similar to Leeroy, Fren Pet is a recent onchain game whose smart contracts allow for users to own a Tamagotchi-like character and compete against other players. The transactions onchain are nuanced and the context is only understandable via obtaining an invite and exploring the data within the app itself.

These examples demonstrate that it’s crucial to unearth the stories and intentions behind blockchain transactions. It should be easier to be an “onchain historian”, preserving context and meaning for future generations.

Our aim with this open-source effort is to give everyone the fundamental tools to build on top of a new contextualized format.

We're introducing the open-source EVM Context library to standardize the process of contextualizing transactions.

This library allows you to see labeled actions, relevant variables, and concise summaries, turning raw blockchain data into easily understandable narratives.

Examples of Contextualized Data

Leeroy

🔗 link

Vitalik's early Leeroy posts

Fren Pet

🔗 link

Fren Pet gameplay

Join Our Open Source Initiative

The contextualized format has numerous use cases beyond human-readable transactions, benefiting indexers and developers.

Explore Once Upon to see contextualization in action and start understanding your own onchain activities.

We invite you to contribute to EVM Context and help shape the future of context-driven transactions for everyone.

1. Context

I spent a few winter days at the site of some extreme mining history in the inhospitable west coast of Tasmania. The landscape here has been left barren by a period of frantic copper extraction. The small town, and its pub and hotel, is ghostly. The wilderness that surrounds it is dense, dramatic, deep and alternately protected / decimated.

A local man drove us to the now closed mouths of a number of mines, to see the emptiness, feel the cold damp air of the underground, and hear about the history. It’s a story with a narrative arc that’s specific, but it’s also so common - the very normal globally ubiquitous story of mining towns. Discovery, boom, decline.

Openings and remnants of the mines

To prepare, I’d read The Peaks of Lyell (1954), an industrial history of the Mt Lyell Mining and Railway Company, one of those old works of research that record in extreme detail materials extracted from the archives. The type of book that attains historical authority, calcified by a thousand facts on each page that can veil the subjectivity of the researchers’ entrenched and often problematic biases. The detail is overwhelming. You have to read the whole thing to follow the main and NP characters, their movements, failures, deceptions, and piece together the imbricated geological, organisational, financial machinery of the mine.

In the 10 years since my visit, this place, story and dry book have stayed with me. A background obsession while i researched and wrote my own version of industrial history (about the retirement housing industry - different machines and materials, some similarly extractive themes), and later while i learned creative coding as another sort of machine. So, I have made a p5.js machine about the Mt Lyell machinery, and about the weird machinery of this book.

A Little Lyell Machine

2. Material

The Little Lyell Machines bring together three digital materials: visual material, words, and sequence + navigation.

The visual material is the randomness and layering of the color, form and arrangement of a field of rubble. Ordinary and beautiful.

The words, barely visible at first, are tiny fragments scattered within the rubble. Words from the mining history are combined at mint into 12 labels describing the little machines of Mt Lyell: tools of discovery, tree felling, water channelling, rock tunnelling, mine machining, mineral sampling, land and sea transporting, company structuring, human labouring, stock trading, air polluting, landscape changing.

Sequence and navigation is the system that connects the visual and word materials, and the wide and detailed scales. Through screenTouch navigation the viewer moves through a sequence in the rock field. Interactivity is a core materiality of computer art because viewing the work is tightly connected to devices, intimately and constantly touched.

Systems of interactive sequences of fragments

3. Catalogue

The work is a ‘slide’, like an insert to a microfiche or View-Master, containing detailed information made visible through the viewing machine. A system to bring 12 fragments into one story, to fit it into one algorithm.

The catalogue of fragments and their labels make an insufficient sliver of sense. Taken away from the gravity of the book’s pages, the labels float with faint information, a wisp of meaning. This is what history is: The moment in time and its catalogue of remnants, no longer used and barely understood in isolation.

Tools of Mt Lyell and their faint information

The moment in time (Tas, 1897) when extreme never-ending resources were assured. I’m honestly not making a stupid statement about crypto, it’s just the way of humans to hype and extract, falsify and rug. There was a time when the founders and influencers believed this tiny town embedded in dense wilderness would grow into a major city on the back of its copper supply, a beautiful city with tramcars running down streets lined with skyscrapers. The copper became more expensive to extract, prices collapsed, and the Lyell machinery lies in remnants.

OnchainMagic is

• mobile first

• media focused (music, videos, graphics)

• expanding ethereum (zora / base / OP / etc)

• ENS supported

mobile first

In 2024, an estimated 56% of global internet traffic will originate from mobile devices, while desktops will contribute 39%. The remaining 5% will be attributed to emerging technologies like smart TVs and IoT devices. Why is onchain infrastructure designed first for desktop when market share is largest on mobile?

