While they have previously been referred to as storytelling NFTs, in this article, we will explore the case for a new way to categorize them and explain why it is useful and necessary.

Introducing: Lore NFTs

What do all of these projects across various mediums have in common? They are all centered around stories. Worlds, characters, and events all play a crucial role in the Intellectual Property being developed around these NFT collections since their launch.

But the problem with calling them storytelling NFTs is that nowadays most projects will point out that they include storytelling, some way or another. There is a role story plays on the project, but it won’t be at the core of their activities.

The truth is that a project focusing on the development of their story itself as a critical element of their core value proposition will behave differently than a project that has storytelling only as a way to build brand or as an add-on for some community members to experience.

Story-centric projects will create their community around the development of their world, their characters and their adventures. People join these projects because they are attracted to the potential for shaping the story through their participation, and they invest in these projects because they believe in the potential for a brand around it.

These projects focus on building their lore along their community, no matter which medium they will explore with it. So let’s define Storytelling and Lore NFTs so we can differentiate the two of them.

**Storytelling NFTs **can be described as any project that develops some kind of backstory for the project, or involves stories as a way to expand their IP. Story is part of what they build, but it is not at the center on how the project relates to their community.

**Lore NFTs **prioritize building stories with their community as a core activity within their projects. If a project actively involves their community through well-defined and recurrent activities to influence their stories being crafted, and aligns all its offerings with those narratives, then we are talking about Lore NFTs.

Case studies across mediums

Lore NFTs will build comics, video games, short films or full fledged movies all around the world that their audience contributes to. Some will launch with a clear medium to focus on at first, but most will explore more than one as they craft their core releases. 

Let’s explore some of these projects and what they have achieved so far.

Comics NFTs

Many projects claim that they are building "Marvel in Web3", but very few have done as much already to be close to that as Macroverse.

Founded by Hollywood and industry veterans, Macroverse creates their own IP, partners with existing NFT Collections with a compelling world, or downright acquire dead collections to give them a new life through comic books. 

They already have an app for consuming their comics, with users in the thousands. Their community has been involved with the process of a handful of them, specially when collaborations insue, just like in the case with Wanderers, another Lore NFT we will describe later on.

Film3

**The Fringe **is one of those massive projects that don't really sound real until you see what has already been done by their core team and their community alike.

Started by a team that have previously made a film with Pedro Pascal, The Fringe is probably best described as a worldbuilding project. While their feature film is their main goal, community members are encouraged to expand on the lore of the planets, cities, factions, culture, and even the food (yes, there's a whole lot of content around food) that will serve as background for that story.

As with many of Lore NFTs projects, you won't need to own one in order to join and contribute to the story. Just navigate the forum and see if there's something you would like to help imagine about life on their planets!

Video game NFTs

**PlanetQuest **has been involving their community on how the main story takes shape for when the core game releases.

Each chapter has included pools that invite gamers to vote on the path their characters take. Then, the team expands on the story taking the community's decision into consideration. 

https://twitter.com/JoinPlanetQuest/status/1661389927915847682

Lore NFTs don't necessarily implies a strong decentralization on how stories are made, and PlanetQuest is a perfect example on how community engagement can happen alongside creative control from a core team.

Transmedia NFTs

**Wanderers **was the first generative animated NFT collection. Released with a short film telling the Genesis moment for the journey of the Wanderers, this transmedia project has played with animation, music, voice acting in their Transcriptions, an upcoming video game that they are building after raising funds with Animoca Brands, and a comic series they are launching in collaboration with Macroverse.

https://twitter.com/Wanderers/status/1661010395820331008/video/1

Holders can have ships, planets, and wanderers themselves, and they are going to be part of the expansion of the lore with a series of workshops and contests managed by Macroverse. So a holder's character may appear (or even star!) in a comic, and then form part of the videogame Wanderers will release. 

Worldbuilding NFTs

There is a channel in Discord for** Animeta holders to share new entries for the lore of Natum, the planet that Animetas inhabit. There’s a whole Notion **where you will find details on the timeline, places on Natum, and the origins and traditions of some of the factions that populate this world.

Similarly to The Fringe, there’s even details about some of the food Animetas make, courtesy of one of the members of the community.

While the project is planning on launching a game, the core activity of the community so far has been building and making sense of the world where Animetas live. Some Lore NFTs won’t launch with a specific format in mind, or explore multiple from the beginning (as is the case of Wanderers), but rather will focus on worldbuilding with their community. People who join enjoy the already existing art, stories, lore, and the concept that got the world started in the first place.

