layers on layers

today’s essay is a rough outline on what what structures could drive the most cultural and economic value in the coming years. many ideas shared here stem from people much smarter than me; i’m just building from them. my favorite form of remixing.

per usual, a tweet to set the tone.

honing in on adjacencies, mary goes on to say “adjacencies are about connecting the dots and intuitive, impractical logic — qualitative over quantitative. meeting in the middle. experimenting, iterating, observing. getting out there. leading by example. that’s how you create new”.

the founder of the cambridge english school, mansfield forbes, said this in 1934. speaking to students at the beginning of the semester, he announced that he would not “cover” the actual course. “i shall cover no ground - i shall teach you to dig in the most fertile plants”. it was said forbes skipped over “a 1001 things” and instead went for “a sweep of paradoxical generalizations, cross-fertilizing references from widely separated fields, tangential wit, and the explosive compression of meaning in puns.” holding onto the belief that every generalization carries cosmic significance.

since day one, the idea of "web3" struck me as a profoundly human and social movement that extends beyond just crypto or distributed systems. however, it's important to recognize that the impact of crypto alone is sometimes overemphasized by those close to it; leading to the exclusion of those who don't fully subscribe to every aspect. gaps between understanding and implementation. now is as good a time as any to start questioning reference points.

the following tweet could basically summarize a thesis around why i’m still energized about everything going on here. the type of “generalizations” we need to be making.

the next “faang company” will be a group of “protocols and dev tools”. the next “media conglomerate” will be a group of “protocols and products”. add and subtract. i want to try to further define this emerging trend that thesis-driven groups, in their ability to facilitate co-creation, revolutionize the way value is captured. 

“the rise of crypto and open-source culture has renewed questions around what a single company can be.” at this point, that’s widely understood. but we’re overwhelmed with protocols, products, and DAOs that quite frankly have no users. a tapestry of intriguing but disjointed elements. many doing the same thing, many more unsure who they’re even building for. i’m all for being delusional, but many protocols and products themselves seem to lack any structure that offers immediate relevance or long-term sustainability. the issue is pretty much this.

to support the claim that the next “media conglomerate” will be a group of “protocols and products”, i’ll regurgitate some of what foda went on to describe in that thread. at the top, there’s one core group of protocols operating around a single thesis. multiple sub-groups with differentiating protocol focuses. these produce various products that lie underneath said protocols. products bring together or separate the community. all products align broadly with the core thesis. all protocols work together to make the varying sub-groups better. a full spectrum of products and brands operating on varying levels of centralization.

there’s a lot to unpack here so let’s see if this makes sense. think i’m trying to make two points.

1. regardless of tangible use, crypto will have it’s influence on the structure of the next generation of great organizations

2. when taking it a step further, L2s will resemble those “core groups” and “starting points” for organizations

thought: are L2s the true containers that we originally saw be defined as DAOs? now, if you call something a DAO, it immediately becomes less powerful than if it naturally formed. and last cycle, the number of purposeless DAOs was insane. one thing became clear, we will always need some sort of centralized decision making; especially towards things protocol and product specific. looking ahead, i have to agree that the user-layer will be the primary foundation for the formation of DAOs. why? most crypto-products lean on the hyper-finantialized state of this ecosystem. not always a bad thing, but due to this, most should have little-to-no way for communities to form under a centralized roof.

got it. DAOs come downstream. and the core value of a DAO really resides in co-creation. so far, that focus sees closer feedback loops between organizations and consumers. not necessarily positive. consensus between the two quickly erode. 1% actually create and the other 99% consume. moving forward, an emphasis on having products and culture in place before new forms of collaborative creation can shape will be an indicator of actuality.

suggestion: the “organization” begins with the L2. building provenance backwards. “creating your own highway” in the words rainbow co-founder, mike demarais, on this recent podcast. L2s are “toll roads” if you will. the whole “culture can’t be forked” sentiment is true. but where does culture seem both strongest and stickiest? chains themselves. think this tweet below supports this idea nicely.

