Bringing Web3 to the Masses, IRL
When I hear someone refer to ‘web 2.5’ or say ‘we are bridging the gap between web2 and web3’, I either 1) feel sick or 2) chuckle about the latest KMoney video
Web1 and Web2 unfolded as kid or before I was born. I have read books and heard stories of the bullshit peddling that ensued in previous eras, but experiencing it firsthand is completely different. Working in venture, the inbound deals have seemed to get cringier by the day — and the bear market mentality has honestly made it worse. I would equate it to the feeling of a bouquet of wilted roses being shoved in your face in San Marco Square. The desperation is palpable. The rickety bridges from web2 to web3 are getting flimsier by the day.
For those of you who don’t know me, I assure you that I’m extremely optimistic and excited about the future of ‘web3’. I also believe that ‘bridging the gap’ is vital to the sustained growth of blockchain technologies. Without a strong network of traditional entrepreneurs and businesses adopting the infrastructure, we will not have the impact we desire. Many of blockchains benefits seem abstract to not only the average user, but the average entrepreneur or business operator. Zero knowledge proofs, staking, remote procedure calls, and liquidity mining are not common knowledge nor should they be. This has left a chasm between web3 innovators and everyday innovators outside of the ecosystem, which has resulted in everyone trying to do everyone else’s job.
Artists are trying to do blockchain.
Blockchainers are trying to do art.
Restauranteurs are trying to do blockchain.
Blockchainers are trying to do restaurants.
And they suck at it.
Not only do they suck, but they are splitting their attention between their true talent and a side hobby they are trying to haphazardly do professionally. For the record — I am not trying to discourage anyone from going outside of their realms to stoke new curiosities and interests. That is wonderful. I highly encourage this and should do it more myself. But this shouldn’t be the solution to everything. We are less impactful individually than together, especially if we willingly lean on the innate talents of our peers and know when to take the backseat. Imagine how much more we could accomplish and create together if we worked together instead of as siloed one-person armies?
This is a challenge in itself. Web3 is as geographically distributed as its underlying technology. Many of its leading innovators live as ‘digital nomads’ or still work from home post COVID. They’ve built these amazing things, ranging from scalable blockchain infrastructure to decentralized asset exchanges to decentralized media storage platforms that can all run without physical intermediaries. This is remarkable. Much of this has happened in under 5 years and most of it has been in the last 2. Hard to fathom. That being said, we still have so much more to do. If you look at the most popular consumer applications and use cases, they are profoundly flawed and disconnected from reality. There are some exceptions — did you know Brooklyn Nets tickets are already NFTs on the backend? But the majority of entrepreneurs are still figuring it out and these different ecosystems and applications are tripping over each other trying to figure out how to reach these entrepreneurs and end users.
One could see how a smart developer or product builder may get lost in a self-constructed world when they are developing in a silo and feeding off the echo chamber of crypto Twitter. Most of these folks are smart, ethical, good people. These are people who got into this space with the idea of making a difference in the world through the technology we use. I deeply believe this. They might be talking about incentivized liquidity for shit coins today, but I believe they entered the space to improve financial systems, empower creators, disrupt surveillance capitalism, etc. And we need to get back to that. I believe what helps most is empathy. It is being around other people. They can be crypto people, but it generally helps if there is a mix.
This is part of why physical developer / creator communities are so important. From ecosystem (ie ETH, Solana, Near, Polygon, etc) hacker houses to co-living communities (ie CabinDAO) — entrepreneurs can feel more grounded by their peers, who may be able to push back on some of the hive mind assumptions that we can form in isolation. As much as people like to trash the crypto conference trail (and then proceed to buy a ticket to Token 2049 in Singapore), conferences are important vehicles of physical connection as well.
This is SO IMPORTANT. Since COVID, many technologists have lusted over their ability to manage a fully virtual work life. I’m all for having boundaries, having personal time, and not being constantly tethered to an office, but I believe the complete virtualization of our work, especially our collaborative work, is detrimental to our ability to experience and cultivate profound human connections. As much as the concept of the metaverse is thrown around these days, we live — and will always live — in a physical world. The day this changes please show me to Jack Kevorkian’s office. Anyway — the point is — if we want to solve IRL problems, it’s important we spend some time working and collaborating together IRL.
The one problem with these conferences, hacker houses, co-living situations, etc is the propensity for them to prompt a self-congratulatory reinforcement loop. Web3 people speak a different language. We really do. If you were to take your mother through one of our alpha chats, she might think we’re an alien species. If you don’t see what I’m getting at you are ngmi ser ;). That is why cross-pollinating these spaces with the non-web3 infected is so crucial to speeding up adoption. Having a diversity of web3 folks in one place may speed up vertical innovation, but we need a diversity of disciplines to speed up horizontal integration into society.
This is what made me fall in love with EmpireDAO. This is a place where we are beginning to bring web3 infrastructure and platforms together with entrepreneurs, creatives, and policy makers under one roof. Blockchain technology’s implications are more multi-disciplinary than any technology ever created, spanning governance, economics, computer science, cryptology, ethics, psychology, sociology, licensing, provenance, and so much more. We are creating spaces to truly allow these worlds to collide. We want to do this together. And we don’t want this positive sum approach to change. I believe we can accomplish this by respecting dunbars number and the principles of decentralization simultaneously. More on that — and EmpireDAO — in my next one…
While you wait, here’s a fun diagram the describes the ecosystem we are building at Empire. Reach out to me at andrew@empiredao.xyz if you want to have a chat about how the Empire network can help your business.
