Fairmint & the Democratization of Upside

Whether they acknowledge it or not, tokenized communities are so focused on token price that they lose sight of why they were created to begin with--the shared values and interests, the intrinsic motivators, the glue that is left when all other bindings are stripped away.

This is common with new technologies -- the first iterations focus too much on the technology itself instead of the user experience the technology facilitates.

If companies can provide incentives for early adopters to participate before critical mass is achieved, they’re more likely to pose a credible threat to incumbents. As Charlie Munger said, “Show me the incentives and I’ll show you the outcomes.” A lot of business models that failed in Web 2.0 will become viable in Web3. The next generation of platf... See more

The Internet is a new way to interact, so it’s only natural that 40 years after its invention, we will come up with digitally native ways to distribute and exchange value, unconstrained by legacy financial infrastructure.

Fairmint is like Kickstarter on steroids, mixed with Carta, embedded right in the products we use and love. They’re building the picks and shovels for founders to turn their equity into the most powerful tool to engage with their contributors.

As large platforms get richer off their users’ personal data and time, people are trying to regain control. We spent the last fifteen years working for gig money, likes, retweets, or follows. The platforms gave us reputation or cash, but no ownership, upside, or voice in its evolution.

In an excellent post, Kim reflects on the challenges of token-based communities:

Better economic alignment between platforms and participants is coming, and will enable the advent of true stakeholder capitalism to give billions of people the opportunity to build wealth alongside the products and services they love and use.

It is still incredibly early. Instead of thinking of crypto as a full-fledged product, think of it as a new set of tools engineers and entrepreneurs can use to build. Just as the internet in the late ‘90s was engineering-heavy and design-light, crypto thus far has focused too much on the technology and not enough on the user experience, too much on... See more

But as much as crypto fans want to believe they’ve created something startling and revolutionary, in reality, the experience feels: unfamiliar (payments happen off-platform), overwhelming (you end up in a confusing maze of wallets - jumping from Coinbase to Metamask to Uniswap, often unclear what you own), and pyramid scheme-y.