With the mass entry of talent into web3 over the past 18 months, we get to witness all the rapid innovation that is taking place as people reach different depths of the rabbit hole. It can be overwhelming for beginners in terms of deciding where to get started. It can often be tempting to take a product first approach and design the most efficient X for Y and so on. Though this ‘user first’ approach is tried and tested it can often be more helpful to understand the underlying force that holds all of this together - communities. That’s right. As Nick puts it, the product-first mindset is consistent with the Silicon Valley mantra “if you build it, they will come” but for someone building in crypto, “if you build it in the open, they will help” may be a better frame of mind. So today we think it is worth understanding the mechanics of communities and how we can participate in one. We are not really going to get into the specifics of what web3 is and so on as there are much better resources like a16z’s crypto canon series to help you out on that. Also I am by no measure some kind of web3 expert and this post is to double as a note to self. Feel free to pick apart anything that’s being discussed here in the comments, would love to hear your thoughts. Lets get started!
How communities work
Sarah Friar, the CEO of Nextdoor (a hyperlocal networking service) talks about the phenomenon of declining in-person interactions in this very engaging discussion. Humans inherently have this need to connect with one another but what’s interesting is that her company’s research shows how it can actually be healthy (surprise!). Her key insights are as follows: Small acts of kindness in real life have a great impact on the overall levels of well being and knowing 6 or more neighbours can have a dramatic impact on the effects of loneliness and social isolation. This works for in person communities but are there more universal themes to this? It is interesting to note how 90% of software value generated over the last 30 years has come out of companies that created a network effect. The other missing ingredient to communities is the sense of movement. As we have discussed before, people want to join communities not only to feel a sense of belonging but to personally develop themselves over a given time horizon. You can read more about this here. So what does all this have to do with building in web3 you ask?
The Bored Ape Yacht Club phenomenon
At the surface, BAYC might seem like yet another limited edition NFT collection of 10000 pieces of art but it is the perfect example to illustrate the role of building a strong community. To hear Eric Golden describe it is priceless:
“And so this was kind of a blue collar project that it had a vibe and a culture I wanted to be a part of……..And we bought this picture of an ape, and it was this fun lore of what would happen if everyone got rich from investing in crypto, what you end up doing, you would create this really cool bar and club to go hang out with your friends, which resonated with a lot of people. Like you're working really hard. You want to make a lot of money, but what's it all for? It's just to go hang out with your friends”
All these digital assets are actually membership cards that grant you access into its own unique universe. As a Bored Ape owner, you completely own the IP for your ape and you can use that however you please. This is what made this collection unique. When BAYC’s founders wanted to increase the size of this community to 30000, they did it in a way that generated value to existing ape holders. They gave each of the owners this ‘mutant serum’ (for free) which when combined with your original ape creates a mutant ape NFT which you could sell. Not to mention the fact that every time someone makes a transaction, BAYC gets 2.5% and a royalty. All if this is very exciting but it is currently very difficult to point at what the ‘fundamental’ is behind this asset. It is just interesting how this project has generated over 100 million dollars on their balance sheets and this can lead to more exciting and tangible use cases in the future. BAYC’s Roadmap 2.0 for example is testing out a bunch of things and is starting with an actual in-person Ape Fest in New York where a bunch of owners have rented out a yacht along the Hudson river to just hang out. The meme is becoming real.
Strong web3 communities
Borrowing from Nick’s post back in 2018, here are some characteristics of a strong (crypto) community:
Transparent & inclusive founding teams: Be it the BAYC or even Bitcoin (when it was just emerging), founding teams that are inclusive from the onset tend to do really well. In spite of being anonymous, Satoshi actively engaged a community of cryptographers by being transparent about his design decisions.
Ownership and incentives: Ownership and community are strongly linked. As with Nextdoor or Bored Apes (with their rewarding mechanism), we have seen how humans can develop a sense of belonging with those we share ownership with. It is important how that ownership is distributed across the community. Vitalik for example owns less than 1% of all the ETH.
Memes: A good meme can go a long way. We have seen this time and again. Calling gold physical bitcoin or BAYC’s ‘hanging out with friends' after making it in web3 or the culture surrounding CryptoPunks are examples of really good memes that support a thriving community
Utility: Culture cannot sustain on its own and people will one day get tired of changing their profile pictures to their latest NFT purchase. As we have seen with the idea of creating a ‘sense of movement’ with communities, it is important to build enduring products that people want to use. This is why a strong roadmap can help bring clarity to the underlying ‘fundamental’ of the project.
Participating in the Scenius
Historians have for long tried to find out why some periods of history are far more productive than others. The idea is to be able to replicate those patterns to create said productivity at will. No scholarly effort had been directed into these ‘progress studies’ for years. British ambient musician Brian Eno then came along and coined the term ‘Scenius’ which he defined as the phenomenon of ‘communal genius’. The renaissance in Florence or Silicon Valley would be good examples.
I call this ‘scenius’ - it means ‘the intelligence and intuition of a whole cultural scene’. It is the communal form of the concept of genius.
- Brian Eno
You absolutely need to check out this brilliant breakdown of the concept but long story short, there are external factors like increase in human mixing, emergence from catastrophe (WWII for Silicon Valley, bubonic plague for the renaissance) and internal factors like mutual appreciation, network effects of success, and rapid exchange of tools & techniques that make up a productive Scenius. All these factors point to where we stand today at the end of 2021. Call it the web3 Scenius or the WAGMI Scenius, it is an exciting time to be alive.
The complexity of the tech might appear to be the barrier to entering and building in web3 but a lot of the foundational principles are still being built. It does not feel very inclusive to look at it this way. Understanding people and communities on the other hand is something all of us can do. Be it DeFi or NFTs or DAOs, knowing the role of communities in shaping the web3 infrastructure can feel more inclusive and help us further explore this multiverse.