After Crypto

We’re building Metalabel with these primitives because it’s hard for us to see why we would, in 2022, make a web product that would trap a creator’s work in a walled garden, that wouldn’t offer utility beyond our walls, and that wouldn’t share value with the people who create it. These are radical and important goals — radical in a way that many cr... See more

3. Permanent agnostic archiving

The artist and writer Mat Dryhurst often says to blockchain critics: “Tell me what you’re voting for.” If you’re against all blockchain-related tech, then are you arguing for the current state and ownership structure of the internet? What are you arguing for, rather than against?

platforms and networks built on the rails of blockchains are able to distribute tokens of ownership to anyone they wish, whether they’re a founder, a full-time employee, or a valuable community member. Imagine if Bandcamp had been a Web3-native company — could part of the proceeds from its recent sale to Epic Games have been distributed to the arti... See more

Blindly dismissing any project that touches a blockchain because it shares the same plumbing as crypto is like missing the forest for the logging industry.

We shouldn’t need to rely on infinite credit cards or the Wayback Machine to tell future creators and generations the stories of our work. Because a blockchain is a giant public ledger, it allows for agnostic permanent storage and provenance that will become even more important the older and bigger the Internet gets.

So long as everything that touches a public ledger is vilified as a scam and part of some dystopian future, the number of responsible people and teams who feel inspired to thoughtfully explore projects that see beyond the constraints of our Web2 systems will be limited.

2. Distributing ownership and influence outside an organization

To say there’s an “after crypto” isn’t calling for the end of crypto or to discredit projects in that space. It’s to say there are potentially groundbreaking and perfectly valid reasons to create tools built around public ledgers that aren’t only about crypto. Our thinking needs to evolve.

After 18 months of learning and filtering with that lens, there were three changes made possible by blockchains that I couldn’t unsee: