Creators, Communities, and Crypto Part II — Fred Ehrsam

Fred: One other dimension people might under-appreciate is how automated getting paid for various actions on the internet might become as crypto proliferates. If you're an influencer on Instagram, currently you do various paid partnerships directly with a brand. In the future, it might just be you take a picture with a product in it, irrespective o... See more

Jesse: In the short term, the successful Web 2 creators are likely to do better creating NFTs that are not the original work that they're posting elsewhere, but rather thinking of NFTs from first principles, maybe as a new kind of digitally native merch that's distinct from the YouTube video.

Fred: Jesse, do you have intuitions around other ways multiplayer investing or “investing as a team sport” might evolve?

Fred: MetaMask announced 5 million monthly active users the other day. That's starting to get pretty real.

Investing becomes a team sport that you play with your friends on the internet. What's exciting is people now understand crypto is the right stack for doing that. Crypto is inherently social. The legacy financial system is not.

Jesse: Tim Sweeney, the founder of Epic Games, is on record talking about the metaverse as something that can only exist once you have a truly digitally native property rights system. Blockchains are exactly that.

I do agree with Fred that, long run, every single piece of media on the internet is going to be incepted as an NFT. And there will be markets for it. I don't think we get there by YouTube just slapping on an NFT widget to their existing platform. I think it will be more bottom-up emergent.

Jesse: If you play that idea out to its logical extreme, it puts both you and me out of a job. I think investment clubs end up dictating what people pay attention to on the internet because it’s no longer who has the most retweets or who has the most attention. Rather it's, who has the most skin in the game? Who invested in what? That'll expand fro... See more

Blake: On social tokens, I don't have a concrete way of how it will happen, but I think at some point, people will hold these tokens whether earned or bought, and it’ll unlock access to communities or access to creators, or both.