Bringing Creativity, Community, and Culture Onchain | Aneri Amin - Base

[Music] gmgm super excited about our next speaker coming from the exchange that brought me on Shain and has kept me on chain with all the security that provides great marketing we have bringing creativity on community and culture on chain with a ner amm in thank you [Applause] hey everyone my name is aner and I work at Bas leading product for social and creators so B's mission is simple but ambitious it's to build a global onchain economy that increases Innovation creativity and freedom and our North Star is 1 billion people and 1 million developers on chain and that's a bold and audacious goal and we can optimize block space and reduce fees and improve onboarding but none of that will matter if we don't bring people along with us technology does not drive adoption culture does and so if we want to bring the world onchain we need to make it where culture happens and that's what I want to talk about today one why does onchain need culture and creativity why culture and creativity need onchain and how we can actually make that happen so starting with why anch needs culture and creativity so culture isn't just art and music and entertainment it's how we live it's the shared beliefs and behaviors and incentives that determine what what we adopt what we create and what we value and that's why every single major technological innovation has not just been about the technology itself but about how people used it and created with it and embedded it into their daily lives culture makes technology feel in inevitable and it's what makes people say oh of course I use this of course I'm a part of this and we have a ways to go until it's unevitable so these are some of the things that we need to do to make sure we get there one is it needs to have a creative medium the printing press didn't succeed because it printed pages but it was because we it transformed how stories were told and ideas spread cameras weren't just a huge technological breakthrough but it gave rise to photography as a way to capture memories and it was a new form of art onchain will succeed when it stops being seen as just infrastructure and starts being seen where people create Express and build the second is that we need to give people a place and identity we need to let people feel their presence and stake in something bigger than something that feels like theirs and feels like they're a part of it and third it must power movements and networks technology doesn't scale on its own with just features it scales with people and when communities move on chain individuals follow so the reason I'm so bullish about building social and creators is if onchain remains just a financial and technological innovation it's going to stay Niche but if it becomes where people create and share and build together it becomes the foundation of the next internet so now let's talk about the other side of this why do culture and creativity need onchain so here's the truth the internet was not built for creators the original sin of the internet was that browsers never had built-in payments and so that means that we could share and communicate and create but there was no way to directly exchange value so platforms stepped in and they dictated the rules and they're extractive and I know this firsthand I was a Tik Tok Creator I built creater products at meta and I saw the power of these platforms and I saw the Creator burnout that came with it and so this led to a broken model where creators couldn't get paid directly instead of earning from the internet itself they had to rely on ads and platforms and middlemen platforms became The Gatekeepers of value and so they extracted content for free they monetized with advertising and they fully control the discovery and distribution and the incentives were just not aligned and so the problem has never been that the creators don't provide value but that they can't capture it but it's not just that the system today is broken but that we actually have an opportunity to build a system that unlocks entirely new creative economic possibilities creativity has always been constrained by the medium paint on canvas words on paper videos on screens but onchain as a medium is by nature more expansive it's Dynamic and it's composable and this expands the creative aperture unlocking entirely new ways to create share and own expression so as an example Zora lets you co coin your content so you can turn content which is the atomic unit of the internet into an instantly tradable asset with price Discovery and verality mechanisms baked in instead of Twitter that Nerfs your links forecaster has built frames which are links that appear as many apps in feed and far Cade which is Tik Tok for gaming is enabling remixes where Builders can permissionless collaborate with other games and add their own creative layers and create something totally unique this is widening the aperture of creativity and unlocking new tools and new possibilities so culture and creativity don't just help adopt on chain but onchain economy actually helps them as well so now the real question is how do we actually make this happen so culture can't really be dictated from the top down or planned like a product feature or a marketing strategy but you can create the conditions for it to emerge and this is one of our biggest lessons from onchain summer so onchain summer celebrated the launch of base and in our second installment it wasn't just a launch it was actually a call to action we invited creators and Builders and Brands and communities to be part of something bigger and a movement and over the past two years we've seen creativity spark small niches of cultural change and so I want to share some lessons learned in a playbook for how to Foster cultural adoption so the first lesson is to lower the barriers and widen the aperture so culture thrives when more people can participate the more people who can create experiment and remix the stronger the ecosystem becomes onchain summer works because we made it easy to be a part of we simplified onboarding you could get started for free mint we simplified wallets we and we asked people to build experiences that you could do in your first 60 seconds we also made it welcoming to everyone it wasn't just for developers it was for musicians and artists and Brands and Traders and Community Builders and athletes to be a part of and if you want culture to emerge you have to expand the types of people who can build on it and who can shape it culture isn't just what the top per 1% of people want or what coders are able to build but it's what the masses participate in the second learning is to reward the people at the frontier culture moves when people dare to experiment first the first movers are defining what's possible and if we want more experimentation we have to incentivize it amplify it and support it to those willing to take the leap like Jack butcher with open additions New Primitives don't emerge from safe bets they come from people who are willing to break the mold the third lesson is to make creation feel like play and not work and so the best creativity happens when people feel like the stakes are low but the possibility and the upside is endless and so part of why we hold onchain summer during the summer is because it's the exact type of energy and Vibe and playfulness that we need to create the conditions that people are going to build these breakout types of experiences some of these fun experiences that are happening on Base today include Ponder which is social betting and you can make predictions with your friends and you earn when you're right Moshi cam just launched Aura it's at the base Booth today and you can fill out some questions and get your own Aura and see who you're compatible with in frasia AI um you can create a digital twin and it competes in this massive competition against other people's digital twins for a grand prize that's I think now $250,000 so when it feels like fun people keep coming back the fourth lesson is to build for participation not just consumption and the internet today is extractive because platforms have turned us into passive consumers of content and not people who are actively contributing to the culture and onchain summer worked because people weren't just watching we asked for people to Mint and collect and remix and build a tari didn't just release an nft drop they in they invited people to stay and play and build with them so give something people to do not something just to buy the next lesson is to let creativity compound so every great creative movement Builds on what comes before it a song gets remixed a meme gets reinterpreted a token and a community grows and evolves and it unlocks new experiences over time onchain allows this inherently it allows things to compound instead of starting from zero every time and so create environments that don't enable just one-off creations but allow for ecosystems and ideas to flourish and the last learning is create the right incentives but then get out of the way the most successful onchain projects are those that we don't actually try and control the outcome we didn't Define what on train summer had to be we created the conditions and let people Define it themselves launchpads like clanker and flanch and Zora they're not deciding which coins are valuable they're letting the market decide in real time the best ecosystems don't dictate they Empower on train is not inevitable because the technology exists but it does become inevitable when people see themselves in it when they can create with it when they can shape it as their own when we bring culture on chain we make it inevitable that we can bring 1 billion people on chain thank you so much I'll be at the Bas Booth today if anyone has any questions [Applause] on for