Posts from blockchain

I've Moved Onchain

Over the last few years, I’ve moved my internet life from web2 to web3 and rarely use any web2 services anymore.

So I am starting a series called “I’ve Moved Onchain” to explain this journey to everyone and today’s opening post is about blogging, naturally.

I’ve blogged at AVC.com for a very long time. I started out in September 2003 at avc.typepad.com but moved to avc.com a few years later.

AVC.com has been my home for blogging for over twenty years.

AVC.com has served me very well over the years but it lacks a few things that really matter to me.

First, the posts are stored in a closed database hosted by me in the cloud.

Second, the services that I use to create AVC.com are not “composable” meaning that others cannot build things on top of AVC.com and the services that create and display the posts I create here.

Third, the identities of the authors (me) and readers (you) here at AVC.com are not tied to any sort of portable identity and reputation system.

While none of these issues may seem like a big deal to you, they are huge deal to me as I will explain in a bit.

So when web3 blogging services started cropping up, I started to use them.

My first rodeo was at Mirror.xyz where I kept avc.mirror.xyz for most of 2021, 2022, and 2023. This was my first post at avc.mirror.xyz on March 18, 2021.

I really wanted to blog at AVC.xyz and that became an option for me in November 2023 when I joined Paragraph.xyz and wrote this Hello World post.

These web3 blogging platforms store all of my posts onchain at Arweave. These posts are available to anyone to read regardless of what blogging platform I use. And if I get abducted by an alien and fail to pay my hosting service, they will still exist onchain. Forever. That’s a huge deal to me.

They are also composable web3 services. Any developer can take what I create at AVC.xyz and build on top of it. That’s also a huge deal to me. My partner Nick describes the composability benefit so well in his post today on USV.com.

And my identity and the identity of my readers are mapped to a web3 wallet address that authenticates who they are, what they do onchain, and allows developers to create reputation systems on everyone. Given my fight with spam and trolls and jerks and assholes that largely drove me away from blogging and commenting in the latter part of the last decade, this last bit really matters to me.

At the start of this year, I took everyone who receives an email when I post here at AVC.com and imported that email list to Paragraph.xyz. So a lot of the AVC readers have been getting emails of my posts at AVC.xyz this year. But even so, I still get a ton of daily traffic here at AVC.com and I have not posted anything new here since January 10, 2024.

I do not plan to post here at AVC.com going forward, but I will keep the archive up and I may choose to cross-post a thing or two here whenever I want to reach the broadest audience.

My home for blogging is and has been onchain for a while now and if you want to follow my writing, please go visit avc.xyz and subscribe to receive my blog posts via email by clicking the green subscribe button on the upper right.

But what about Mirror.xyz and avc.mirror.xyz? you might ask.

Well, I am also thrilled to be able to say that Mirror and Paragraph have merged and these two leading web3 blogging services will now be one. And, as you may know or suspect, USV has invested in both of them and now will be a major shareholder in the merged company. I am very excited about that. Here is Paragraph’s blog post about the transaction and here is Mirror’s.

The team that built Mirror.xyz is now turning their attention to a new app called Kiosk and they blogged about that today. So USV is now also an investor in that project.

Over the last thirty years, our lives moved from offline to online. They are now moving onchain. That’s a wonderful thing and I hope you will join me in moving onchain as well.

#blockchain#crypto#Web3#Weblogs

Read Write Own

Chris Dixon, who leads the A16Z crypto fund, and has been an entrepreneur, VC, and friend of mine for over twenty years, has written a book called Read Write Own that is available for pre-order now and will start shipping at the end of the month. Chris gave me a copy right before the holidays and I read it over the last week.

I asked Chris why he wrote the book and he had two answers, one personal and one practical. The personal one is “I have focused my career on investing in blockchain networks. During the recent downturn, I felt a need to rearticulate to myself why I am doing that.”  The practical one is “I want to explain blockchain networks to young adults who are thinking about where to start their careers, to the mother of the software engineer at Coinbase who wants to understand what her child is working on, and to lawmakers and regulators in DC who need to understand why they are important.”

