Our new reality consists of loot. No matter easily discovered or barely recognized, it’s everywhere, and all you need to do is collect it.

Сollecting is your lifestyle: in the constantly expanding Metaverse, you are minting, swapping, and transferring the things you find, always searching for something superior to your last discovery.

Modules are your keys — each one unlocks a unique Surreal feature.

https://surreal.mirror.xyz/KRnFIXTtfnwM8XiaLIpHv2K7Zu6bBVSnlnOtyoraI48

The other day, Jacob shared a blog post describing an experiment he was working on with a fun little signifier to let readers know the post included something to collect: [NFT Inside].

I thought it was a great little meme summarizing a fundamentally new experience enabled by web3. Web3 media always gives you something to take with you, to own and collect, to add to your digital inventory.

It reminds me of cereal boxes that came with toys or video game magazines that included stickers. Commoditized consumption (eating cereal, reading a magazine) were differentiated with unique physical collectables. The “stuff inside” made me want it more.

The abundance of online content continues to expand, and will be exponentially amplified by AI-generated work in the coming months and years. Online experiences are increasingly immaterial, but NFTs promise to introduce experiences of tangible “stuff” digitally.

Next-gen media will have “NFT Inside”

NFTs enable media to be ownable and collectable, and reintroduces materiality to digital work at all layers.

I believe web3 native brands will provide much more fun ways to engage audiences by enabling them to collect and own pieces of their story.

How this could play out:

• Collectable brands. Every great brand has an iconic logo. Great web3 brands will make their logos collectable. Think laptop stickers, pins, or company t-shirts. These will be free to mint and be tied bootstrapping a project or creator’s audience.

• Revival of mascots. Brand mascots (think Mickey Mouse, Sonic, Michelin Man) will make a comeback for web3 brands, because they can be easily turned into a series of collectable NFTs. These don’t need utility and are simply a fun way to engage with a brand, but could also be used as a digital merch business model. Dirt’s Dirty and PartyDAO’s Kazoo are great pioneers here. Imagine them dressed up for Halloween or Christmas, they could do almost infinite things within the brand’s universe.

• NFT inside. Projects will invest more in art directed assets, such as illustrations and graphics for their content. A great essay with commissioned illustrations won’t be rendered as lifeless jpegs—they’ll be collectable NFTs that feel like memes, stickers, or swag that communities will want in their wallet to commemorate being part of the creator’s journey. Playbooks will emerge for thematic collectable series that let projects re-engage their audiences.

Turning “NFT Inside” into a meme

After seeing Jacob’s tweet, the iconic Intel Inside marketing campaign immediately came to mind (a meme template itself).

In the spirit of decentralization, I thought it would be fun to commission a derivative work, so I tweeted a 0.1 ETH bounty to create an “NFT Inside” vector graphic. Eleven people submitted great takes, but the prize went to elih.eth. Making the “f” and “t” look good together was the trickiest part of the job, and he did an awesome job turning it into a custom ligature. It was the only submission that did that! Also, extra credit for the CC0 logo on the outline. Thanks to everyone who submitted!

Subscriber mint

As promised, free mint of the logo above. The edition block uses a new Mirror feature called “Subscriber NFTs”, which requires the collector to subscribe to a creator before they can collect. We see Subscriber NFTs as an exciting new way to grow your newsletter audience on Mirror, and a native productization of the “NFT Inside” concept. If you want to try it out while it’s in private beta, DM me.

What does it mean to be original when creativity is reimagined as a problem of autocomplete, one that an algorithm with an exponentially improving corpus of knowledge gets better at solving each day?

vgr and AVC offer two good takes on crypto and AI being a yin and yang or two sides of the same coin.

It feels like AI and crypto are mathematical evil twins of sorts; that each is somehow deeply incomplete without the other. The mild culture-warring between the two tribes is in fact a symptom of deeper kinships.

AIs can be used to generate “deep fakes” while cryptographic techniques can be used to reliably authenticate things against such fakery. Flipping it around, crypto is a target-rich environment for scammers and hackers, and machine learning can be used to audit crypto code for vulnerabilities. I am convinced there is something deeper going on here. This reeks of real yin-yangery that extends to the roots of computing somehow.

