NFTs and the Future of Work

As my friend Dror Poleg wrote in NFTs and the Future of Work, “Technology will make it possible to compensate each person according to their economic value. That’s pretty bad news for most people, and very good news for some.”

Despite all this, most programmers still work for a fixed salary. It's too complicated to monitor everyone's precise contribution and to pay them each time they do something. But two important technologies are about to make it much easier.

"First, we need to explain the shortcomings of existing earning models. Traditional corporate employment is rapidly becoming outdated as a means for coordinating activity in the Information Age — we already see this in the emergence of alternative forms of earning such as influencers, contractors, creators, gig economy participants, and more. These... See more

As a result, more and more knowledge work will become as modular as physical work. Programmers will enjoy the freedom to step in and out of projects as they wish. But their work will also be coordinated, evaluated, and compensated by algorithms and protocols.

Ownership, via employee stock option plans, has been a powerful tool for incentivizing talented people to dedicate their skills to building startups in Silicon Valley. While this model has been extremely successful, it hasn’t been accessible to all, constrained by geography and legacy financial infrastructure, among other factors. One result is tha... See more