What Chris calls Blockchain Networks, I call Web3. The term Web3 is important to me because my investing career first took meaning during the initial phase of the web, which I think of as Web1. It took off during the second phase of my career which many call Web2. And I’ve spent the last decade of my career imagining what a better version could be, which I call Web3.

Chris takes the same journey but he calls these phases Read, Write, and Own. The initial phase of the web, when the web browser arrived, was mostly a reading experience. Then in the early 2000s, the web became two-way and we could Read and Write. What Blockchain Networks have unlocked is the ability to own things on the web. You can own your identity. You can own your social media posts. You can own your money. You can own your art. You can own your music. And so on and so forth.

Chris’s book has three parts. The first part is a history of the web and how we got to where we are right now. The second part is a detailed description of what makes Blockchain Networks work and why they are important and powerful. The third and final part is a series of descriptions of new kinds of applications that are being built on Blockchain Networks.

While I enjoyed all three parts of the book, I was energized by the final section. Chris imagines a future that is very different from where we are today. It is one I very much want to see emerge. I think you will too.

You can pre-order Read Write Own here.I encourage you to do that. I expect you will turn that last page and be excited, like I am, about what is coming now that we can own the Internet instead of it owning us.

#blockchain#crypto#Web3

Software That You Can't Shut Down

The term “censorship resistant” is used a lot in the decentralized computing/web3/crypto space to talk about a core feature of these systems. I don’t love the term censorship resistant because it is a wonky term.

Software that is encoded in smart contracts (and other ways) on fully decentralized blockchains can’t be shut down or turned off.

So why is this a big deal?

Let’s make up a story:

Imagine that an AI is trained to teach children to read better than humans. But the powers that be decide that teaching children to read is something that humans need to do. So they make this AI illegal and block access to it.

Well if this AI is written in a smart contract on a fully decentralized blockchain, it can’t be shut down. As long as there are nodes somewhere around the world willing to maintain the blockchain, this AI will continue to run and anyone that has access to the Internet will be able to use it.

That’s a made-up story, but hopefully, you get the point. I picked AIs and education, but you could also go with self custody and your money. Or you could go with image detection and speeding cameras.

The point is that the powers that be have, from time to time, decided that certain things are bad and attempted to shut them down. Alcohol, for example. Or sex between two people who love each other, for example. Or books about racism, for example.

Fully decentralized blockchains offer something powerful. Software that can’t be turned off. Data that is open to everyone. AIs that can’t be shut down.

We are in a moment with enormous posibilities brought on by the computer science revolutions in machine learning, decentralized systems, and new user interfaces. It will be tempting for powerful entrenched interests to seek to put the genie back in the bottle on some of this stuff. But if the genie is deployed on a fully decentralized blockchain, there is no going back in the bottle.

#blockchain#crypto#machine learning#Web3

What Will Happen In 2023

I want to focus this post on the macro environment for tech, startups, web3, and climate because that is where my head is at right now.

I believe that sometime in the first half of 2023, the central banks around the world will start backing off the tightening that they have been engaged in as inflation continues to ease and the economy continues to cool. Interest rates will level off in the first half of 2023 and I think there is a good chance of a “soft landing” or a very mild recession in 2023.

With that macro view in mind, what would that mean for tech, startups, and web3?

The largest tech companies will emerge from this downturn leaner and more profitable and growing more slowly. They will be mature businesses that behave like the blue chips that they are. I think these companies, like Apple, Amazon, and possibly Google, will see their stocks come back into favor ahead of everything else in tech. I am hedging on Google because I believe the massive advances in AI/ML that we are seeing right now may be a threat to their core search franchise.