Most interfaces for onchain infrastructure are designed for desktop. Mobile experiences are painful. Switching to an external wallet app is clunky. While Zora’s desktop experience has a sleek, Apple-like feeling. I feel embarrassed collecting art on zora’s website on mobile. I see red X telling me my wallet is disconnected after I mint. I jump from zora to metamask back to zora. From there, zora sends me a signature to verify, pushing me back to metamask. Wait for the signature. Back to zora. What was I coming here to do again? I feel unloved, frustrated & rejected.

How can we build more fun interfaces on mobile-first publishing onchain? Instagram & Tiktok do an amazing job creating a clean and simple publishing interface offchain. They are a design baseline I’ve been following up to now. The design may be skumorphic to old traditions, but, as a 1-3 person team, I’m doing the best with what I’ve got. Are there better, mobile-first, models we should be examining for onchain media publishing?

In Buenos Aires, Argentina, artists have been struggling to get compensated on platforms to live a sustainable living. This problem is true globally, but I’ve been seeing the problem first-hand. Spotify pays musicians pennies on the $0.003 – $0.005 per stream on average. For musicians in cities such as Buenos Aires, Argentina, those payments are even smaller. How can we build onchain infrstructure in which there is more equitable payments for creators vs the platforms they use?

Protocol rewards on public hyperstructures are proving to be a successful model for small communities growing online & onchain. Zora pays musicians 0.000333ETH ($0.66) per collect on Free Mints from their total mint fee of 0.000777ETH. 43% of fees go directly & instantly to creators globally. What does this actually look like in practice?

past 24 hours of onchain media payouts on zora

I went to a concert last night where musicians in Buenos Aires earned more $$$ from 2 collectors listening at a live event than they’ve received in 2+ years publishing their music on Spotify. These musicians will come back and put more music on Zora. They will want an easy way to discover & collect music. Possibly in an interface that feels familiar, like Instagram Reels of the TikTok feed. How can we help make it as simple as possible for creators and collectors to participate in the growing marketplace for onchain media?

expanding ethereum

Ethereum mainnet is expensive. Current price to publish a contract on Ethereum mainnet is $79.75 as I write this. For musicians in Buenos Aires, that’s over half a month’s rent payment. The current options, on Ethereum, are to:

1. pay half my rent

2. publish media onchain

Any responsible parent will skip this onchain nonsense & focus on rent. The barrier to entry is too high. How can we expand ethereum to make it more accessible?

OP stack is inexpensive. Current price to publish a contract on Base or Zora mainnet is $1.11. Or, roughly cafe con leche con una medialuna. The decision becomes much easier on OP stack.

1. buy a cup of coffee

2. try out this new tool

OP stack expands Ethereum as a rollup on top of it. The costs to experiment are low & accessible to creators globally. Composability is key here. With Zora paying creators 0.000333ETH, creators only need to find 2 collectors of my free collectible for publishing costs to break even. Most musicians in Buenos Aires could survive on 777 collectors buying 1, free, piece of media each month. How can we make it as easy for musicians to get discovered onchain?

ENS supported

Online naming services are a public good. Creators know the value of being easily discovered. Being in the top 10 results on Google, or on social media, can drive major success for a creative’s work. ENS is public infrastructure trusted by musicians to interact onchain. With ENS being deployed on Ethereum mainnet, applications face a challenge when identifying creators on other chains.

This is a solved application-level challenge. Good apps already know to reference mainnet, even if the address is being used on another network. Most apps simply don’t know, or have the resources, to support ENS identity on their applications. How can we make it easier for developer-level tooling to natively support onchain identity in their applications?

closing.

Onchain Magic is currently in the early release stages in Argentina. Our goal is to produce the most fun place to create and collect on Zora when you’re on your phone. From live events to studio sessions, we’re helping musicians get paid onchain.

Before we begin, a big thank you to the builders who contributed to this article: Christina Beltramini (Lens), Alex Comeau & David Finkelstein (Airstack), Abhi Raheja (CyberConnect), Dan Romero (Farcaster), Billy Luedtke (Intuition), Helena Gagern (Salsa), and Suji Yan (Mask Network)

Introduction

There has been an explosion of technical advancements, new applications, and users building in Web3 Social. Major protocols such as CyberConnect and Lens have launched new versions of their social graphs, there’ve been 7 million POAP NFTs minted to represent IRL and online attendance, over 50 million Galxe NFTs representing onchain actions, and approximately 150,000 tickets per month are sold through GetProtocol’s NFT platform.

