Fairmint & the Democratization of Upside

The digital economy has radically changed the nature of the relationship between customers and corporations. Individuals have switched from being passive consumers to being an essential force in creating value, either through their actual work (Airbnb, DoorDash, Uber, Sofar artists, Wikipedia editors, Airbnb hosts) or their data (Facebook, Google, ... See more

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

In the same way the internet was a democratizing force that gave everyone in the world the ability to easily create and share information, the next step is to give everyone in the world the ability to easily create and share value.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.