Startups are going to have a tough year in 2023. While many have gotten their burn rates way down, most startups still are losing money and will eventually need to raise capital in 2023. Because most startups avoided raising in 2022, there will be a glut of startup companies in the market for capital this year and while there is plenty of venture capital sitting on the sidelines waiting to be deployed, VCs will be much more selective, instead of funding everything that moves as we’ve done over the last few years.

Good businesses with product market fit, positive unit economics, and strong leadership teams will raise capital although it will be at the new normal in terms of valuation. I believe that “new normal” is more or less where we were in 2015 where seed rounds were done around $10mm, A rounds were done around $15mm to $25mm, B rounds were done around $25mm to $50mm, and growth rounds had a cap at 10x revenues. This new normal will lead to many flat rounds, down rounds, inside rounds, and rounds with a lot of structure on them. None of that is good, but the worst of those options is rounds with a lot of structure. I believe founders and CEOS and Boards should take the pain of a new valuation (flat, down, whatever) over structure.

But there is a huge number of startups out there that have not really found product market fit, have not created positive unit economics, and have unresolved issues in their founding teams and leadership teams. These startups will struggle to raise capital at any price and most of them will fail. This has already started to happen but because so much capital was raised in 2021 and the early part of 2022, it has taken longer for these companies to fail. I think we will see a lot of startups in this category go under or taken out in fire sales in the first half of 2023.

While all of that sounds gloomy and downright horrible, I do think the startup sector will end the year in a much better place. The good companies will have gotten funded, the bad ones will have shut down, and VCs will be back to competing with each other to win deals, which is where founders always want VCs to be.

I think web3 will behave similarly in some respects but different in others.

I think the large caps in web3 (BTC and ETH mainly) will start to attract more interest from investors and should do well in 2023. I am more bullish on ETH personally because it has the best underlying economic model of any web3 asset.

Like the startup sector more broadly, web3 will go through a triage of sorts in 2023. Projects and protocols that have found product market fit, have real token economics, and ship new features quickly will attract new interest and rise in value. But many web3 projects have not found product market fit, have weak or no token economics, and do not execute well and I think we will see many of them continue to flounder and fail in 2023.

There is a much larger overhang in web3 right now when compared to the broader startup and tech sectors. There are entities that are insolvent but have not been restructured. There are funds that are so far under water that they may be forced to liquidate. These kinds of activities will produce ongoing sell pressure on web3 tokens for at least the first quarter of 2023 and maybe for much longer.

While there are compelling values out there in web3, I am not convinced that it is safe to go back into the water just yet unless you have a very strong stomach and a very long time horizon.

Climate, where USV has been actively investing for the last three years and now has two funds dedicated to the sector, has mostly been spared the carnage that has hit the other parts of USV’s portfolio. 2022 brought largely good news to the sector in the form of the oddly named Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) that will flow billions of dollars of capital into the sector over the next decade. Many leading VC firms have dedicated climate funds now and we see huge amounts of capital available for climate startups with strong teams and novel approaches.

Last year I predicted 2022 would be a big year for carbon credits and while we saw a lot of growth in the market for these credits, particularly among the large tech companies, I was way too optimistic about how fast the market would grow. That said, I think 2023 will bring more growth in this market which provides the underlying business model to many of the new climate startups VCs are funding right now.

We are also seeing a noticeable movement of tech and startup talent into the climate sector in search of new problems to solve, more meaning in their work, and many more job openings too. I think 2023 will be a big year for this talent migration.

There is a pattern to much of this and it is that 2023 is going to be a tough year for most but those that get through it should find themselves in a good place, with leaner cost structures, less competition, and healthier employer/employee dynamics. Surviving is thriving in 2023.

So to everyone who is reading this, Happy 2023. Buckle up, hang tough, and be smart.

#blockchain#climate crisis#crypto#economics#employment#entrepreneurship#management#stocks#VC & Technology#Web/Tech#Web3

What Happened In 2022

I like to bookend the New Year holiday with two posts, one looking back at the year that is ending and one looking forward to the year ahead. This is the first of these two posts. The second one will run tomorrow.