Blockchain Infrastructure has now improved to a point where builders have more choice than ever to create, but with the large multitude of protocols & design choices where do they start? In this article we landscape the Web3 Social stack and help lay out the design considerations for builders looking to create the next generation of social media apps.

In Part I of our Web3 Social series, we shared the 4 key Value Propositions of Web3 Social:

1. Open Data & Portability: your data & social graph is owned by you and you can port your information across different social apps.

2. Web3 Composability: blockchain technology enables the combination of different onchain primitives and use cases, creating new experiences & powering the next wave of Super Apps (i.e. users plugging in their social profile & graph with other primitives like DeFi, music, attestations, loyalty, commerce and ‘banking).

3. Next-Level Community Enablement: onchain activity, zk proofs, and token/NFT ownership facilitate the formation of new and unique communities.

4. Censorship Resistance & Ownership: rather than a single source of truth, decisions on content rules can truly be distributed and enforced at the application level.

In this article (Part II of our Web3 Social series) we are going to ‘unpack the stack’ and discuss the different decisions needed to build an application and bring these Value Propositions to life. Note: The companies highlighted in the stack and in this article are not an exhaustive list of the Web3 Social ecosystem.

The Web3 Social Stack

1. Blockchain & data storage: The foundation on which everything is built, similar to how Netflix is built on AWS. For example, friend.tech is built on BASE, which is a Layer 2 blockchain (“L2”) on top of Ethereum.

2. Social networks: The social graphs that delineate user profiles, relationships, and interactions. For example: Lens, Farcaster, and Cyberconnect.

3. Middleware: Tools and intermediary services that make it easier for developers to build applications and infuse them with utility. For example, Airstack makes it easy to develop composable applications and Huddle01 enables decentralized applications to use video communication.

4. Applications: The interface for users to interact with Web3 Social. For example, Orb allows users to easily access communities that use Web3 technology via their mobile app.

1. Blockchain & Data Storage

At the bottom of the stack, a decision is required on what blockchain and data storage solutions to use. Given the decentralized architecture of blockchains, they typically cannot handle the volume of transactions and amount of data needed to be stored to run social applications; for example, it costs $60M to store 1 GB of data on ETH Mainnet and an estimated $1.4M on Optimism Mainnet to store 1 GB of data onchain. Teams typically use a combination of onchain and offchain data storage solutions to deal with the trade-off between decentralization and scalability.

Blockchain

At the blockchain level, social apps need to decide whether to use a general-purpose or app-specific blockchain, each with their respective advantages and disadvantages. Which blockchain an app is deployed on will have an impact on technical design choices and existing ecosystem support (users, liquidity, applications, etc).

• General-purpose blockchains are designed to be open platforms to enable a multitude of smart contracts to deploy and operate. Building in these ecosystems will maximize composability and allow apps to easily access data and liquidity that is on the same chain.

• App-specific blockchains are designed to allow for greater flexibility and scaling. Appchains enable the teams to customize their infrastructure, but typically need to bootstrap network security and integrate interoperability solutions to increase composability.

Within general-purpose and app-specific blockchains, there’s a choice in the type of network: Layer 1 (L1) and Layer (L2). At a high level, L1s are a blockchain network with its own set of nodes, form of consensus, and set of rules; whereas, L2s are chains built on top of L1s that solely focus on executing transactions and sending transaction data to the L1 for security. For more information on the nuances of these networks, take a look at Cointelegraph’s research report.

Some considerations below on evaluating blockchains:

For further reading, here are some other helpful resources:

• General-purpose and app-specific L1 landscape: Comparing Layer-1 Platforms by The Block

• App-specific L2s: The Layer 2 Evolution by Binance

Data Storage

Once the decision has been made on the blockchain, it’s time to pick the data storage provider. It can be prohibitively expensive to put the amount of data generated from social protocols onto blockchains, so scalable and secure solutions are key. Decentralized data storage solutions like Arweave can be more than ~250,000x cheaper than posting data onto Optimism and ~10,000,000x cheaper than Ethereum Mainnet.

(Numbers may vary based on gas & token prices. Estimated storage costs of 1GB data: $60m on ETH mainnet; $1.4m on Optimism; $6.52 on Arweave)

1GB storage on Mainnet ($60m) / 1GB storage on Arweave = ~10,000,000x

1GB storage on Optimism L2 ($1.4m) / 1GB storage on Arweave = ~250,000x

While there are many options out there, some of the top Web3 Social protocols today use a few different solutions:

• IPFS: a peer-to-peer network for sharing data, functioning closer to a torrent network. Although IPFS is not a data storage solution, providers like Filecoin, Pinata, and Filebase have built systems on top of IPFS to ensure data storage and retrieval.

