Nobody likes advertisements, right? They always get in the middle of an activity and distort people’s attention from the main event. But there is one exception that I can think about, and that is in motorsports.

Have you ever watched a car race? You probably noticed that the sponsors blend into complete car styles, and act as decoration accessories around the racing track. There are no “let’s cut to commercials” or “we’ll get back after these messages” moments. Advertising is sort of embedded into an experience that is not at odds with delivering brand value.

As an avid fan of motorsports, I have played racing games since I was a kid, and it has always been a way to achieve two things: Learn new skills, and make new connections. Back in the ‘90s, the skills involved learning how to design cars to use in-game, and how to make websites to attract better drivers for my teams.

I grew up and got into Product Design, but the friendships made along the way with online simracing remained. The sense of community and shared experiences was so strong that we organized real-world visits to some of the great Formula 1 races along the years.

When the pandemic hit and my coworkers were craving virtual hangouts, my first thought was to introduce them to LiveForSpeed (LFS), a simple game that does not require great hardware capacity and lets people jump into a track for free. It became a huge success as a way to connect and talk to others while racing.

The thing to know about LFS is that it is a simracing game, so it is meant to simulate the laws of physics. As a result, you will not be able to pick it up and be immediately competitive. It will take some time to master, as guessing where to start hitting the brakes into a corner is not as simple as with arcade racing games, known for having ultra-forgiving and highly-efficient super brakes.

With LFS you also have to take other factors into consideration, such as the strength and direction of the wind, the gear ratios for the track, the tire pressures, fuel levels and suspension settings that will match your driving style or the type of circuit you are presented with. It is the ultimate explorer treasure trove, a tinkerer's dream, if you will.

For more immersion in this coworker racing project I did last year, we made custom car designs and had our brands represented in-game. When people got up to speed and developed enough familiarity with the game, we saw ourselves craving more. So we invited other companies and set up a livestream with a team of expert commentators using multiple cameras to capture our overtakes and crashes, complete with post-race interviews.

It was a thrill, but some people got very competitive and we were stuck trying to find balance between the weekend hobby and the esports competition. I knew there was room and excitement for both, but we surely needed to stay simple since most of us did not have the time to put in big amounts of weekly practice.

This is what came to my mind when I saw the Superfluid NFT Billboard idea. A casual but well-organized simracing league could start by innovating around the methods by which you transact and provide assets for in-game customization. Then the tokenomics and talent-acquisition experiments can begin.

For example, if your team does not have the time for a next season, you can hire a driver from a community of full-time racers. A timed contract for the season could well be a stream of driver remuneration in a custom super token.

I bounced off some of these ideas on Superfluid’s Discord, and the response was very positive. This is why we decided to create the Ethereum Racing League, inviting all racers from the ecosystem to come together and play. Check it out!

In 2021, I competed in a simulation racing (simracing) league, a series of 10 races per season. It was meant as a budding activity for peers and coworkers. We ended up doing 30 races during the calendar year, with a produced livestreaming that involved multiple virtual cameras and a team of expert commentators.

It was a great experience and I came away with two season wins, meaning I won enough races to score enough points for the Drivers’ championship title in two occasions. I helped my teammate with her race setups -the configuration of the many elements of the car- and together we won the Teams’ championship title, which combines our points to compile team-based standings.

The best aspect of the competition was the search for pace. As we all practiced and prepared for a race, we would use Discord for voice conversations and exchange helpful tips about what was unlocking faster laptimes for one another.

We would then take this gaming camaraderie into post-race interviews done live on the broadcast, and based on what happened during the race, we would invite one or two drivers to a podcast that covered their race and gave them a chance to explain their mistakes or their grand successes.

Since motorsport deals mostly with human prowess and error, it makes sense that simracing captures this social dynamic between what is possible, and what is outstanding. It is in searching the outstanding that we make mistakes.

But not every gamer is set to navigate this effectively and become a title contender. So you also have to design for the gaming thrills of fighting for position in places outside of the winning spots.

At the end of the 2021 racing calendar, I asked myself what would a play-to-earn model look like for simracing. How can we reward the drivers for their performances? Most of the examples I could follow would destroy the intrinsic motivation for racing, as placing so much value on extrinsic rewards would turn time spent on the track into a job.

Moreover, rewarding mainly based on performance would mean that people would switch their incentive system away from helping others and into maximizing profit for their own wallet. This means we would be left with a small percentage of very successful drivers earning most of the rewards.

By introducing a Universal Basic Racing Income (UBRI), we could remove these issues and reward players for participation. Imagine a stream of funds every second, paid to the drivers who remain active in the racing league.

