What is a Digital Nation? - Jaye Harrill

all right i think we have our next speaker coming up they are going to be jay harrell from quant stamp my friend and yours talking about what is a digital nation jay you ready hey how's it going yeah great um i'll take it away go right ahead so yeah i'll be talking about what a digital nation is today um i'll be unpacking the terminology that has been thrown around the space for a while um swarm web 3 open value networks etc so that's kind of what i'm going to be doing so you know we have this new paradigm well it's been around for 30 years now well 40 years now but you know we went from web 1 to web 2 and we're going to web 3. web one was very passive web to interactive interactivity with users and of course web 3 pre is where we're going web 2 started to have problems because of course consolidation in the marketplace and you became the product so what we got was most of the internet controlled by us a handful of few people a few companies and they're profiting off of the data that's generated so this idea of web 3 kind of goes beyond that of decentralizing this and it includes vr spaces includes interactivity and um many other kinds of spaces but we're going to kind of dive in more scoped more to more blockchain-ish so the future vision is of course there is no single entity um controls yet everyone can still trust it it's decentralized uh it has digital money increased usage usability scalability individuals use the internet without giving up their privacy and data it's an anti-fragile system again it's transparent opt-in um privacy when needed secure and we have control over our own data so we've you know people have mentioned this to adam so we all know this however you know the mechanisms behind web 3 really start um way back with open value networks an early example is sincerica essentially a collective accounting for equitable opt-in work um and this model can be applied to open and decentralized networks uh the idea isn't is to interact with other organizations as a collective be highly adapted fully decentralized and governed through distributed decision-making processes and resource allocation unfortunately uh they weren't able to gain traction but it did set the stage for of course daos so you know we heard early terms like swarm digital collectives you know removing um silos of data and silos of just thinking um so the idea of a dao it's a collective of like-minded individuals with common goals digital organizations without central uh servers no leaders hierarchies rules defined uh buy a smart contract that run on the blockchain and uh with the funding pool to issue new shares the concept of daos have grown over the over the last few years decentralized organizations um came to a head um a little bit later in fact uh techcrunch even um said that it's a paradigm shift in a variety in the very idea of economic organization it offers complete transparency total shareholder control unprecedented flexibility and autonomous governance of course we all remember where we were when uh the dao happened of course it was created in 2016 it had grand vision of of serving as a decentralized funding a model to empower development for both commercial and non-profit purposes um unfortunately it was hacked and it created a contentious chain fork which ended up splitting ethereum to ethereum and ethereum classic um i think the community learned a lot and you know we're better for it unfortunately this you know went to through an evolution and since the attack we communities formed dows to manage development use um adapted um various cryptocurrencies without giving control to centralized governing bodies and the traction just started to to form and what did we get we had the rebirth of dowse we had moloch metacartel in 2019 it was it reduced friction and organized people and resources and by 2020 uh it gave it actually came to a fold and gave uh people a reason to cooperate ultimately these these mechanisms of collective accounting are seen in various examples of of dows um conceptually like bitcoin which is more of a funding inwards and allocate work outwards via abilities we started to see the growth of defies and distributed storage systems and interfaces that make it easier for people to participate and vote these are some factors that drove the growth while the success well the the concept was already there it was becoming easier because we have successful examples to draw from more mechanics and infrastructure tools to mitigate some challenges around creating daos and these daos are shaping our world through self-organization borderless communities dao's web or web3 communities um offer a way to both uh for both technical and non-technical community members to find unique niches that resonate with them just like the market provides us options in terms of what we want to buy thousand web 3 communities gives us options for communities to shape the society that we live in and where scenes grow and grow and grow sushi swap is is a has has a dow as a smart contract but operates as a decentralized uh organization um of course it was launched in 2020 amidst uh d5 summer it was a code fork um of unit swap at the time um without at the time uniform didn't have a native token um and they positioned themselves as an evolved community oriented version of unispot of course we all know what happened um there was too much trust in one person and uh chef the pseudonymous founder chef nobi rugged everyone but of course later returned the the funds and relinquished control and now sushi swap ultimately became uh community run and we're seeing you know we're seeing communities in art spaces right super rare is a marketplace for single edition digital artwork it aims to offer the best collector experience for digital art it's essentially like an nft gallery it uses more of a curator model and nfts are driving this mainstream mainstream growth another example is zora zora it increases liquidity um for limited edition goods putting control back into the hands of creators giving uh them community giving the community power to create tokens actually be a platform for various platforms speaking of