• Filecoin: built on top of IPFS, Filecoin adds an incentive layer that enables anyone to come in and pay storage providers a recurring fee to store data over a certain period of time. As of November 2023, storage prices are $0.002336 GB/yr.

• Arweave: unlike Filecoin, Arweave is a blockchain network that enables users to pay a one-time fee for permanent data storage. As of November 2023, storage prices are $6.52 per GB. Additionally, service providers like Irys (formerly Bundlr), ArDrive, and Akord have been built on top of Arweave to augment the capabilities of protocol and simplify the user experience.

• Custom Data Storage Solutions: some social protocols have decided to forgo existing decentralized data storage solutions and develop their own in-house solution.

  • Offchain: protocols like Farcaster have opted to create their own data storage networks.

  • Onchain: protocols like DeSo have built an app-specific L1 optimized to handle large quantities of data.

With so many options out there, how do developers make decisions around the foundational level of their tech stack to solve for scalability and decentralization? Let’s take a look at the design choices of some Web3 Social protocols in the following table:

Our Perspective

When deciding which blockchain to deploy an application, it’s important to note that historically Web3 Social networks built on app-specific chains have had the most success. DeSo for example, has facilitated the creation of 2 million wallets, 85+ million transactions, $2+ billion total transaction volume, and $30 million in creator earnings as of October 2023 — more than any other Web3 Social network.

While there’s been great traction so far for app-specific social protocols, we believe that building applications on general-purpose blockchains with social protocols like Lens and Farcaster will bring in the most users, improve composability and community enablement, and minimize onboarding friction. Social applications are a user-centric experience and realize their full potential when augmenting an existing ecosystem’s network of applications to provide better user experiences — not as a standalone product/chain. For example, Farcaster recently migrated to Optimism Mainnet in order to be closer to their community consisting primarily of developers on Ethereum.

Additionally, one of our core beliefs is that blockchain will be multichain and multilayer, meaning the same for Web3 Social. Apps, creators, and entrepreneurs within each blockchain ecosystem will require tools to provide social experiences to their communities. The path for many Web3 Social protocols may begin on a single blockchain (either general-purpose or app-specific), but over time, we’ll begin to see expansion into other blockchains to help different ecosystems build out their social sector. We’ve seen early signs of multichain social networks like CyberConnect; who have spent an arduous amount of time designing and implementing cross-chain features. As it stands, the current state of interoperability and blockchain technologies are too nascent for protocols to easily support a robust multichain social network. For more information on the current state and future of interoperability, read through our series here.

Today, most people think of a social network as X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, etc — places where users share content, view media, and communicate with others within the bounds of their respective platforms. Leveraging web3 technology, we define social networks differently: we see a true social network as a system of relationships and experiences that enables users to connect and communicate with one another, in new ways, irrespective of platform.

Under a decentralized architecture, the interface (frontend platform) and social graph (user connections) are decoupled. A user could post on X and another user could view it on Instagram. Or a user could share a video on TikTok and a user could like and comment on it via Facebook — all without having to sign into different accounts and platforms.

Federated Networks (Non-Blockchain Networks)

There are two types of decentralized social networks, federated networks (non-blockchain) and blockchain-based networks. Before we dive into blockchain-based social networks, which are best suited to bring the Web3 Social Value Propositions to fruition, it’s important to highlight a few examples of federated networks that are moving the industry towards a decentralized world.

The idea of federated networks has been around for some time; with the first decentralized computing network, Mix Network, being conceived in 1979. Federated Networks helps solve for 2 of the 4 value propositions, namely Open Data & Portability and Censorship Resistance. Similar to blockchain, federated networks consist of many independent servers that are able to communicate with one another through an open standard. You can compare these networks to email where there are many providers (gmail, outlook, etc), but they can all communicate with one another. A recent example of a federated social network is ActivityPub, which launched in January of 2018 with the backing of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The most well-known application on ActivityPub, Mastodon, has almost 2 million MAU, and Instagram is stating that they may move Threads to ActivityPub.

Here are some important federated networks to be aware of:

Federated Networks support many typical social media activities, such as profiles/identities, connections, posts, likes, follows, subscriptions, and comments. But they lack a few of the core primitives required for Web3, namely the ability to create ownership through tokens/NFTs and new experiences through smart contracts.

