PAST & FUTURE!

• 🔥 The New Stuff: Refi Summer? Maybe. We’re getting hyped for Dream Dao’s monthly Regen Ragers just in case.

• 🏛 The 101 Stuff: understanding the roots of regen by 101ing degen.

• 🧠 The Deep Stuff: DAOs new to you? Not to some, who’ve been effectively running them in Web2 companies and winning. 🔥

• 🌎 The IRL Stuff: Hold Crypto? Unless you’re a world-class market-timer, you’re being gut-punched right now.

• 📜 The Long Stuff: Self-sovereignty, the sovereign self, why they’re different, and why it matters.

• 🏫 The Jobs Stuff: Jobs, Jobs, Jobs, Jobs... Jobs all over the world (well remote).

Those brilliant people over at Toucan think we’re in for a ‘Refi Summer. If mid-2021 was the heyday of NFTs, mid-22, could be the season of regenerative finance on-chain. The conceptual start-gun being referenced was Defi Summer (when decentralized finance took centre stage with an explosion of alt coins and defi projects). Its Refi iteration, that some are hoping for I mean predicting 😉 could be a mass onboarding of degens into regen communities. People like this guy, who made his money from BAYC, and still felt meh.

Maybe to kickstart a seasonal bloom of regen, what we need is IRL hype, so we’re excited by Regen Ragers monthly gathering in New York!

You doom-scrollers need a downer to finish off the new stuff? Done. On May 8th 2022, some began to notice refi content being off-switched and deleted from Web2 platforms, like google and YouTube. What's going on? Your far-fetched conspiracy theories are welcome; indeed, encouraged.

DegensInspired by crypto’s potential, first in the early 2000s (and later emerging from the 07/08 crisis), the original adopters gave a blatant middle finger to the old financial system, and they got the tag ‘OGs’ or ‘Maxis’ for their trouble: people who bought early and now trade and hodl through the good times and the bad.

The next wave of crypto adopters were mostly everyday Janes and Joes, driven by FOMO, and drawn to the chance of life-changing returns in a fringe casino. This culture was short-term, and minimalist. These were the degens. Conceptually originating in ‘degenerates’ (as in ‘gambling’ and in the pejorative), they created hype and a flood of new money, a tendency now in retail investment which exploded during the pandemic.

Peer into the world of crypto from the outside, and you’ll see degen culture. But people buying PNGs of rocks for $300k ‘for the culture’ is not great marketing. Couple this with the environmental impact of blockchains, and you can understand why some people that care about the world, but don’t yet understand the potential of blockchain technology, are sceptical.

And yet, some onlookers understand what Web3 could bring to societal problems of coordination. The curious amongst them find regen.

Maybe regen is partially born as a reaction to crypto degen culture, maybe not. It’s certainly beautiful in its juxtaposition to it in any case. And while we reflect on that, many hope the next wave of crypto adoption, instead of being driven by FOMO, could instead contain an army of regens seeking to harness the power of blockchain technology to change the world.

Summary here people:

• Degen culture: borrowed or low conviction, hype communities, self-interest serving, naivety, in anyway & early (if possible);

• Regen culture: High and long term conviction, discursive learning communities, self-interest + public good serving, long terms games.

The past, the future, again.

Turns out Valve has been running a DAO for ten years. This rediscovered 2012 leaked handbook describes ‘Flatland’, a workplace where staff are completely free to form their own working groups (‘cabals’), centred around what they want to create. Valve says:

“It’s our shorthand way of saying that we don’t have any management, and nobody “reports to” anybody else. We do have a founder/president, but even he isn’t your manager. This company is yours to steer – toward opportunities and away from risks. You have the power to green-light projects. You have the power to ship products.”

This is from deep Web2 times people, and while Valve were at this caper between 2014 and 2017, they tripled streaming revenue alone to $4.5bn. Something to think about, and especially resonant with Phoebe Tickell, who on ch.12 of GreenPill talks about learning from Web2 world for DAOs.

Everyone’s had their arses kicked. Milk Road brilliantly sketched out – in a piece that reads like the script of The Big Short - one important part of this story on Tuesday.

But while we all wince at red fonts in our wallets, it’s worth remembering the human cost (as seen in sad and troubling messages on this Terra reddit). The Schumpeterian economists amongst us will herald such an unparalleled market downswing as a moment of creative destruction. But that doesn't mean we can't reflect on the opportunity cost for regeneration of public goods of $50b getting torched.

Oh and while we’re in a reflective mood, let's also creatively destroy the IRL and Web2 gender biases replicating themselves in Web3.

Here’s how this is working out: The Hustle report that women represent just a fifth of crypto holders, and own just 15% of Bitcoin. Of the top crypto companies worldwide, less than 4% are led by women. For this trailblazing new sector, this is some sad-ass laggard shit, given the top 500 companies in America (yes, from the IRL/Web2 snore-verse) more than triple that rate of representation.

Regen needs to build with this in mind. And people like Lucy, who spends time onboarding women into Web3 in her hometown of Barcelona so they can stake their claim to the future of it, need to be heard.

Regen Totems #2: Self Sovereignty

You might associate ‘sovereignty’ with a nation state, because in International Relations (the discipline), the word is a way of describing where ultimate authority rests within a system. For example, in medieval Europe, the sovereign was whichever royal reigned in each territory. Their only equal: other monarchs; their only superior: God.

In crypto, ‘self-sovereignty’ is a reduction of this idea of absolute authority to the individual level: to sovereign identity. In other words, it’s the idea that the individual rights of a person should not be governed or transferred to any other entity outside that person’s body. This includes expressions of that body and mind in data/digital form, on the internet. Moreover, it’s the idea that in the future, this owned digital identity can be the verification key to everything from memberships to purchases. It’s a concept that’s very important to crypto maximalists, and we see it everywhere from Balaji to Kevin Owocki and GreenPill.

Alert! Be careful not to confuse this with the idea of the sovereign-self, which is related, but has a slightly different etymology, originating in an extreme form of individualism we see in the writings of Ayn Rand. In the version of sovereignty Rand envisions, people who claim their sovereign rights are heroes of sorts, and should/will rise to the top of society. In Atlas Shrugged (a fictional work that serves as a potential-reaching programming-guide for some entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley), in the kingdom of the altruistic, the self-sovereign can be king.

The two get conflated, but this is (perhaps) the least of creators’ problems. DAO builders are trying to wrestle with complex challenges:

• Are people who are doxxed (their identity voluntarily/involuntarily revealed) functionally equal to someone whose self-sovereign identity is concealed?

• Can you verify someone but respect self-sovereign identity?

• Can builders create structures where head-starts are avoided, in which everyone is proportionally equal at the start-line?

• In systems where people have head starts, how do we disincentivise coalescence of and formations of cabals around areas of mutual self-interest?

Heirarchies, assymetries, and problems of transparency: although it sounds a lot like the centralised internet we have now, people building DAOs are working at this; grappling with some big problems, and iterating solutions.

Think to the future and we can see sovereign employees having increasing roles across numerous DAOs as non-identifiable contributors. There’s even perks and benefits companies already up and running to serve this community.

Looking beyond tomorrow though, and we can see the potential of sovereignty being extended to non-human species, to individual animals, and almost certainly to natural assets, like waterfalls, glaciers, and forests.

Let’s work towards a tomorrow where there’s still public goods like these to denominate self-sovereign identity to.

• Communications Lead - Toucan Protocol - Berlin/Remote

• Senior Solidity Developer - Toucan Protocol - Berlin/Remote

• Marketing Operations Manager - Gitcoin - Remote

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