There are tons of projects launching and building Lore NFTs, and this is just a glimpse to what exists out there. You can find more in** my compendium of projects, **including platforms and tooling that enable Lore NFTs to be developed. If you would like to include another project, hit me up on Twitter!

Why a new name can help us

In this article, we have explored how lore plays a central role in a certain category of NFT projects. Their business models might change depending on the formats they pursue, but community engagement will always share a focus on building a story together through the expansion of the lore of the collection.

Why name this category? By having a recognizable way to address these new emerging IPs we can share best practices and experience on how we can build these types of projects. Having a single meme of production that can rally all storytellers under this shared concept can help us share and learn from each other, as we navigate the frontier on how we can tell stories using the new tools that web3 put at our disposal.

The future for how stories are crafted is already taking place, and it is built by Lore NFTs.

**

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Much has been written about Regenerative Finance, or ReFi, and in this short piece, we will take a quick look at how blockchain has already started to become an amazing tool to transform how we can build impact driven projects.

Funding

Web3 introduces novel mechanisms for value transfer across the Internet, making transactions of money (in the form of cryptoassets) as easy as transferring information.

This has brought a wave of innovation on how projects can raise funds, from Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) in 2018 to crowdfunding through NFTs (Non Fungible Tokens) and forming a DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) while pooling resources in the form of crypto. 

New platforms have emerged over the years that experiment with how smart contracts can facilitate these funding mechanisms, or funding legos (we talk a lot about building blocks - or legos- in web3!). Giveth and Gitcoin, for example, allow for new types of crowdfunding and donation campaigns, while platforms like Zora and DoinGud focus on NFTs as a means of fundraising.

Organizational Design

With a new way of thinking about value, comes a new way of defining the organizations that create it. 

Web3 invites us to think about the power of decentralization, and the resilience of incentivized communities of builders and creators. Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, or DAOs, have been pushing innovation in organizational legos, with specialized tooling like DAOHaus, Tally and Aragon helping anyone start a DAO with their no code approach.

But not everything is technical. New types of organizations demand new ways of thinking about work, and our relationship with the orgs we build and the processes that regulate our day to day. And of course, not everything needs to be built from scratch. DAOs have learned from cooperatives and other horizontal organizations' management frameworks, with a work culture that might be more aligned with what impact driven individuals feel comfortable with than the culture instigated in more traditional organizations.

Decentralization is not always the rule, however, and it can be a long term goal while the organization explores its first stages. Tokenized communities and orgs built with decentralization as a long term vision are now referred as Internet Native Organizations, or INOs, as Jess from Seed Club likes to call them.

Product

Technical-driven teams exist as well, with those who think about the disruptions smart contracts can bring about at the helm of projects like Toucan Protocol or Regen Networks.

These projects adopt the technology at the core of how they create new solutions, which were previously inefficient or downright impossible without blockchain.

We have discussed Gitcoin for example, which introduces Quadratic Funding as a way to complement donations and enable public good's founders. Or the ever expanding climate solutions that rethink carbon bonds with smart contracts, relying on blockchain's transparency and traceability to bring hope to a very criticized tool of regeneration. 

User Incentives

How can we keep a community of regens incentivized? This is a question that could be dismissed at first glance, because in an ideal world, impact driven individuals would work towards regeneration regardless of incentives.

But ours is not an ideal world (that's why we need to regenerate it in the first place!), so we need to come up with ways to recognize those who help us build and scale impact.

Enter tokenization as an incentive mechanism. Both fungible and non fungible tokens can be part of how we reward regens. Incentive legos can be more than mere digital money too, they can become discount points in a sustainable ecosystem of products and services, or means of recognition for those who contributed to a shared effort. 

Web3 for Good

While this list is not exhaustive, I hope it can illustrate some of the practical ways web3 can help founders, builders and creators in their mission to scale impact. 

If you would like to learn more, I recommend visiting Impact DAO’s Telegram Group or going through the resources ReFi DAO has curated!

Technology can be the tool that finally gives us hope in building a better future. And web3 can become the schelling point for regens all over the world.

This is an update on that Journey.

https://paragraph.xyz/@luisotravez/becoming-a-web3-regenerative-instigator

Choosing Celo as my HQ

My path forward is already taking shape. With my upcoming role as Celo’s Ambassador for Peru, for example, I will be helping new builders and creators deploy their ideas on the mission driven Blockchain that Celo is. After all, is the main reason why I joined their Ambassador Program: No other blockchain has gathered so many regens as Celo, if you ask me.