community tokens saint fame dao de centralized brand organization that sold fame tokens tied to a limited edition uh shirt created by crypto designer matthew vernon uh collab collaborated with uh grammy award-winning singer-songwriter sorry songwriter producer and web 3 artist rac to crowdsale a limited edition cassette tape version of the same name and he heads his own community on discord and and twitch so we're seeing these these like this idea of like community mechanics really really start to take hold on the music industry alone uh of the 40 billion dollar music industry only 12 percent is ever captured by the artist so royalty distribution is a problem and if nfts are fundamentally changing how we think of this personally i think uh drm is a bad application of nfts just because there's no collectibility element and so there's not really a reason to to mint them and of course blau released a single in 2021 everything on nifty gateway in january uh he believes nfts may become the fastest onboarding tool for uh fans and artists to join the web 3 ecosystem i love the quote that he gave i envision a future where limited edition nfps of songs or albums follow a similar structure to prince and photography or lithographs in art collectors are driven towards owning an authenticated copy that is digitally signed by the original creator or artist simply because that collector has a deeper personal relationship with the song which i think is very powerful and if you look at uh gaming communities actually infinity is creating or has been creating a digital pet universe players can earn tokens through gaming but more than that it's actually a play to earn model uh people have opportunities to build the platform play on the platform and and just work towards the growth of the entire platform itself and recently um some land on the platform sold for 1.5 million dollars so this idea of passion work community work and engaging social jobs as a platform is what we're starting to see in these digital nations sky weaver is another example it's it's essentially you know you can think of it like magic the gathering but digital nfts are the cards and they won't be additional minted um but you own the card and it's on ethereum and it's not owned or controlled by a triple a studio raid guild is a fantastic example of one that provides a service so they're a dev agency um of the for the web 3 ecosystem so their dev agency for web 3 equal system a decentralized collective of mercenaries ready to slay your web 3 product demons really they're a diverse group of talent healing from the media cartel network but they operate like a dao on a discord and they as a collective interact with other collectives or organizations um in fact we have even audited projects uh from dows themselves before wall street bets actually operates as adapter they're uh what what are they they're a reddit board um with a community of like-minded individuals decentralized structure no leaders or hierarchy and what do they do they act like a decentralized fund a large fund so all of these ideas since open value networks if we come back to that model and we apply it to say the existing crypto market stack uh using sushi swap um you know i took this this uh this picture in the corner from actually from the federal reserve bank of st louis um where they quoted d5 has unleashed a wave of innovation in the financial industry and i think that's a really special thing to see because people are taking notice so what do we have here right we have this community that surrounds the commons which is a bunch of tools which all work towards core products reasons or value prop you know in the tool sets we have discord we have snapshot we have documentation and then of course the the observer is crypto twitter and chef know me rugged and sent to an exchange but if you zoom out you have a network of interoperable communities with various value props for different people with different political affiliations how the incentive mechanisms are built and how the community takes care of themselves is community dependent token rewards make sense in this model um as it provides uh an opportunity for not just primary but also secondary and tertiary um in network work assuming the core product benefits uh as a produces a benefit an incentive that exceeds the needs of the core of the core needs of said community this example of post-internet platformism exemplifies a system where participants own the means of production via governance token mechanics not every model needs to include needs to include include a native governance token but some do the next step is turning these mechanics into systems that can produce public good or even public goods that go beyond that of the network participants of in-network participants so we're seeing these self-organized borderless communities these are digital nations uh communities are built from the ground up primary focus is on community profit is secondary there's an equalizing effect uh opportunities for people all over the world to partake in early stage product development and equity financing so where does this leave us this leaves us with this defy web 3 dow stack of infrastructure applications on top of that um with also their own communities very likely all of that running on ethereum or maybe another um uh another chain but by and large ethereum and then all of that sitting on on btc so we have this this this interlocking growing uh nation and so where does quan stamp fit in so of course we're proud to secure some of the most innovative communities within art music gaming and more and we strive to secure the assets and infrastructure in your digital nation thank you very much for joining me if you'd like to read more um about eth2 d5 hacks nft btc liquidity or more go to our blog quan stamp.com blog um if you want to hear just the the updates of our best stuff over the month uh scan that qr code and you'll you'll be linked to the to sign up for to the newsletter thank you very much for joining me thank you so much for uh coming here jay that was a great presentation everyone hit up quant stamp everyone follow jay on twitter thank you everyone