Edition 6: Assholes, Manifestos and Trains

• 🔥 The New Stuff: Someone had to guess an early use case for SBTs would be an Asshole token.

• 🏛 The 101 Stuff: Who's building the dip... building 🙏

• 🌎 The IRL Stuff: Old plants and new manifestos

• 📜 The Long Stuff: Proof of Good. ‘Proof of what?’ We’ll explain.

• 🏫 The Jobs Stuff: Did anyone notice no jobs last week? Well, you get 1 more than nothing this time.

I bet some smart MFs among you guessed that an early application of Soul Bound Tokens (SBTs) would be mischief. And you were right: someone created a means for you to ‘permanently’ label someone an asshole. Yes, you can drop an Asshole token into a wallet for just 0.05Eth, with a thorough explanation of assholery of course. The cost to get rid of the moniker from your wallet? 32Eth. That’s right. $62k at today’s prices. Cue revocability arguments.

Potential conclusions to draw range from ‘a bit of fun’ (this is potentially a great gift for dad’s 70th), through to possible libel. A stumbling block for SBTs? Doubt it. Perhaps more a chance to reflect on the internet we have now, and the one we will want tomorrow. While we do that reflection, the debate about SBTs rages on, mostly on Twitter.

Let's wrap New Stuff with some good news: Coinbase is providing $1m in funding through Gitcoin Grants to go to projects feeding and creating public goods

It often seems like Web3 is a spring orchard of possibility. Across the degen and regen ecosystem, people are looking to pluck some of that juicy fruit. New projects everyday, despite the global financial market conditions. It seems everyone is ‘building’.

The crypto space is powered by its own vernacular, mostly in the form of memes. As soon as there is a drop in market prices many scream “BUY THE DIP!”. The idea being that these new lower prices are great spots to pick up a bargain for the fabled return to 'all time highs' (ATH). Its day trading variant is a tactic fraught with risk. At its worst, catching daily dips and bounces in the highly volatile crypto markets can be reckless.

Combining ‘everybody is building’ and ‘buy the dip’? Maybe we get ‘Build the Dip’.

In fact some hugely successful projects have been built or iterated on during a long-term bear market: OpenSea, ENS, Gitcoin, amongst many others.

With the likelihood of a longterm bear market upon us we are about to enter the ‘Build the Dip’ zone. Why would these conditions create good projects?:

Each bull market brings new entrants to web3, but many lose interest when prices go down. The ones that remain during the depths of a bear market may be passionate about web3, or keen to see out the turbulence. If building a project during these times, perhaps they are not in it for the quick $$$, but instead to contribute to the space.

During a bull market projects find it much easier to find funding, investors are happier to spray money around as upside seems more likely. In a bear market, the funding pipeline tightens. A higher % of the funding available goes to projects that deserve it.

Attention and capital within web3 rotates extremely quickly during an upswing, new fads are pounced on. Yet during a bear market rotation is slower, providing projects more time to explain their vision, and for capital to observe progress a while longer rather than get distracted by the next big thing.

Regen could also benefit from a bear market as participants in the degen bull of 2020-2021 get a chance to reflect on their path into web3. We believe the journey from degen to regen will happen for many during bear markets as they look for more sustainable web3 technology to be excited about.

This momentum towards ‘build the dip’ is the context for @gregory_landua’s leading tweet:

It’s time to take stock, access the unique opportunities in front of us and coordinate for a better future.

The largest plant on earth has been discovered in the waters off Western Australia. Its over 200 Sq. km. It’s thought to be over 4,500 years old.

And whilst an ancient and sprawling organism becomes known to us for the first time, one of our favourite regens – Joe Brewer, of the Earth Regeneration Fund – continues his penchant for succinct, digestible, and operable insights. This time, it’s a recapture of Nobel Prize Winner Elinor Ostrom’s 8 Design Principles for Managing the Commons, repositioned by Joe as a manifesto for a functioning regenerative DAO.

Regen Totems : #3 Proof of Good

Regen Totems is finally back from a two week break after mind-melding with the thought-provoking Ohlhaver, Weyl and Buterin piece.

This week we’re looking at Proof of Good (PoG), a problematic that seems to have perplexed the crypto and regen spaces for a while now. The simple version is this two-part problem: (1) verify that Impact organisations are indeed having a positive impact, and (2) then reward those projects that create that verifiable impact and therefore incentivise actions that feed public goods as a new norm.

For the first question, answers are complex, highly subjective, and at worst paralysing. Crypto’s not alone in struggling with this. In fact, ‘measuring impact’ is a challenge the traditional charity sector's been grappling with for decades. I even wrote about some of the conceptual problems in my PhD (WARNING: do not read this snore-fest without a pillow in close attendance. Only three people ever read my thesis: two were my supervisors - they had to - and the third was my mum; she also had to).

And regen's embraced the challenge. Gitcoin DAO, for example, has made proposals for development of a proof of impact for Impact DAOs.

The second part is the fun part. The theory is that by funding verifiably impactful organisations (especially retroactively), we create an incentive system for work that feeds public goods, and decision-making norms that default to doing the same. This is what Gregory Landua calls the ‘high functioning automatic’, which you can see sketched out in his appearance on the GreenPill podcast.

Its theoretical right now, as so much is in regen. But the challenge doesn’t make PoG less important. Proof of good is so, well, good! So good in fact, it even gets into The Ministry of the Future. And while we’re on Sci-Fi…

Former GreenPill guest Phoebe Tickell posted this tweet, searching for change-agents with big imaginations. If you can’t immediately find the postings, then relax and lose yourself in the Train Story for 15 minutes.

Come back when you’ve finished and share yours with us.

Here’s ours:We who disembarked - the fortunate - flicked our gazes between the emblazoned train, and the edge of the chasm. At some moment amongst the horror - I don't know when, maybe it was minutes or hours or more yet - some one among us walked into the forest and returned with arms of sticks and logs. They approached the dwindling fire and lay there upon the ground the once living detritus in a kind of rudimentary track. Such as a child would make. When arms were bare but for shards of bark they would return to the woods and bring more. As we all watched paralysed we came to know that this new path aimed not to the precipice, but instead curled away in an arc to the forest. And over time, as the sun rose above the shrinking embers of the engine wrecked there on the steel line, they finished their path of twig and leaf. When retraced, this line led to the burning wreckage, and after a pause, a moment spent in reflection over the desolation, they walked back with snap and crinkle across the track, disappearing as they went, into the woods. And we all followed.

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