When I launched web2.0 products, my first task was to find users. Web3 turns this upside down. Now, I have access to every user even before building anything. Each user is a wallet on the blockchain.

Let's explore what this means, how this works, and how to navigate cryptocurrency through wallets.

What is a Wallet

A wallet holds the keypairs that allow us to send and receive cryptocurrency. Keys are a list of numbers and letters between 0 and 9 and A to F. This system is called hexadecimal, or hex, because there are 16 different options: 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,a,b,c,d,e,f.

There are two keys in each wallet: a public key and a private key. The public key is available to anyone and represents the 'user.' A private key is longer than the public key, and you generally have to do some work to see it. You never share this, and you rarely even look at it.

You can use a public key to sign up for new token airdrops or certain discord groups. We will discuss this in more detail below.

Public keys are the new email addresses.

Here is an example of one of mine: 0x30e5Dc795dBf1F26D5b205C593A3108fc8f6BA8 that I copied from my browser based metamask wallet.

Finding the others

We surfed the web in web2.0 — we went from link to link, from URL to URL. The foundational nature of the URL was not initially evident. Google capitalized on this with their page rank algorithm, which led to their search engine's success.

We now surf wallets via blockchain explorers.

Social tokens are a type of cryptocurrency that focuses on building communities for token holders. For example, we can go to Forefront Market and look at the top social tokens. I may own Pounds or Bitcoin, but I use these instruments to buy things or accumulate wealth. Their main utility is not in building interpersonal relationships with other Pound or Bitcoin users. I do not think of myself as part of a bitcoin community or Pound user community.

Here is an example of the social token $RAC, issued by the Grammy-award-winning musician.

I can see the top holders on the right — their public key identifies them.

Webpage vs. Wallet

I am going to click on one of the top owners, the one with the pink unicorn: 0xf744417d0a5fd18b5b18726ce1b48f931dfa32ea.

Now I am at an Etherscan page. Etherscan is another blockchain explorer that provides detailed information on wallet activity.

I can see the history of transactions. I can see the first transaction was from georgio.eth. I can see that all these transactions happened on Uniswap.

When I click on the ERC20 tab, I get a more granular view of all the transactions.

I have the transaction in the first column, the date in the second, the sender's wallet in the 3rd and the receiver's wallet in the fourth. And finally, I have the token in the last column. Here it is mostly the $RAC token and wrapped eth. Wrapped Ethereum (wEth) allows Ethereum to transact with different tokens and cryptocurrencies. Users may not always be aware this is happening, and that is ok. But the transparency of web3 allows us to peek under the hood.

As you see, some addresses are names, and some are hexadecimal strings. The name is an ens domain. It is similar to a webpage domain name. Anyone can go and buy an ens name for their wallet. Then, that name will appear in transactions instead of the hexadecimal public key.

Ens names make it easier to read a list of transactions. Here I see rvboss.eth. It is the only address that is not hexadecimal or an exchange.

I click on rvboss.eth. That brings me to a new Etherscan page with all of rvboss. eth's transactions. There is a new tab here for Erc721, in addition to Erc20. Erc721 is the Ethereum protocol for NFTs. When I see that tab, it means the user has some NFTs.

Then, we go to an NFT blockchain explorer, like Opensea, and enter the user's public key into the search bar. When I do this, the rvboss account pops up, and I can select it to browse the NFT collection.

A Good Neighbor

Blockchain lets us transfer assets, but we still want to know what those assets are and the users. If I know someone's address, I can send them tokens and NFTs. However, that does not mean I should. If I receive a token from someone I don't know or don't share community with, it is like receiving spam. There is also the danger of receiving scam tokens that access your entire wallet.

Community in web3 allows us to connect with one another beyond buying and selling. Platforms like discord, signal, and jitsi enable token holders to communicate with one another. Future leaders of web3 companies will be community organizers, not software developers.

What Next?

In web3, users and wallets are the connective tissue, not web pages, and links.

We can use explorers like Etherscan, Forefront, and Opensea to understand users and token communities. What sorts of dApps, decentralized applications, can we build to navigate this space? A web3.0 organization could create something elegant and automated. Web2.0 companies like Amazon or Salesforce appear unbeatable, but there will be a new web3.0 centric salesforce that complements our web3.0 wallet-centric universe.

Thank you for reading. These are concepts that I am developing, and I welcome thoughts and comments.

Passwords

As a child, I remember using the same words as my friends. Even as an adult, I do this. I picked up the habit of saying ‘bogus’ from a friend. Communities have common languages. Our painting group uses color world, paint handling, and edges to communicate our modernist leanings. Michel Foucault used discourse to describe how different groups create meaning and knowledge.

Another community I frequent is the Yak Collective, a diverse group of individuals that began with Venkatesh Rao and the Ribbonfarm blog. We self-consciously use language developed on the Ribbonfarm blog within the Yak community. These words are our discourse. Our use grounds them in a history of ownership — a provenance. This provenance transforms ownership into something that is not only accumulated but used. Ownership circulates.

The person known as Commits Vortex made a fantastic presentation Web3 for Yaks on blockchain governance. CV presented Bleep.art DAO that creates NFTs for individual musical notes. The conversation turned to other building blocks, such as language and words, into NFTs.

Blockchain and Tradition

In language, what is essential is the relationship between words, not just the words themselves. As word patterns repeat in different writings, a body of work emerges. That becomes a tradition or lineage (CV’s term).

Right now, the blockchain can only connect individuals that hold cryptocurrency. Language connects everyone that uses the same language. We can have pockets of people or communities using similar language that can now connect through a shared lexicon or lineage. There is an opportunity to communicate across discourses through shared language in Foucault’s sense of separate knowledge systems.

dLit

CV and I talked about writing as staking, to use the discourse of Defi. We discussed ways lineages could pay, charge, or bundle works. We discussed ways bad actors could hack the system and avoid this. We also discussed how this relates to custodial (or as VC recommends steward) systems instead of extractive systems.

The value is in language, as well as tokens. When we stake ourselves to a particular lexicon or lineage, it is like providing tokens for a liquidity pool. We are providing language liquidity: dLit (CV’s lexical invention) which stands for decentralized literature.

Some Imaginings

Imagine different communities with different lexicons. After we write something, certain communities are suggested to us based on our language. The goal here is to widen the community and to connect communities with resonant lexicons (or perhaps opposite lexicons).

Imagine, that there was an option to join a community. We could either buy tokens to join or be automatically invited based on our writing.

Imagine that as part of this community, or lineage, writers could bundle their work together. They could reach a larger audience and the pieces would have resonance as the lineage builds.

From Extraction to Stewardship

Let’s escape the extractive long tail of Web 2.0 — the exponential distribution of goods where a small number of people have all the attention and money. A flat curve gives us a richer cultural ecosystem and more opportunities for enjoyment and success. Stewardship only makes sense where communities are engaged and connected in reciprocal and lively relationships. Language is alive every time we write. Lineages operate with stewardship.

In this piece, I created a lexicon with words like discourse, web3, stewardship, lineage, painting, and maybe Susan Sontag. I could also throw in erotics — but I’ll save that for another post.

*Thanks to Commit Vortex for feedback and suggestions and dLit.