— The Dawn of Mediocre Computing by @vgr

I think AI and Web3 are two sides of the same coin. As machines increasingly do the work that humans used to do, we will need tools to manage our identity and our humanity. Web3 is producing those tools and some of us are already using them to write, tweet/cast, make and collect art, and do a host of other things that machines can also do. Web3 will be the human place to do these things when machines start corrupting the traditional places we do/did these things.

— Sign Everything by @fredwilson

I am excited to participate in the evolution of this from the web3 side.

As I play with ChatGPT prompts and think about how NFTs will evolve as a medium, two observations come to mind:

Commoditization of creativity elevates creators. If producing creative work becomes democratized via LLMs, where the effort between idea and high quality final output is drastically reduced, who produces the work becomes a lot more important. The creator’s celebrity, influence, world-building, and interaction with the rest of the ecosystem becomes much more important. Appreciating art becomes more-so about who is making it and how they engage with their audience and the broader memeplex. This likely exacerbates the power laws of creator popularity and success.

Scarcity + cost makes consuming creative work more meaningful. As AI abundance commoditizes and devalues creative work, further straining the attention economy and overloading the feed—audiences having the ability to purchase or invest in work offers an antidote. Scarcity creates a “meaning filter”. The byproduct is both a significant new business model change for creators, and a more meaningful relationship with the works as we become more discerning collectors.

If you aren’t already, I recommend starting experimenting with both. It’s really fun. Try ChatGPT or publish your first on-chain essay (which is automatically an NFT) on Mirror today.

Sunrise Blue, by CFCF

Sunrise Blue by CFCF, released 06 May 2022 1. Sunrise Blue sunrise blue, a new tune for you. enjoy __☼__ written & recorded 2018 - 2021

http://bandcamp.com

So why do we still have Likes? It’s no secret there’s another side to the Like coin serving an ulterior function (please note there is no such actual coin). Likes first and foremost benefit the platform. Engagement feeds their algorithm and appeases shareholders, steering design decisions to whatever generates the most likes. Not only is the creator-fan relationship secondary, it’s potentially forged into being.

On top of that, likes hold no real value—benefiting neither the creator or the audience. For example, early fans aren’t rewarded for identifying high-potential creators or for their ongoing engagement and support. Lastly, even if we could introduce value to the Like, they are ultimately centralized, mediated by a single platform and stored in proprietary databases. Likes don’t belong to us, nor do they effectively bind us together in any meaningful way.

Okay, back to web3.

At Mirror, we have the upper hand of a credibly-neutral protocol built on decentralized infrastructure. We’re constantly thinking about ways to utilize that to better bridge creators and their communities via innovative tools enabled by smart contracts. But what’s that backbone equivalent of a Like for a web3 publishing platform?

We’d like to propose the Collect feature.

We introduced Writing NFTs back in May, empowering writers to mint their entries with a customizable supply—at no cost to them. While that directly benefits writers, it also turned readers and fans into collectors. Collecting entries imbues a sense of real camaraderie and investment into engaging with content. There’s almost something material about collecting Writing NFTs—bringing to mind personal libraries and record collections. In that sense, collecting on Mirror becomes a curatorial process, giving readers a way to define their cultural identity (and replace algorithmic curation of the web2 days). Finally, collecting Writing NFTs brews community from the bottom-up—binding community members by their likeminded collections.

For writers, the collect function provides more than just financial value. In a world where Likes have lost any kind of sincerity, collecting signals real support. With that assurance in mind, writers can build a direct on-chain relationship with their audience. The NFT then acts as a ledger of fandom for the media—free from platform control and oversight. And with the freedom to customize the price and supply of any given entry, writers can play with incentives to create experiences around patronage, funding, collection, fandom and more—a totally achievable manifestation of the “1000 true fans” thesis.

A few experimental models for writers that make their writing collectable:

• Free and abundant, the on-chain version of a like.

• Free and scarce, a model to gift to your more attentive and avid fans. While free at first, these can always obtain secondary market value.

• Expensive and scarce, a model for patronage and fundraising.

We need no further evidence that to Collect is the new Like. And, yes, that conclusion comes with a platform update. Starting last week, all entries on Mirror are collectable NFTs by default, each with a supply of 500. There’s no gas for a writer to mint. Using lazy minting, the initial cost to deploy is charged to the first collector. Writers have the option to enable funding and customize pricing and supply—meaning a creator’s onramp to the web3 economy can be as easy as sharing an idea.

