You've Been Framed: The Future of Markets

Packed edition – Farcaster Frames, Headless Marketplaces, Mintellectual Property, and more...

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Forefront
January 29, 2024

Happy Monday!

Welcome to the 177th edition of the Forefront Newsletter, now more dynamic than ever. 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.

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This week we’re covering:

Let’s get into it…

Week’s Highlight

This past weekend was the most excited we’ve felt about crypto in a long time. The stars felt like they were aligning. The future of the internet was at our fingertips. Dramatic? You be the judge…

  1. Headless Marketplaces. Jesse Walden from Variant wrote a thread (and then an essay) on “headless marketplaces,” the former of which we featured last week. “In 2024, you can go to where the wallets are.” Marketplaces are no longer destinations. Instead, they’re decentralized protocols and modular applications that plug into the social layer: Telegram, Farcaster, Twitter, etc.

  2. Multi-Hit Wonders. The Variant team was on a roll. Earlier this week, Li Jin wrote an essay describing a future of ephemeral applications, where brands or tokens otherwise unconnected social experiences over short periods of time. Apps didn’t need to be forever.

  3. Farcaster Frames. Finally, it hit: on Friday, Farcaster launched Frames, a new feature that lets developers embed interactive experiences directly into posts. Over the weekend, folks created one-click airdrop NFTs, interactive polls, distribution-gated posts, and more.

Farcaster Frames aren’t necessarily a unique idea (e.g. Lens launched a similar feature months ago), but the protocol has a sufficient concentration of developers actively using their main client and the timing was just right. Consumer crypto is still the hot meme, folks are moving from X to FC, and everyone is asking, “what is crypto good for?”

Frames aren’t onchain, but the FC identity layer is. Wallets are. And the distributed nature of Frames allows for a whole slew of opportunities for onchain actions and plug-and-play applications. There’s already a live proposal for a Frames embedded wallet to unlock even more magic.

Web3 social has truly arrived.

What’s Poppin’

From the Zora blog, this essay discusses the evolving landscape of media creation and IP ownership in the age of AI and open-source technology. It highlights the challenges posed by AI-generated media, such as fake or remixed content, and the shift of IP into the public domain. While crypto brands – including Zora and Nouns – have widely experimented with open IP remixing, this essay more formally emphasizes the importance of minting media to establish provenance, ownership, and monetization options. It argues that minting allows creators to verify their media globally and protect consumers by ensuring they engage with authentic content. The essay also touches on the impact of these changes on brand value and the need to adapt our understanding of IP in the digital age. As minting becomes more popular, the evolution of IP will accelerate.

Speaking of Zora and minting, this piece from Fred Wilson explains minting in the simplest terms: “You don’t just tell the creator you like their work, you send them a tiny bit of money and you get to own a copy of the work.” With that interaction, the creator is building their own set of data that they own, not the platform. He then offers a future for AI: “The next obvious step is for companies like Zora to offer collectors the ability to train models on their collections. This turns their collections into training data sets. But these are training data sets the collectors own.” This is a simple yet fascinating piece that will surely have your wheels turning about the future of media.

This essay from Katie Chiou and Graeme Boy delves into the role of point systems in gamification and their effectiveness in user engagement and loyalty. The essay further explores the incorporation of onchain points, highlighting their potential for user identification, reward, and incentivization. The differences between tokens and onchain/offchain points are analyzed, emphasizing points' flexibility and direct impact on user behavior and product interaction. Finally, the duo discusses the future role of gamified points in communities and networks and their potential to enhance user identity and incentive alignment.

BlockchainBrett hits us with the "state of consumer crypto,” where he discusses the current landscape and future potential of the space. He explores the increasing integration of NFTs and smart contracts in various consumer industries, such as art, music, and gaming. He then highlights the shift towards direct-to-consumer sales of digital objects, and the evolving user experiences in crypto applications. Finally, he touches on the importance of gamification and user engagement in consumer crypto and anticipates future growth in areas like media and autonomous worlds.

Prediction markets are breaking out, with a renewed focus on the US Presidential Elections. Nick from 1Confirmation believes that Polymarket “is now a trusted information source for political events” given that Trump and some news outlets are regularly posting about it. There are “markets on everything and markets on random cultural topics now regularly go viral.” Carl Cervone believes that “Polymarket will be to the 2024 elections what the 538 model was for the 2008 election. It will go from being an obscure corner of the internet to a foundational source of intelligence.” As journalism is taking a beating, is there a future in markets?

Multichain Pill

Jupiter – the Solana DEX believed to have an upcoming token airdrop – launched WEN, a meme token airdropped to over a million wallets used as a marketing tactic for the DEX without actually creating any utility or granting community governance power.

It surpassed BONK in value and is clearly a brilliant marketing strategy for the exchange, sure to be copied by others in the future.

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Fun with Fundraising

  • Scene Infrastructure Company – an FWB-incubated software arm – raises $3M seed led by a16z.

  • Bagel – the artificial general infrastructure company – raises $3.1M led by CoinFund.

  • Axiom – the smart-contract data infrastructure company – raises $20M led by Paradigm and Standard Crypto.