This article published in Not Boring by Patrick McCormick is the best in depth intro to Celo and its mission of making money beautiful with a Regenerative Economy. As we enter ReFi Summer, make sure to take a look at what Celo is building!

On a side note, I also have my personal token on Celo, deployed using Talent Protocol. On the following weeks, I’ll be reaching to other Regen talent to join the Protocol and have their own tokens launched on Celo. Would you like to be one of them? DM me on Twitter!

Creating Learning Communities for Regens in Web3

I’m also creating a Decentralized University for Latinos, mostly built in Spanish. Composed of multiple learning DAOs and Communities of Practice, the idea is to build a DAO of DAOs so we can share resources, talent and opportunities for people exploring web3 as a tool of creation. A new Regen Community will be made public in the following days, as part of that Decentralized University. Regen Latam started as a Telegram group, and was shared with other regens in the region so we can share what we are building and figuring out how we can help each other out scale impact across Latinoamérica.

Culture and Storytelling meet Impact

And last, but definitely not least, we have launched Metasuyo’s Genesis NFT a little over a week ago, even if it was as a glimpse to what’s to come and a pitch to members across the peruvian community. Metasuyo will build cultural brands inspired in the prehispanic civilizations that existed across the Tahuantinsuyo Nation, the land of the Incas. These cultural brands will be launched as Storytelling NFTs. The products and experiences we develop are going to create impact through their value chains, including members of the native communities whose ancestors’ stories are the ones fueling the imagination of our own.

Writing NFTs and the Future for Creators

As an entrepreneur, I consider myself a creator. And as someone who loves to write, it’s impossible for me to ignore the incredible opportunities web3 enable for the Creator Economy.

Take a look at the upper corner of this post. You will see that you can collect this entry as an NFT on Optimism! This is a Layer 2 that has extremely cheap gas fees for every transaction you make, including minting this post as an NFT! These are known as Writing NFTs, a new concept introduced by Mirror, the platform that you are using right now to read this post.

And because web3 is composable and easily interoperable, if you collect any of these NFTs and you send me a screenshot of it on my DMs on Twitter, I will send you 10 $LOV, my own personal token on Celo! These will allow you to take part on the community votes I will make in regards to the future of my Regen Newsletter, available on Snapshot. If you are lost on what any of this means, or on how to take any of these steps, don’t worry, I’ll help you if you send me a DM on Twitter!

Path of the Regen Guardian

Blockchain, Learning, Culture. These are the three main areas I want to focus on as a Regen Guardian. The goal is to become an instigator for new projects to emerge, and a Guardian for the ones that do succeed in crafting a clear vision and building their first steps.

I believe web3 represents the biggest opportunity we have at reorganizing our society so we can heal all of the damage we have done to our planet and to each other. We are on time, if we bring hope back and build with scale and impact in mind.

The future can be better, but we will need more Regens to build it. And those Regens will need Guardians to guide them. Which one would you become?

Web3 is a rapidly emerging technology, enabling disruption across industries just as it's predecessor, Web 2.0, did. If LatAm arrived late to the party with only a handful of successful Internet companies in the first 20 years of this century, we cannot allow that to happen again with this new technological shift.

So a question arises: How might we build the educational infrastructure much needed to prepare the Latino workforce of the future? How can we leverage web3 techonology to craft a solution?

Let's imagine a Decentralized University.

What does a Decentralized University would look like?

Many projects are already attempting to answer this question. A term coinned by Crypto, Culture and Society describes these types of Organizations, themselves a subtype of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs): Learning DAOs. They are learning communities that attempt to explore and learn together about a particular subject. In the case of CCS, they want to become the Liberal Arts "Faculty" of Crypto. Some other DAOs take a generalized approach, such as Odyssey DAO with their Learning Paths for web3 and Invisible College with their diverse set of contents in web3, too.

Besides Learning DAOs, another concept that can help us picture a Decentralized University that is web3 native (which means a solution built taking advantage of features made possible by web3 tech) is that of DAO2DAO relationships. Just as Business can focus on having other businesses as Clients, DAOs can cultivate beneficial relationships with other DAOs that share similar goals. As these relationships involve even more DAOs, whole ecosystems of organizations sharing resources, knowledge and even talent (DAOs tend to share contributors) emerge.

The vision I have for a truly decentralized university is of a DAO of DAOs: a distributed organization that shares governance across many other learning DAOs that come together with a shared purpose.

