Thoughts at the Intersection of Web3 and Creative Culture

NFTs and digital collectibles are primarily non-financial assets, ends in and of themselves. Stripped to its core, the former is driven predominantly by extrinsic motivations (cash flows), and the latter predominantly by intrinsic motivations (consumption value).

Equity will become increasingly disfavored relative to tokens, as the compounding benefits of community co-creation and incentivization increasingly outweigh the drawbacks of building a blockchain-based game.

My overarching thesis is that we are at the early stages of a multi-decade super-cycle of retail empowerment driven by the fact that “consumption, culture and community” are now tradeable assets. Consumption is no longer ephemeral, but persistent. No longer private, but communal. No longer limitless, but scarce. Consumption is, for the first time, ... See more

When professional investors look at GameStop, they see a company trading at a price unjustified by its fundamentals. When retail investors do the same, they see the symbol of a social movement, part investment, part status symbol and part entertainment derived from “sticking it to the man”.

The more interesting opportunity lies with “community owned games” – where enterprise value is not monopolized by equity holders of a studio but funneled entirely to holders of the community token. It will be very difficult for existing game studios to morph into community-owned ones – for the same reason that Epic can’t just dissolve and “convert”... See more

Mason Nystrom writes, “Web3 is about rearchitecting the existing services and products of the Internet so that they benefit people rather than entities.” If what web3 has enabled is for consumption to become collectible, the implications for gaming, art, and the creator economy broadly are profound: