People are the New Platforms

Users are the marketplace. Uniswap points to the increasing power of individuals not just to build out platforms like Dune or The Graph but become platforms themselves.

But more importantly, web3 can let us transcend the limited language of existing platforms by creating more advanced living, breathing identities on-chain. Our data doesn’t need to be limited to our music selections or our conversations with strangers on dating apps. It can include our contributions to building communities in DAOs, to writing artic... See more

So much for the fat protocol thesis, we might say. The platforms of web3 start to look a lot like the p2p platforms of web2 and web1: the Pipes, the Airbnbs, the Ebays that win markets by capturing liquidity for rare, non-fungible items and services, their strong liquidity moat giving them strong commissions.

When people own their own content, including its data and metadata, they own its distribution as well. They become the new intermediaries.  People become the new platforms.

Web3 doesn’t just incentivize people to promote narratives by giving them open-market opportunities to buy and sell; it gives them the tools to promote narratives in place of centralized marketplaces that would have traditionally served as the toll-keepers for discovering items and information online. For as important as the incentives for shilling... See more

But there is a difference. Because: to get users in the first place, platforms have to increasingly airdrop their token that incentivizes users not only to use the platform, but more importantly, grow its long-term value by getting their network to use it as well. No self-respecting platform under the watchful eyes of the SEC would say that they’re... See more

But I would hope that in the future, the organizing principle will be you, your identity, your stuff, your digital goods, your connections, and then you’ll be able to pretty seamlessly go between different experiences and different devices on that. 

And second—at least in theory, if not always practice—the platforms are not much greater than the sum of their users. Because it’s the users who govern the platforms, own its token, and even use platforms to transact in the token.

The internet, we could say, is still running in a fairly agrarian economy, as that most precious digital commodity—data—is consigned to the localities of individual platforms: Spotify, YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, and, yes, Facebook. The metaverse, Zuckerberg suggests, is a railroad between these local economies that lets them exchange data with the u... See more