Swimming amongst a sea of likes is an archaic state of being online. The real value and community-building inherent to collections has a lot of potential for moving us forward. We hope it opens up new forms of social connections between creators and their communities.

Connect your wallet to Mirror to start creating, collecting and exploring the best writing in web3.

But today there’s a significant usability hurdle with getting funds onto an L2. Users first need to “bridge” them from Ethereum, and bridging offers a poor UX:

• It is slow. Users are used to transactions confirming in a few minutes on L1, bridging can take over 20 minutes.

• It is expensive. Bridging costs around 150k gas, which can get expensive with L1 congestion.

• It requires switching apps. You need to switch to an external bridging app to migrate your funds.

• It requires switching networks. You need to switch networks in your wallet, which will now show completely different balances and transaction history for the L2.

A common critique of L2s is that this friction is actually a significant hurdle, and that users will “drop off” before successfully bridging funds, and therefore fail to actually get to use any apps on L2.

Bridging is an ecosystem-wide problem that will get solved over time by wallets and exchanges. But in the meantime, can we catalyze L2 adoption by using NFTs in creative ways to make bridging more fun and aesthetically pleasing?

Looking at gift cards for inspiration

In the real world, gift cards represent a significant market and are a popular way to gift someone cash to spend at their favorite retailer or online platform.

Gift cards are a classic way to “bridge” funds into another commerce ecosystem. Even more interestingly, gift cards are also an artistic canvas. They follow a standard format (credit card size) and can be customized with various graphics.

Retailers commonly brand gift cards with mascots like Mickey Mouse or Peanuts, and release them as limited editions to make them collectible. It’s not surprising to hear that a collector culture exists around gift cards:

The largest gift card collection in the world, as of 2021, belonged to Canadian-American brothers Aaron and David Miller of Scarsdale, New York. By 2013, the brothers had amassed an estimated 3,125 different cards.

We all know an expressive format for digital collectibles in web3—NFTs! NFTs can be programmed to interact with any smart contract, including L2 bridging contracts.

L2 Bridge Pass NFTs

What if we took the gift card metaphor to make collectible NFT editions that, when minted, automatically bridge funds to an L2?

Instead of bridging to L2 through a boring “swap” UX, what if users could buy a cool looking NFT! Under the hood, the purchaser receives the collectible NFT on L1, while the funds are bridged and made available on L2.

Bridge Pass creators can play with two variables to make minting collectible, social, and fun:

• Aesthetics. A Bridge Pass can be created in collaboration with an NFT artist or can reuse existing CC0 art from a PFP project.

• Scarcity. Bridge Passes can be released in limited editions to make collecting them more desirable.

Imagine an “Optimism Early Adopter” Bridge Pass that is released in collaboration with an artist like pplpleasr—priced at 1 ETH with a limited edition of 100. A portion of the proceeds could go to the artist or to fund public goods. A Bridge Pass can also be gifted to a friend to help onboard them onto L2.

CC0 pfp NFTs provide an amazing library of art that can be remixed without permission into Bridge Passes. Imagine a “Nouns L2 Pioneer” Bridge Pass, using openly licensed art from the Nouns project.

A custom gallery, something like bridgepass.com, can be created to showcase Bridge Passes by different artists for different L2s. There can even be new drops each week, as old drops sell out, to keep the excitement going in perpetuity.

All scaling solutions present tradeoffs. L2s are a really promising way to take the Ethereum ecosystem to the next level. As an ecosystem, we need to get creative to grow adoption and I think Bridge Pass NFTs with custom art could be one fun approach.

Special thanks to Julian for imagining and designing what Bridge Passes could look like. We are hiring at Mirror.

Party DAO

An amazing community coordination paradigm called PartyBid has emerged this week. I want to capture it in this post and invite you to get involved in PartyDAO.

But first, PartyBid’s backstory is essential.

In a recent deep dive into web3, Packy McCormick cited Chris Dixon’s 2013 post “What the smartest people do on the weekend is what everyone else will do during the week in ten years”, signaling readers to pay attention to what people are doing with web3 after hours. Appropriately, PartyBid was spawned from a Twitter thread by Dave White that began “It’s friday night, let's build a mechanism together!”