What happened in 2022 is the bottom fell out of the capital markets and the startup and tech sector more broadly.

Back in February 2021, I wrote a post called How This Ends. In it, I wrote:

I believe it ends when the Covid 19 pandemic is over and the global economy recovers. Those two things won’t necessarily happen at the same time. There is a wide range of recovery scenarios and nobody really knows how long it will take the global economy to recover from the pandemic.

But at some point, economies will recover, central banks will tighten the money supply, and interest rates will rise. We may see price inflation of consumer goods and labor too, although that is less clear.

When economies recover and interest rates rise, the air will come out of the asset price bubbles that have built up and the go go markets will hit the brakes.

I went on to say that I had no idea when all of that would happen, but I was confident it would.

Well, it happened in 2022.

The air came out of the asset price bubbles that had built up over the last decade and were accelerated/exaggerated by the pandemic. There have been a number of other factors at work, like a war in Europe, that made things even worse, but it is my view that most of what happened in 2022 was entirely predictable, expected, and necessary.

In the areas that USV works in; tech, startups, and web3, there have been a number of important downstream effects of the popping of the bubble and they are worth enumerating.

As the capital markets, including crypto/web3, came undone, companies reacted by adjusting their burn rates to reflect that the growth at any cost phase was over and it was time to get on a path to breakeven. That has meant layoffs across the tech, startup, and web3 sectors. The voracious appetite for talent has waned. Spending for growth has largely stopped and most tech companies and startups are growing more slowly but with better unit economics and lower cash burn.

Some startups have failed, particularly the ones with upside-down unit economics or with a lack of product market fit. I think we have just seen the start of this trend and I plan to talk more about this in tomorrow’s post.

The sector with the largest impact, obviously, has been web3. Many large centralized entities; lenders, exchanges, crypto funds, etc, blew up when the value of web3 assets declined 70-90% over the course of 2022. The carnage has been massive and reminds me of what happened to the web sector in 2000/2001. Some of this has been markets doing their thing, but not all of it was. There was fraud, mismanagement, irresponsible risk-taking, and more, at play in the web3 sector.

And yet, I am not aware of any leading decentralized protocols blowing up in 2022. The smart contracts that run these protocols did what they were programmed to do and they have come through intact. It is a testament to the power of decentralized protocols over centralized entities and, for me, the major lesson of 2022 in web3.

I used the word necessary a few paragraphs ago to describe what happened in 2022. I understand that this year has been painful for most and devastating for many. I am not immune to it. Our family’s net worth has taken a massive hit. The carrying value of USV’s assets under management has been cut in half this year. And yet, I am fine, my family is fine, and USV is fine. Many are not. I understand that and have a lot of empathy for those who lost so much, including their jobs, this year.

And yet, I know that the unwinding of an unhealthy and unsustainable growth at all costs/cheap capital environment was necessary and will be healthy in the long run. We already see many of our portfolio companies operating at much more sensible cost structures with clear paths to profitability at much lower growth rates.

The ending of the war for talent in tech also is incredibly healthy. Some leading tech company CEOs I know believe they can operate with much lower headcounts in product/engineering/design than they have been for the long term. That talent can move into new startups and new growth areas, like climate and healthcare, that need it.

Like all transitions, this is messy, painful, disruptive, and ugly. And this year has been all of that and more. I am happy to see it in the rearview mirror and looking forward to better things in 2023. Which will be my topic for tomorrow.

#blockchain#crypto#Current Affairs#economics#employment#entrepreneurship#management#stocks#VC & Technology#Web/Tech#Web3

Sign Everything

The advances in AI over the last year are mind-boggling. I attended a dinner this past week with USV portfolio founders and one who works in education told us that ChatGPT has effectively ended the essay as a way for teachers to assess student progress. It will be easier for a student to prompt ChatGPT to write the essay than to write it themselves.

