Web 3.0 and Community Management Heidi Williams talked to Daniel Ospina about Web 3.0, blockchain, DAOs and what they mean for community management
CAN YOU GIVE US A POTTED HISTORY OF WEB 3.0 The advent of Web 3.0 is as much a cultural movement as a technological revolution and the two are happening in tandem. 2012 saw the birth of Bitcoin which was the first application of Blockchain to create a currency. Blockchain works through blocks and those blocks are essentially data packages which are synchronized across databases. If you lose one of the files or your laptop goes down the other files have another copy which makes it transparent and secure. The whole movement was revolutionary and in reaction to a parasitic financial system. The first wave of applications on blockchain were around currencies but things have quickly evolved to more complex applications and the question becomes; how do we manage these protocols and who is governing these tools? Unlike a traditional programme in your own laptop or server, you deploy the code in a decentralised database, it’s out in the open so anyone can see it. The code deployed in the blockchain can encode things like ‘if someone sends some tokens to this thing, then those tokens are going to come to me’. You can add parameters and rules Thats when governance and the idea of decentralised, autonomous organisations (DAOs) started to appear. They are autonomous because there’s this set of rules in the blockchain. It’s an organisation because there’s a group of people using it to coordinate different things, to create a company, to manage assets. Fast forward to last year, and we have the ability to create these organisations in the blockchain and non-coder people like me could use and deploy. They’re still clumsy and there are a lot of things I cannot do unless I can read the code and interact with it but it’s becoming a lot friendlier. So we have the ability to create a token which only has as much value as you give to it, these can be inter-changeable or all different (tokens with differential values are called NFTs, non-fungible tokens). The code might say the owner of this piece of code owns a jpeg, or file or asset at this URL. And you can add utility – so only owners of this jpeg get access to this members club. 28
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HOW DOES THAT THEN “GET OUT” OF WEB 3.0 TO BECOME TRADITIONAL CURRENCY In the same way everything becomes hard cash, if people accept it as valuable. When there is enough trading in the market for you to have a market price which means that you know how much to transact it for. That’s how shells became currency at some point, they were rare so it’s not like you could create them out of thin air and people agreed together that they had a certain value and essentially they could trade it all around. You had that market price. You can then trade across any sort of assets so instead of trading shells for rabbit skins you can transact tokens for dollars. Suddenly it starts to connect to the rest of the ecosystem and people start to build software applications to make this easier.
SO IT CREATES A NEW ECONOMY, A SECOND HAND MARKET ALMOST - HOW DOES THAT FIT INTO THE CAPITALIST MODEL, HOW IS IT SUSTAINABLE? One of the many innovations in this space has been a mechanism so that every time an NFT is sold part of the profits go back to the creator. Essentially you create say, a content asset, like training and people need a token to access it. I buy it for $100 and then I am going to resell it to someone else but you only created a 100 passes for this course. At the beginning no one wanted it now everyone wants it because it has become very popular. I have so many people want to buy that I can sell it for $1000 instead of $100. In the code itself it says every time it is transacted you get a commission. That is one of the possibilities. But there is now a whole range of other applications that essentially talk about how you can have a prize yourself. You as the source can have a prize in whether you create new tokens which can be fungible or non-fungible tokens, they don’t have to be NFT’s. Algorithms program that, depending on how much demand there is, the price