So, what can we do about this?

How can we create our Decentralized Latino University?

A few months ago, almost at the end of 2021, a new community for people exploring web3 was created as a simple WhatsApp group. In just a couple of months, the group was already close to max capacity: 200+ members, all of them arriving organically through word of mouth and from different countries of LatAm.

Cryptoamigos was born. And since I became a core contributor as co founder, I've always described it as a General Studies Faculty.

The goal of Cryptoamigos is to help people navigate web3 so they can find how they can create value with this tech. But what happens when someone wants to go deeper into a specific rabbit hole?

We could always just expand and try to cover a little bit of everything. But why would we do this? If there already exists specialized communities for other subjects, wouldn't it be better to create with them an even bigger community?

To build that, we have been talking with leading members in other communities. Futurx, a community for music professionals exploring web3. RedWeb3, a community for DAO founders and operators. Impact NFT Academy, a community for creators of Impact driven NFT Collections. And some others that we are just beginning to explore, such as a community for Artists that want to create impact with their crypto art, or a web2 community for scientists and engineers doing research and creating projects together that want to tokenize their organization.

The idea is to come up with a model for an organization that allow us to share resources, knowledge and opportunities across all of the talent in our communities. This new organization would work as an underlying support for all of our different communities, while each of us keep our own models of gobernance untouched.

Our common goal? Develop the Latino talent so we can make the most of web3. Creators and builders would eventually find any learning path they choose, being able to move freely between all of our different educational offerings.

That's what we are creating now.

Want to join us?

A Discord server has been created for this purpose. Leaders across all of these communities have been invited, and together we will decide how we shape our Decentralized Latino University!

If you are creating a Learning Community that shares our purpose, please get in touch with me on Twitter or Telegram.

If you want to keep up to date with our progress as we go, you can fill this form so I can send you any progress!

Latinoamérica ha vivido durante siglos ante la sombra del resto del mundo. Tercermundistas llaman a nuestros países. Y tienen razón.

Es hora de cambiar esto.

Unida, nuestra región puede prosperar con esta nueva revolución tecnológica. ¡Depende de nosotros construir un futuro mejor para toda nuestra gente!

They are about NASA, drunk engineers, and accesible prothestics.

NASA and Comic Books in the 30s

In the 60s, as the space race got more competitive, NASA was recruiting engineers by the dozens. The ads they used said: "We're going to the moon, Want to come along?"

As James Donovan describes in his book Shoot for the moon, there was a shortage of engineers on the US, as missile, aircraft and electronic companies compited for skillfull and knowledgable talent. But NASA had no problem going from 700 engineers on 1960 to 2000 two years later.

Why? These talented people had grown with stories such as the ones in the comics of Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, hard science fiction that appeared on the 40s, and the sci fi films of the 50s.

Sure, NASA payed well, but the lure it had was what made it a no brainer for talent who wanted to go to the Moon and beyond. It was what they were already dreaming for, because of all of those stories they had learned to love.

Engineers' confessions

My first years after school were studying Mechatronics Engineering. I had lots of friends from other careers, but in Mechatronics, which is kind of a mix of electronics and mechanics (think robots, for example - I know this is a oversimplification but bear with me), there was a common story I used to hear when everyone was feeling at ease (or drunk).

People wanted to build something like Tony Stark's Ironman.

It made such an impression on me, because it was so consistent that I believe it was true for many people. Even if they didn't mean it literally, it was a first inspiration that got them thinking about engineering.

The story of an inventor

When Enzo Romero saw Luke Skywalker's robotic hand on Empire Strikes Back for the first time, he decided he wanted to build one for himself.

He is missing a hand, but is full of talent devoted to build accesible, useful prosthetics. His peruvian company LAT Bionics has been developing and distributing prosthetics that are 50x cheaper that their counterparts from other parts of the world.

All because he was inspired by a Star Wars movie that made him dream and aim for building what was only fiction.

I believe Fiction has the power to get us dreaming. Stories can be the fuel not only for imagination, but for the inspiration to build a future that looks a lot like what we usually just dismiss as simple entretainment.

That's why I want to write Fiction. I don't want to keep consuming and watching dark, corrupted versions of Earth in the future. I'm tired of post apocalyptic scenarios where Humanity failed.

I want to tell stories about a cyberpunk world transitioning to a solarpunk future.

And I can only hope that maybe I get to inspire someone, at least some one person! To actually build that greener, better future.