An hour and a half later, I replied with the following:

nis.eth

@Iiterature

wouldn't it be cool if... deploy automatic DAO to bid on any NFT auction

call it PartyBid

- constructor: auction_id
- anyone deposits ETH, gets back an ERC_20
- contract automatically bids on auction
- if win, funders get fractional ownership in NFT
- if lose, funds returned

Dave White

@_Dave__White_

it's friday night, let's build a mechanism together!

quote tweet with "wouldn't it be cool if [your DeFi/NFT/other idea]"

then me, you, and your tl can jam on it

137

8:58 PM • Apr 16, 2021

In short, a PartyBid is a pop-up DAO whose sole purpose is to win an NFT auction.

The idea was a response to a few drawbacks I see in NFTs. On the positive side, NFT auctions have found a clear product market fit over the past few months as a new, crypto-native way for creators to monetize their work, inspiring a wave of new people to wade into crypto. But I’d argue there's still an anti-social element to NFT bidding and ownership, for instance:

• Only one person can win an NFT auction, excluding all other collections put forth from supporters who might have wanted to get involved with a work. Obviously, that also means only one person can own an NFT.

• When you’re bidding, you’re bidding on your own. NFT auctions are single-player.

• Crypto whales have an enormous edge over more humble patrons in these auctions.

PartyBid aims to solve both the single-ownership and whale-dominance issue of NFT auctions by allowing bidders to pool their assets and bid as a collective. I see it working like this:

1. A PartyBid (or multiple PartyBids) can be deployed for any NFT auction.

2. Anyone can deposit ETH into the PartyBid, in return for a proportional stake represented by an ERC-20 token. They become partiers.

3. The contract can be called to bid on the auction if it has enough ETH in the pool to place the highest bid.

4. If it gets outbid, partiers can deposit more ETH into the PartyBid to make another bid.

5. If the PartyBid wins, the DAO takes custody of the NFT. Token holders can vote on what to do with the NFT.

6. If the PartyBid loses, funds are returned to the partiers.

The idea took off. Only a few days later, @_anishagnihotri built an initial implementation of PartyBid.

Anish Agnihotri

@_anishagnihotri

This weekend, you may have seen @_Dave__White_'s mechanism design thread. In it, @Iiterature detailed a collectors DAO for NFT bidding.

I built it: github.com/Anish-Agnihotr…

PartyBid lets you pool ETH, bid on @viamirror @ourZORA Reserve Auctions, vote on resale, and split profit.

github.com

GitHub - Anish-Agnihotri/partybid: PartyBid is a collector DAO that lets individuals pool capital,...

PartyBid is a collector DAO that lets individuals pool capital, bid on Mirror's reserve auctions, and resell NFTs. - Anish-Agnihotri/partybid

173

12:04 AM • Apr 20, 2021

A testament to the power of sharing ideas online—where they’re only ever a retweet away from a talented developer bringing it to life—PartyBid had attained minimum viable meme status. Enough people shared it. Someone built it. Now, Anish’s build is already evolving, boosting the idea’s viability in the memepool.

Yesterday, Anish and company deployed the PartyBid code to bid on Colin and Samir's auction.

Anish Agnihotri

@_anishagnihotri

2 weeks ago @Iiterature posted about a DAO for bidding on NFTs via @_Dave__White_'s mechanism design thread.

Last week, I wrote a contract to let you do exactly that.

Today, @jzlegion (@YouAreMatrix) and I used the contract to create a DAO and bid for @ColinandSamir's NFT.

90

8:03 PM • May 4, 2021

The success story even got its fairytale ending. The first PartyBid—deployed by Anish—won the auction for 9.70 ETH!

Token #2962

It’s insane what the internet can do with an idea in two weeks, but we can take it even further. PartyBid could use a lot more work. Improved and generalized contract code. An audit by experienced solidity engineers. An interface that’s easy to use. Integration with popular NFT platforms, where all the action’s happening. Even Mirror integration!

Meme power only gets an idea so far. To get to a production-ready smart contract or product, we need funding and coordination.

Introducing PartyDAO

What if a DAO could form around PartyBid with the mission to get PartyBid production-ready and into the world?