Similar to Federated Networks, Blockchain-enabled Social Graphs are a form of decentralized social network that include profiles/identities, social connections, posts, likes, follows, subscriptions, comments, etc. The primary difference is that Federated Networks are a peer-to-peer system that emphasizes sharing of information; whereas, blockchain networks primarily serve as a tamper-resistant, distributed ledger. The distributed ledger enables all sorts of new use cases, such as tokens to represent value, trustless governance systems, decentralized compute, and ownership of assets. The combination of tokens with a decentralized social graph provides a much greater chance at adoption than Federated Networks alone and we believe Blockchain-enabled Social Graphs will solve for all four value propositions.

Here are some Blockchain-based Social Graph protocols that are important to be aware of:

Cyberconnect

Founded in 2021, CyberConnect is a multichain social graph deployed on several EVM networks, including Ethereum, Optimism, Arbitrum, BNB, Polygon, and Linea. Its most popular dApp, Link3, is a social platform built by the CyberConnect team to help users find events, discover content, and display their profile. CyberConnect is currently undergoing deployment of CyberConnect V3, featuring three core upgrades:

• CyberAccount: an ERC-4337 compatible account that serves as a user’s identity and access point across the CyberConnect ecosystem.

• CyberGraph: serving as CyberConnect’s social graph layer, CyberGraph links CyberAccounts to their content and social connections.

• CyberNetwork: an app-specific L2 optimized for Web3 Social.

To date, CyberConnect V3 is one of the most popular social graph protocols with over 500,000 CyberAccounts and 1M User Operations executed as of November 2023.

Farcaster

Founded by former Coinbase early employees Dan Romero and Varun Srinivasan in 2020, Farcaster defines itself as a “sufficiently decentralized social network,” meaning two users can find each other and communicate, even if the rest of the network wants to prevent it. There are three features required to obtain to be a sufficiently decentralized social network:

• The ability to claim a unique username

• The ability to post messages under that name

• The ability to read messages from any valid name

Additionally, one of the focal points of the team is to provide accessible core infrastructure to encourage developers to build new features and creative applications that may be lacking or improved upon in the current Farcaster ecosystem.

As of November 2023, Farcaster’s metrics show 196K users, 3.5K weekly active users, and over 7.6K casts per day.

Lens Protocol

Developed by the team behind Aave, Lens Protocol is a social graph protocol with a modular toolkit providing users and developers with easy-to-use features adapted to their needs. Lens V1 launched in early 2022 without any user-facing app experiences with the intention of focusing exclusively on providing powerful tools to enable dApp developers to build social experiences. Since then, Lens has quickly grown into a rich ecosystem of applications experimenting with new ways to leverage Lens’ social graph and tooling.

In accordance with their original thesis of supporting developers, Lens Protocol is currently undergoing their next major upgrade, Lens V2, to provide an even greater suite of tools, features, and upgrades to the existing architecture. Here are a few:

• Smart Posts (Open Actions): enabling users to combine external smart contract functions with Lens publications. Developers can create their own set of Open Action smart contracts or use Lens Protocol’s out-of-the-box features.

• Collective Value Share: a system that rewards users, applications, algorithms, and networks for their positive contributions.

• Security: profile manager upgrades, Profile Guardian, and onchain blocking.

• Architecture: social operations are now profile-based instead of address-based, Lens Handles upgrades, and more.

To date, the protocol has facilitated $7M in economic activity, deployed over 100K profiles, and brought in over 4,000 daily active users.

Note: As of November 2023, Lens Protocol is in beta and new users must be approved from a waitlist before accessing the social network.

DeSo

DeSo (short for Decentralized Social) is an app-specific layer 1 blockchain created for decentralized social media applications. Most Web3 Social protocols utilize some form of offchain storage to handle all of the data social applications produce; however, DeSo is able to store almost every social action onchain — identity, connections, posts, follows, likes, messaging, and more. By building their chain from the ground up, the DeSo team has had full control over the design of the chain, allowing them to optimize various elements, including data structures, storage, consensus mechanism, social graph, etc.

3. Middleware

The next layer in the stack is middleware. Web3 Social middleware helps bring apps to life by abstracting the complexity of blockchain infrastructure and allows builders to develop standardized, yet unique experiences for their users. Whether it’s the ability to easily communicate across protocol, providing seamless attestation engines, to payments, and more, Web3 Social middleware is certainly a must-have for builders and entrepreneurs.

Web3 Social middleware typically falls under one of two categories:

1. Developer Experience: Providing APIs, SDKs, frameworks, and other tooling to make it simpler for developers to build their consumer-facing dApps — abstracting away backend complexity. For example, instead of developers running/maintaining their own data infrastructure for their Web3 Social app, Airstack abstracts the complexity away by cleaning and maintaining usable data.

