Bet on Songs, Bet on Artists

Music x Crypto shake-up, collaboration cookbook, internet companies, and more...

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Forefront
October 30, 2023

Happy Monday!

Welcome to edition 164th edition of the Forefront Newsletter. If you’re new here, we give you a weekly roundup of the best news and insights at the intersection of crypto, culture, and community.

This week we’re covering:

Let’s get into it…

Week’s Highlight

The intersection of Music x Crypto saw some interesting releases and turns this week. While Music NFTs have taken on a life of their own in support of artist autonomy and monetization, we have seen a less speculative approach to Music NFTs than we did in years past.

This week, some explicit speculation was reintroduced.

First, SongTech dropped on Base. SongTech is a platform that lets you submit any Spotify link to a song and instantly create a market around it. Once a song is submitted, anyone can buy or sell tokens representing the song, which increase or decrease in value linearly with each buy or sell, respectively. Artists can claim their wallet – and the associated fees accrued – by logging in with their Spotify accounts.

The platform already has 1000 songs, and while there is not friend.tech-level degen energy on the platform yet, it has certainly garnered some excitement in the Base community.

The second drop this week was from Alex Masmej and Showtime. Rather than song tokens, Showtime Creator Tokens allow you to invest directly in a creator. Holding a creator token unlocks an exclusive channel where creators can post both audio and visual content.

Both SongTech and Showtime Creator Tokens are heavily inspired by friend.tech, which has caught flack over the last few months for its extremely speculative nature. However, these implementations of social tokens are arguably already more useful (and more widely used) than most previous ERC20 implementations circa 2021.

Take Note. Music creator and content speculation is back, this time with low fees on L2s and a successful example (friend.tech) that founders are trying to emulate. While the UX has made massive leaps over the last few years, it remains to be seen whether this behavior is something that will stick.

What’s Poppin’

Folklore is back with another banger, this time from Ruby Justice Thelot and Rue Yi. The essay begins by observing that the internet was once decentralized, but now mega platforms create a shared digital space leading to culture clashes. Users retreated to echo chambers, then private chat groups with insider language, causing "Babelification". Unique slang develops in isolated online groups, causing misunderstandings when they interact in public spaces. Physical touch is proposed as an antidote, with "time-to-touch" as a new metric for social media to bring people together in person. Reconnecting online cultures requires understanding gained through intimate human contact and vulnerability. Fascinating read.

This drop from Metalabel and FWB is a new open resource for collaboration: an online collection of recipes for creative projects, as told by the people that made them. The cookbook offers instructions for collaborative projects featuring contributions from some of the most interesting and notable creative people and projects active today. It includes recipes from the Cyber Feminism Index, DO NOT RESEARCH, Extinction Rebellion, and more. Once you add an approved recipe, the team will send you a limited edition physical copy of Collaboration Cookbook — available only to contributors!

The essay announces the launch of WASD Guild, an onchain gaming clan that offers various membership perks like in-game alliances, team competitions, priority tournament entry, and an exclusive chat. The author is excited about the impending gaming releases and events in November 2023, predicting it will be a significant month for on-chain gaming. Key anticipated releases include Primodium v0.8, which will introduce co-op gameplay, Words3 and Network States from Small Brain Games, and PixelLAW, a creative pixel manipulation project. Additionally, This Cursed Machine, a horror-themed supply-chain management game, is set to publicly launch. Devconnect in Istanbul will host major gaming events, and tournaments are also scheduled, potentially shaping November into a milestone for the on-chain gaming community.

The essay advocates for Internet Native Companies (INC), which operate on the blockchain, addressing their regulatory challenges and the necessity of linking with traditional legal frameworks. It prescribes a three-step process for legitimizing INCs: onchain incorporation, legal personhood for smart contracts, and encoding laws onchain. The author suggests a "demand first" strategy to gather stakeholder interest as leverage for obtaining legal recognition of INCs from governments. The essay posits that the first state to recognize INCs will gain substantial economic and technological advantages. It concludes with a call to action for those in government and the Web3 space to support the development of INCs.

New research for Coinbase examines how young people experience and access the financial system (or not), where they think it falls short, and how they’re taking their future into their own hands and creating economic opportunity for themselves. As younger generations become more pressured financially and more disillusioned by the system, they’re also becoming more empowered by technology and emboldened by their growing influence as consumers and voters to do something about it. This report offers some interesting insights on how young Americans view the economy, the financial system, and the world.

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Inbox Signal TL;DR

The 13th edition of Inbox Signal went out to Forefront Members. Here's a taste of the stories:

Forefront Members get full access to Signal – our daily curated feed on consumer and creator crypto – every day. You can become a Forefront Member by minting a 2023 Annual Pass here.

Fun with Fundraising

  • Nocturne Labs – the company that wants to bring private accounts to the Ethereum ecosystem has raised $6 million in seed funding, led by Bain Capital Crypto and Polychain Capital.

  • Hytopia – the game platform and engine raises a $3 million round led by Delphi Ventures.

Take Check