Crypto, Social? | Union Square Ventures

Public Robinhood - a wacky part of investing in crypto is it's public. So there could be a consumer experience built around that. It's like Robinhood for crypto where it's a consumer experience to buy/sell crypto. But it's also public and social and you compete against your friends and have a public profile. Maybe it starts with collectibles tradin... See more

What makes crypto unique is its potential to expand on that familiar framework. The principal innovation of crypto networks is their ability to grow network effects by enabling users to share in the value they create.

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.

My goal and challenge for today’s issue is to convince you that crypto is less like the stock market and more like social media, where you can participate, build a reputation, and actually add more value to the network than you extract.

So crypto is a new way of organizing humans along with a new computing platform that has money baked into it.

Using the so-called “platform internet” isn’t always an investment, in an explicit monetary sense. Crypto can turn some of those passive efforts – scrolling, exploring, socializing – into financial transactions. What would it mean to live in a world where every single image, song, health record, Twitter “like” and blog post has a discrete token att... See more

Crypto isn’t just a technology, it’s an internet-native economy. Revenue is tracked in ETH. Key decisions are made with community governance. Transactions are enforced on-chain through smart contracts. Treasuries are controlled via multi-sigs. And value is captured with tokens.