don’t have exact touch points of some of this playing out, but we’ve seen some primitive elements of these structures emerge.

a great example is partyDAO, a decentralized software organization focused on making crypto multiplayer . partyDAO develops partybid and contributes to the party protocol. their thesis revolves around creating schilling points for the sake of people coming together. build fundamentally social products with some sort of crypto primitive while utilizing the party protocol. feel like motives for their protocol-to-product structure also relate to this tweet discussing reusable components for rapid iteration of social apps. once a certain thesis is established around a protocol or a group of protocols, product teams can leverage that foundation to build interfaces targeting related use-cases.

considering L2s, the coming moves by coinbase and zora interestingly display an “opening of worlds” or “expanding ethereum” in their respective niches. coinbase and base. zora and redacted. the order or origin might be different, but they resemble the structures mentioned above. especially glancing through zora.energy. while promises of scale and lower fees are the primary value propositions behind L2s, a larger purpose resides in being an incubator that nurtures true culture. i remember reggie james saying “ethereum needs a creative director” and really resonating with that. L2s are those creative directors. another recent essay by lght called onchain hypercultures is a must read.

there’s definitely a few who have an inherent understanding of said aspects involved onchain. my tagline for the remainder of this is the layer is the label.

conceptually, metalabel also needs inclusion. a label which “facilitates cultural outflow in collaboration with the best people across the space”. here’s recent thread from one of their founders, yancey strickler, if you want to go deeper.

they hit the nail on the head if you believe a creator's main focus will be committing their community to the group that best fits the culture around what they’re trying to produce. i was listening to a podcast by chaser chapman recently and she mentioned, “a creator's distribution isn’t predetermined by the products that they use, but the protocol they associate with - creators provide liquidity in the form of content which in turn inform these groups as to where to invest infrastructure.” once a creator finds a fit, the group turns into a distribution engine.

generally speaking, maybe it’s “i’m going to use base to iterate on my defi product…etc.” users are going to be choosing worlds based on general actions rather than individual purpose. finding “cores” and jumping around different things under that umbrella. i’m interested to see L2s embody a particular aesthetic more than anything. some of this sounds wack, but we’ll see. so far, most traction has been on the defi side of things. the rest is under-explored.

anyways, i really think that the structures mentioned above will host the most influential “conglomerates” of the new internet. the “apples, berkshires, warners”. and they won’t look the same. we’re moving into the era of small, big teams. protocols can’t always capture value alone, but they enable products to. same reason any traditional “conglomerate” has so many distribution channels. brand will continue to play the biggest role in the next generation. you don’t want to throw everything on ethereum. and i’m not emphasizing “fees” as the reason for this. you could compare the shift to commenting under a random instagram picture. it’s visible to your friends and visible to the public too. but your friends aren’t going to see it unless they see that same post by chance, and a few random people will see it but they don’t care who you are. these things may seem mundane now, but they’re a big part of connecting all the dots. to re-enchant the internet is to define new containers for stories to exist.

i want to close with highlighting the classic mcluhan idea "the medium is the message". a simple call to stop obsessing over the explicit content of a message and start recognizing the profound influence of the medium itself. so many remain entangled in outdated narratives and predefined frameworks for crypto. i’m just so bored of things built to serve like the same group of 30 people with no taste. by showcasing new, collaborative potentials of these structures, we can better identify the missing pieces needed to achieve some sort of continuity. teams bringing ideas to life that are fresh and currently uncapturable. builders inspired by “onchain culture” to create beautiful companies that only touch crypto from a philosophical standpoint.

maybe what i’m really getting at is that moving forward, companies will act more like labels, labels are best operated with a crypto frameworks in mind, and these organizations will exist on L2 blockchains. a lot of this can absolutely sound like fluff; currently working on some research that will serve as some sort of case study on this. honing in on the music industry and curation. “the layer is the label.”

ps: let me know if you have any thoughts or if i’m be thinking about these things in a weird way. ok bye for now.