If you are a top driver, and you are all set for a race on Saturday, you might want to show up for the Friday practice and help other community members improve their laptimes. This would count towards your minimum activity level, necessary to keep your UBRI active.

If we could factor in a positive review system based on kindness and sportsmanship, we would be solving the gaming industry’s problem with griefing, or in-game harassment.

But how do we make sure the financial side of this is safe and trustable? Enter Superfluid, an Ethereum-based smart contract framework that makes it possible to create super tokens. What is a super token? Simple: an implementation of Ethereum’s ERC-777 standard with added super powers, such as real-time finance and a registry.

This is important to UBRI as it makes it possible for it to exist as a super token itself. So when we reward drivers, we are giving them $UBRI units, not speculative assets. By doing this we are creating an ecosystem of people who gravitate to UBRI for meaningful gaming experiences, not for get-rich-quick schemes.

To financial speculators, this would sound boring. It means that we ignore comparing $UBRI to fiat or other assets, and instead we exchange value in that token, until we later figure out what that will mean. As of now, it is simply a measure of participation and engagement, and nothing more.

But to true gamers everywhere, this is very exciting, as we rely on the super token for creating a community with governance where engagement increases the overall value of the activity.

Another vector of growth is the possibility of using Superfluid streams for on-track sponsorships, as we could expand the concept of engagement to reach people watching the races as well.

As an avid reader, I thought, it is great that these grown ups with a catalog of books and other materials can get in on the web as well. My guess was that this can only expand the amount of resources, people and ideas that I can reach through search engines. I remember thinking back then, if the Internet would be a book, it would be quite a short one. There wasn't a lot of content.

So I chose to stay positive, even if a little part of me felt invaded by adults, as web browsing was until then a rebellious act against the powers that be. Keep in mind that anyone over 30 years old would not really understand what the Internet was about.

Back then, I knew the web was about to change the minute that traditional institutions and companies got the hang of it. I had to trust that even if they were about to bring a horrible and humongous amount of advertisements with them- we'd still be ok with our online experience. It could still be about finding content and building things with it.

This helped me learn that in order to enable and facilitate learning, one must build a fabric of trust around experiences, whether online or offline. And establishing this trust is very difficult with the technologies of the web as we knew it. But there is change on the horizon.

Gaming, learning and sharing experiences are all intertwined nowadays, so trust and transparency become key factors.

People are nowadays using words like "metaverse" and "web3" to describe technologies and processes that enable people to connect and exchange value. Most likely, these experiences are marked by a decentralized method of keeping the score, or ledger, so that all members of a community are able to trust the activity around them.

Working on the web3 in 2021 feels a lot like coding websites did in 1996: it often results in looking at your screen wondering about one problem for too long, because you are in uncharted territory, and there are no quick fixes to what you want to accomplish.

It is precisely in that journey of acknowledging the gap between where we are, and where we want to be, that we realized we needed the concept of a virtual library. A place for common good, unburdened by the commercial pressures of what the main product, Wayports, should become.

This is what The MacLane Library has to be, with an agnostic view on the type of virtual world, its mission is to create more value for its members. So it made total sense to us to spin The MacLane Library (MCL) off into its own Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO).

As of today, the MCL is a DAO, and this means you can acquire the MCL token and be a direct owner of the organization. As an owner/holder of the token, you are part of our governance model, which means you can make proposals or submit a challenge to a decision you might not agree with. In this case your challenge will go through an entire on-chain court system where other members can vote to take action together with you.

Source: Aragon Govern, the DAO framework we use for The MacLane Library.

As we grow and evolve, the idea is that our members can take The MacLane Library in the direction that they see fit. Our vision is to have a networked virtual library with no frontiers, where members able to connect, learn and obtain rewards for their contributions. Thanks to being a DAO, everything is transparent and auditable, on-chain for members to see.

Just like in 1996, we have to embrace the change that results from mixing in crowds with different objectives and preferences, this time around we have the tools to facilitate decision making in a transparent way. Intent was a lot harder to predict in the 90's, and if you think about it, the new era is all about taking people further by removing old structures that would otherwise put up a wall between intent and value.

We hope compensation can always meet actions for the impact these have generated in our community. This is a significant mark of a web3 experience, since creation of content is so accessible yet the economies of the web2 aren't there to support creators, and make careers out of all that talent. We think of this as a great effort to meet that moment. It makes sense that we would want to enable those experiences in several different places or subsets of virtual communities, to go where people play and learn, and I can't wait to see what we'll build together.

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