Perhaps the biggest question is how will the ecosystem continue to incentivize interoperability and collaboration given that first party data is still very valuable?
This doesn’t mean literally everything is transparent - there’s a huge amount of nuance in how to maintain people’s privacy as we push for the benefits that come with better contribution data. For example, it might be enough to simply know that someone is being paid by a DAO rather than exactly how much.
We are at the point where we need the initial valuable apps to pull the data out and do the work of structuring it for many more products to be built on top. After all, the platforms that own this data aren’t hoarding it in private vaults - that was web2 vibes.
Put another way, we have to resist this skeuomorphic temptation to think that everything is better on the blockchain. Some things, when put on blockchains, just become the same as they were before, but on a blockchain
-Cleaner graph/standards. This will be an obvious point to anyone building in web3 at the moment, but the data is a (beautiful) mess. If you want to use a contribution graph right now — which people are connected to which DAOs and which projects and so on — you have to do quite a bit of manual work. For example, there’s no ENS type solution for... See more
-Clear applications for contribution and affiliation data. Valuable applications of this data create the incentives for bringing more of it on-chain. This is one of the primary reasons we launched Backdrop, but there will be many different platforms all building on top of this same data.