2. New Capabilities: Make it possible to build things onchain that weren’t possible before by providing new services that augment the capabilities of the underlying blockchain or social protocol. For example, communication between wallets isn’t a native function to blockchains; however, XMTP bringing this capability onchain unlocks all sorts of new innovations — decentralized chat apps, marketing platforms, etc.

Protocol Toolkits

Back when X had a more open API, there was a small but innovative ecosystem of developers creating many different custom features. A lot of the features that you see today were actually built by these third-party developers, such as @ replies, hashtags, quote tweets, and more. Unfortunately, over time Twitter (and many other social media platforms) slowly tightened public access to these tools. In the same way Twitter used to provide an open API, most Web3 Social protocols (Lens, Farcaster, and CyberConnect) also offer a suite of tools to help builders create applications and features — the key difference being that many of these tools are open source and available forever.

Data Platforms

Pulling data into an application to display for the user or use on the backend is one of the fundamental building blocks for software. While data on public blockchains are freely available for everyone to view and use, developers quickly find that it is mostly unusable in its raw form. Data platforms are basic core tools that clean, transform, and make it simple for developers to access usable data via APIs and SDKs so developers no longer have to spend weeks if not months building data infrastructure internally to power their software.

Airstack: a web3 development platform that provides GraphQL APIs for integrating onchain and offchain data into any application. They’ve integrated Lens, Farcaster, POAP, XMTP, and more to make it easy to gather data for your application. Note: Superscrypt is an investor in Airstack.

Goldsky: a real-time data indexing platform that makes it easy for developers to access the latest blockchain data. They have two core products: a data pipeline platform that easily syncs real-time blockchain data with any offchain database called Mirror and custom subgraphs.

Identity

As more and more of our lives move onchain, there will need to be a way to prove that we are who we say we are. We’re excited to see this layer evolve with teams experimenting with different ways to prove identity, including attestations, KYC, biometric proof-of-personhood, and more. We believe identity solutions built with blockchain tech will give us greater control of our information, unlock better protocol & product innovation, and lead to better community & user experiences.

Credentials and Attestations

Credentials and attestations are often used interchangeably; however, they’re more-so complementary technologies. The key difference is that credentials are the onchain representation of a fact while attestations are onchain proofs that the credential is true. Placing credentials onchain will allow users to be more expressive of their achievements and contributions. These credentials, represented in the form of NFTs, can express both onchain and offchain actions.

• Ethereum Attestation Service (EAS): an open-source public good infrastructure service providing onchain and offchain attestations. EAS is built around two primary smart contracts: one to register a schema to define the data to be attested and one to make the attestation.

• Intuition: a full-stack, decentralized identity & knowledge solution that aims to empower users to provide and query attestations about any subject. This platform provides an indexed, discoverable, and composable knowledge graph constructed with verifiable data — opening up the attestation landscape to subjective claims and more advanced reputational models. Additionally, Intuition enables users and developers to easily filter attestations by the voices and opinions they trust. Note: Superscrypt is an investor in Intuition.

• POAP (Proof of Attendance Protocol): one of the most popular credentialing protocols, POAP allows users to mint NFTs at live events as onchain proof that they participated in-person.

• Galxe: on the other end of that spectrum, Galxe is a platform that creates campaigns around onchain actions. After users perform these actions, they’re rewarded an NFT credential proving they’ve accomplished said action.

Access Control

Social media can be a very turbulent place, full of hundreds of thousands of posts and activities per second. Access control infrastructure helps creators create value for their community by giving holders access to exclusive benefits. On the user side, it helps retain a high signal-to-noise ratio in a social feed.

• Collab.Land: perhaps the most well-known access control protocol, Collab.Land allows communities to curate access to social platforms like Discord and Telegram based on tokens held, NFTs, onchain interactions, and much more. They are the de facto tool, serving 50,000+ tokenized communities serving some of the biggest brands using NFTs. Note: Superscrypt is an investor in Collab.Land.

• Guild.xyz: the team at Guild have built infrastructure helping online communities to manage access across many social platforms. Guild provides “one membership to rule them all” that allows memberships and access control to be interoperable with connected social platforms (i.e. — utilize Discord membership tiers for Google Workspace without having to rebuild access control from the ground up again).

Communication

Direct Messaging

The most intimate of conversations, sharing of the deepest secrets, jamming on the most outlandish of ideas, and emotional vulnerability happen when there isn’t an audience. Private conversations are a key part of the human experience and a Web3 Social dApp experience isn’t complete without the right infrastructure in place to support this!

• XMTP: an open protocol, network, and standards for secure, private web3 messaging. Founded in 2021, they’ve quickly become one of the most used web3 messaging network in the world and have integrated Farcaster and Lens Protocol on the social network side.

• Ylide: a cross-chain wallet-to-wallet communications solution for Web3 projects. The core product is the Ylide SDK, enabling developers to seamlessly integrate an all-in-one communications platform (including DMs, forums, group chats, etc), spam-prevention mechanisms, and multichain capabilities with over 20 chains supported.

Notifications

Notifications are not inherently part of Web3 apps. For these apps to share information with their users, they have relied on user activity in groups often within Telegram, Discord or X. Web3 notification systems allow for the sharing of important information, directly within apps and wallets.

• Notifi: Notifi allows for simplified communication across web2 and web3 messaging channels (Discord, Telegram, SMS, Twitter). Designed with simple APIs for easy integration and customizable and advanced features for dApps and web3 applications, Notifi empowers developers and creators to better engage with their users and communities via multichannel communications. Note: Superscrypt is an investor in Notifi.

• Push Protocol: a communication network that allows users and developers to communicate through a variety of ways, including notifications, text chat, video chat, and host token-gated spaces.

Data Storage Management

A lot of dApps in the future will generate content outside the scope of the social graph protocol. For example, data intensive social dApps like streaming platforms may want to allow creators to store VODs on their platform but may find it too expensive to store on their respective protocol or maybe the protocol doesn’t even support that type of data (for example, the Farcaster protocol only allows for the storage of text). Built on top of data storage solutions like IPFS and Arweave, Data storage management middleware like Irys, Pinata, or Livepeer make it easy for developers to access these data storage solutions without having to integrate direct pipelines themselves.

• Irys (Formerly Bundlr): defining itself as a “provenance layer,” Irys simplifies access to Arweave to permanently store data, provide timestamps for sequential ordering of data, and access the data at any time.

• Livepeer: a video infrastructure network that handles transcoding, streaming, distributing, storing, and broadcasting of video in a decentralized and secure manner.

Payments

One of the core value propositions of blockchain is the ability to transfer value. As creators move on chain, ensuring infrastructure is available to allow creators to be rewarded financially for their content, users to contribute to communities, and more through payment services will be vital.

• Superfluid: an asset streaming protocol that enables real-time crypto transfers. They make it easy for crypto-native businesses and creators to exchange value onchain via ERC-20 token transfers.

4. Applications

Now that we’ve covered the infrastructure, social network & middleware layers — it’s time to cover the fun part — Web3 Social Applications. Good applications solve everyday problems for their users and/or are fun to use. A few of our favorites:

• Orb: Orb is an X-like mobile app allowing users to explore all forms of media available on Lens (text, video, and music). With an emphasis on community discovery and creation, Orb makes it easy to create, join, and find new communities on Lens. For example, if you own a particular NFT, you can automatically be granted access to that community on Orb. Note: Superscrypt is an investor in Orb.

• Mirror: If you’re reading this right now, chances are you’re probably on Mirror! Mirror is a decentralized publishing platform that allows writers to fully control their relationship with their readers. Creators also have the ability to monetize through selling NFTs of publications and build a following through subscriptions. All posts made on Mirror are stored and will forever be available on Arweave.

• Friend.tech: Instead of using a blockchain-based social graph, Friend.tech relies on users signing up with their Twitter accounts — leveraging an existing, centralized social graph. Built on Base as the underlying network, users can buy and sell ‘keys’ using ETH in order to create or join exclusive chat groups. This feature of ‘people tokens’ is likely something we will see combined within other Web3 Social applications. Note: as of November 2023, new users require a special invite code to join the platform.

The success of Web3 Social is reliant on the same factors as traditional social media: distribution, retention, and monetization; however, the means to achieve these objectives will be through curating network effects, vibes, and utility. In the long term, Web3 Social will be an ecosystem of dApps that provide novel experiences, high-value content, new revenue streams, and new growth strategies.

Network Effects

Metcalfe’s Law states the financial value or influence of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system (n2). Although initially created to describe communication networks like the telephone and fax machines, Metcalfe’s Law has been used as a guideline for social networks as well.

While a great idea in principle, we quickly find Metcalfe’s Law falls short of capturing the full picture of users on a social network, including activity, types of interactions, the quality of interactions, and more. Having plenty of users does contribute to the value of a social network but what makes a social network truly valuable is having users and retention. Many social networks with high distribution like Vine (peak: 200M DAU) disappear while some “smaller” social networks like Kakao (current: 47M DAU) maintain success over time via distribution and retention.

