Sc3nius

The best ideas win, no matter who or where they come from, and those ideas are mashed up and remixed into more and more novel ideas. That’s contributed to an explosion of creativity in the space and will lead to enormous outcomes for the protocols and projects that embrace diverse participants.

Web3 is cooperative, and it’s also competitive. It’s fueled by positive-sum competition

Web3 is different than previous Scenia in a lot of ways, but maybe the biggest is that it began its life with money baked in. While other Scenia proposed radical new ideas, it was easier for them to hide away, for a while at least, and not draw authorities’ attention. Not so for web3.

Anish Agnihotri built PartyBid, for example, while a student at the University of Waterloo, and has more demand for his talents than any degree could bring him (he’s now an associate at crypto VC, Paradigm)

Less focus on credentials and more focus on doing the work means that the participants in a new scenius will potentially skew younger, infusing new creativity and energy into the scene, and blurring the lines between work and play.

The most important shift may be that credentials matter less than they have, and proving that you can do the work matters more. Between YouTube, Udemy, Replit, Optilistic, and a wide range of online educational resources, anyone smart and motivated enough can learn practically anything they want.

Friends with Benefits, the popular DAO with a $114 million market cap, has local channels for SF, Berlin, NYC, Asia & Australia, Miami, Canada, Lisbon, Paris, and more. Axie Infinity was started by a small team in Vietnam and is on track to do $1 billion in revenue, shake up the business model of gaming, launch the x-to-earn movement, and change em... See more

Those four factors -- human mixing, new educational models, institutions that encourage risk-taking, and catastrophe -- set the stage for Scenius.

I had a vague idea that web3 was at the core of a new Scenius when I started researching this piece, but what I didn’t appreciate is that web3 seems to be a toolkit for conjuring Scenius. More than financial speculation, web3 offers a set of tools that can align incentives in ways that allow groups to tap into their communal genius.