The PartyDAO experiment starts now with the $PARTY crowdfund. Here’s how I see it playing out:

• Backers can support the crowdfund with ETH in return for $PARTY tokens

• $PARTY tokens represent membership in PartyDAO

• The first feature of PartyDAO will be a tokenized Discord, gated by $PARTY. Backers will immediately be able to join the PartyDAO Discord.

• $PARTY holders will coordinate in the Discord to decide on a plan for governance, development roadmap, and how to allocate the raised funds

• 50% of $PARTY supply will be held back to airdrop on quality community members who'd like to participate but may not be able to back the project with ETH

The crowdfund will target a fundraise of 25 ETH, which will be deposited into a multisig governed by the backers. With PartyDAO, I imagine we could hire solidity developers to ensure PartyBid contracts are production-ready, hire designers and product engineers to build a web app and hire artists to create marketing materials, memes, and NFTs.

Those are just some initial thoughts, and anything’s possible. Ultimately, $PARTY holders will decide. PartyDAO is just an experiment, but I believe it could serve as a blueprint for how communities fund, build, and evolve open infrastructure, as well as how the next generation of collective curation could work.

I'd like to recognized the influence of amazing DAOs in the ecosystem, such as @PleasrDAO, that have pioneered collective collecting and have done extremely impactful charitable work. PartyBid stands on the shoulders of these giants and hopes to lower the cognitive and technical costs of DAO coordination to create a new wave of DAOs.

Let's look at two subcultures that may provide inspiration for how NFTs might evolve:

• Photography as an art form

• Streetwear as fashion

Photography was rejected by the art establishment until late in the 20th century, almost a century after it was invented.

They saw photography merely as a thoughtless mechanism for replication, one that lacked, “that refined feeling and sentiment which animate the productions of a man of genius.” source

Streetwear, similarly, was seen as a low form of fashion consumed by a low-brow audience.

Some important properties of disruptive subcultures:

Practiced by outsiders

• Photography: Camera equipment tinkerers

• Streetwear: Skater kids

Considered culturally inferior

• Photography: Not art, but the output of a "machine"

• Streetwear: Logos on sweatshirts, no appreciation for craft or materials of fashion

New marketplaces and connoisseurship criteria

• Photography: Collector community outside of “art world”

• Streetwear: Bespoke online and retail marketplaces

Both result in controversy and a rejection of the new form among the old guard. Both are initially adopted by outsiders to the dominant culture.

Eventually, the old guard starts to slowly embrace the new medium, because the economic and cultural opportunities are too big to miss out on. Finally, the new culture is merged wholesale into the old.

NFT culture will evolve following a similar trajectory. NFT art won’t be taken seriously by the art world at first. Crypto-natives will blaze their unique path and create a new culture.

The best example of NFT culture today may be community "portraits" of crypto founders. Every civilization valorizes its heroes through art, and crypto is no different.

nis.eth

@Iiterature

What are the best NFT portraits of crypto founders?

29

12:27 PM • Jan 12, 2021

Until the arrival of crypto, sharing information online existed in a technically separate system and on different terms than sharing value.

Sharing information is Internet-native—defined by interoperable protocols and file formats, encoded as bits that can be sent independently between any two nodes in the network. Sharing value, on the other hand, has relied on pre-Internet financial and monetary infrastructure that inherited all the political and technological limitations of those underlying systems.

Crypto's innovation is infusing value exchange with all the desirable attributes of a digitally-native information medium—programmability, interoperability, composability, virality, transferability. Importantly, crypto solved the one major limitation of digital mediums that previously made them unsuitable for a purely digital representation of value—scarcity guarantees.

Crypto protocols therefore blur the line between information and value. They encode value as information, and, consequently, information as value. Crypto turns media into financial assets, and as well as financial assets into media.

With crypto, sending five dollars to a relative across the globe is finally as easy as sending them a family photo.

This is why with Mirror, we're building a new publishing platform on top of crypto. We've seen the impact of Internet-enabled publishing over the past three decades, facilitated by the programmable spread of information. Now, it's time to run the experiment at the intersection of publishing and the programmable spread of value.

This is my new blog. Going forward, I will talk about Mirror and explore ideas at the intersection of value and information exchange in more depth here.