The first step for successful Web3 social apps is to build out a strong underlying social graph with high-quality users and content for the apps to tap into. For comparison, Facebook boasts an impressive 3B monthly active users, but its true value is derived from the attention Facebook captures from its 2.3B daily active users. Constant user engagement enables advertisers and creators to dedicate time & resources to the platform as a distribution channel for their content, products & services which in turn, incentivizes users to stay on the platform to consume more content, thus driving a positive flywheel effect.

In order for Web3 Social networks to succeed, they will need to build out a similar network effect. We believe this will happen by building out a network of applications across the spectrum of hyper-curated experiences to generalized large platforms.

Vibes

To succeed, Web3 Social applications will need to create more than just content (which users can get from most other social media platforms) — they’ll need deeper forms of engagement. Li Jin from Variant suggests that as traditional social media platforms trend toward large distribution platforms and focus less on the curation of intimate relationships & communities, there’s an opportunity for Web3 Social to capture this underserved domain.

Web3 also has token incentives to help drive ownership & participation and turn communities into distribution channels. New business models based on DAOs, revenue share, and more allow for the creation of sustainable small communities without the need to rely on size for value capture. Of course, while token incentives are helpful to bootstrap initial behaviors, users will only be retained if the communities successfully create an environment where users feel they belong — in other words, the vibes need to be immaculate.

Utility

The open nature of social protocols on blockchain enables the ability for third-parties to leverage the social graph to build apps that provide new experiences, serving as a gateway to onboard new users. As Chris Dixon from a16z would say, “come for the tool, stay for the network.”

• Creators will find new ways to monetize, distribute content, and grow their audience.

• Users will be able to directly support their favorite creators, enjoy new experiences, and find community.

• Entrepreneurs will find new ways to build and grow businesses.

• Protocols will need to capture some of the value through a multitude of ways to ensure contributors are sustainably rewarded for managing the protocol and implementing upgrades, e.g. Protocol transaction fees; API fees; Domain name registration

Conclusion

Over the last few years, development across all the layers of the Web3 Social stack (1) Blockchain and Data Storage, (2) Social Network Layer, (3) Middleware and (4) Applications have made significant progress. The blocks are there for builders to start creating new applications and experiences for users that extend beyond Web 2 social applications.

While it’s still early and we haven’t quite brought all the value propositions and use cases to life yet, we are optimistic about what will be built from here, so…

• If you’re looking for a career in Web3 Social, now is the time!

• If you’re a user, hop in and try some of the dApps;

• If you’re a creator, utilize all the tools in front of you to build out your community and brand;

• If you’re a developer, start playing around with different tools now on offer; and

• If you’re an entrepreneur who’s passionate about upending the current social media landscape and creating meaningful apps that foster deep community relationships, start building!

Twitter: https://twitter.com/superscrypt

Website: https://www.superscrypt.xyz/

We're excited to announce that Foundation is teaming up with Highlight to provide generative artists with more expansive tools and flexible options for creating, selling and curating their work. This partnership, launching exclusively in Worlds in early December, is a step forward for artists and curators in the digital art space.

Create, Curate, Thrive

Generative art is one of the most digitally native forms of expression defining the NFT market. Appreciating this genre of art means looking beyond its visual appeal to the underlying code and context. That's where curation comes in—it's not only about displaying art but also telling its story and celebrating the artist behind it.

Until now, generative artists had two choices: work with a platform and give up control, or do it all on their own. Our collaboration with Highlight changes that.

The relationship between artists and curators has long been a force for shaping culture. By combining our forces with Highlight, we’re able to reshape these relationships, equipping them with collaborative tools to push forward one of the most powerful movements in web3.

The power of working together

Highlight stands out as the first open-access generative art platform on Ethereum, offering artists the freedom to innovate with dynamic tools that embrace the blockchain's unique potential for permanence, scarcity and interactivity. With Highlight, artists have access to dynamic data inputs, curated outputs and full ownership of the smart contracts that they create.

Worlds is the leading platform for decentralized curation, providing infrastructure for curators and artists to build their own art platforms, on their own terms. With Worlds, generative artists have the unique opportunity to etch their collaboration with curators directly onto the blockchain, creating enduring digital spaces that not only showcase their work but also immortalize their impact on the art world.

Highlight's expansive tools and Worlds' diverse curatorial options converge in our partnership to reshape generative art. We’re coming together to forge innovative infrastructure, grounded in shared values of creative independence, accessibility and collaboration.

Following successful collaborations with Manifold and Transient Labs, partnering with Highlight marks another milestone in the journey towards making Worlds a composable, decentralized curation platform for uplifting digital artists—a vision worth realizing, together.

Ready to create a generative art project? Go here.

Ready to create a world? Start here.