Between Mark’s admission of pandemic bloat and overestimation, Sam’s flip from badly dressed crypto-saviour to badly dressed crypto-scammer, and Elon’s on-again, off-again relationship with Twitter engineers, we’ve had a bunch of crazy weeks this November.
And with FTX wrapping up a year of drama in crypto, we’re as done with speculative crypto as we are with effective altruism.
With all that noise out of the way, though, there’s never been a better time to build!
So while crypto might be dead, long live Web3!
We couldn’t have chosen a more dramatic time to launch our Web3 Builders Playbook.
But it’s finally here!
And before we move any further, the Web3 playbook launches today. Get your copy now:
Protocols have often been dismissed by Web3 skeptics, as hacker tools that will only impact a small community. Instead, protocols — in combination with tokens — look increasingly likely to power the next generation of market economics.
Protocols (in combination with tokens) change the incentives and returns on production and disentangle consumers from the lock-in enforced by platforms.
Read the definitive post on the topic here: Pipelines to platforms to protocols: Reconfiguring value and redesigning markets
Web2 ecosystems primarily comprise market participants.
Web3 ecosystems need to consider participants not just at the market layer but also at the infrastructure layer, the financing layer, and the governance layer.
A deep-dive here:Unbundling the unbundlers – The end of winner-takes-all
Web3 network effects are different!
We need to rethink network effects from first principles and understand what changes as we move from Web2 to Web3.
For instance, token value provides an additional value lever to kickstart and scale network effects. Conversely, data and reputation portability, combined with technology interoperability, makes network effects much less defensible in Web3.
A meaty teardown here: Web3 Network Effects: Five Mental Models
Composability enables us to kickstart network effects faster. However, data portability also makes network effects less defensible.
One of the most interesting seeming contradictions about web3: Designing for composability and designing for forkability.
Designing for composability is obvious. Designing for forkability is counter-intuitive.
Here’s how it really works out: Web3 network effects: Designing for forkability
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