It is not just language models that are making huge advances. AIs can produce incredible audio and video as well. I am certain that an AI can produce a podcast or video of me saying something I did not say and would not say. I haven’t seen it yet, but it is inevitable.

So what do we do about this world we are living in where content can be created by machines and ascribed to us?

I think we will need to sign everything to signify its validity. When I say sign, I am thinking cryptographically signed, like you sign a transaction in your web3 wallet.

I post my blogs at AVC.com and also at AVC.Mirror.xyz which is a web3 blogging platform that allows me to sign my posts and store them on-chain. This is an attestation at the end of last week’s blog post.

You can see that “author address” and click on it to see that it is one of the various web3 addresses I own/control. That signifies that it was me who posted the blog. It is also stored on-chain on the Arweave blockchain so that the content exists independently of the blogging platform. That is also important to me.

I think AI and Web3 are two sides of the same coin. As machines increasingly do the work that humans used to do, we will need tools to manage our identity and our humanity. Web3 is producing those tools and some of us are already using them to write, tweet/cast, make and collect art, and do a host of other things that machines can also do. Web3 will be the human place to do these things when machines start corrupting the traditional places we do/did these things.

#art#blockchain#bots#crypto#digital collectibles#hacking education#machine learning#non fungible tokens#streaming audio#VC & Technology#Web/Tech#Web3

NFT Art CDMX

We spent this past weekend in Mexico City at Bright Moment’s NFT Art CDMX. Bright Moments is the premier NFT art “gallery” in the world. I use that term in parentheses because Bright Moments is much more than a gallery but that word is well understood. USV is a member of the Bright Moments DAO.

Over the course of the weekend, eleven leading NFT artists minted new generative artworks one by one in minting rooms where the collector and the artist saw the work revealed together.

Because there were eleven artists minting their work and also the 1000 mexican cryptocitizens (called Mexas) being minted all at the same time, there was a “live feed” of all of this minting activity in the center of the space.

Hanging out in the main space and witnessing all of the fantastic art coming to life for the first time in real time and in real life was an amazing experience. We did it for two nights this weekend.

I’ve written before about Bright Moments and the in-person experience of experiencing the creation (minting) of generative art. Too much of the NFT experience for my taste happens online and in isolation.

Art is best when it is experienced by a group of people and displayed in a large format where everyone can appreciate it and discuss it together. When you experience generative NFT art that way, it is an aha moment.

Finally, I want to thank the entire Bright Moments team for putting together an incredible event where the artists were front and center along with their amazing work. I came away from it even more excited about where NFT art is going and what it will become.

#art#blockchain#crypto#non fungible tokens#Web3

Taking A Long Term View Of Web3

This post was co-written by Katie Haun and Fred Wilson

The events surrounding FTX have shaken the confidence of many. How did one of the largest crypto exchanges collapse so quickly? Why do meltdowns like this seem to keep happening?

At times like this, it helps to have a long-term view of web3 as a sector, not just a forward-looking long-term view, but also some perspective on where we have come from.

As longtime investors in web3 and board members (also individual shareholders) of Coinbase, one of the oldest and best-known companies in the space, we thought we might share some thoughts.

Web3 is a software-driven innovation that has a built-in financial system. This has been both a strength and a weakness. On the one hand, tokens enable developers and users to contribute to open-source protocols and participate in the economic upside of doing so, leading to strong developer communities. That’s been a positive relative to how software has been developed, monetized, and governed in the past. On the other hand, tokens lend themselves to boom/bust cycles and a sense by many that web3 is simply a speculative endeavor with no real substance behind it. 

This perception is only reinforced by the companies and individuals who started web3 companies and projects with the exclusive intent of making a lot of money very quickly through leveraged trading and speculation, pumping and dumping, and, sometimes, outright fraud.

Most of the well-known meltdowns in web3, going all the way back to Mt Gox and including recent failures like 3AC, Celsius, and Alameda/FTX, have happened to centralized companies operating trading, lending, and speculating businesses. Many of the failures have been offshore and all of them were largely unregulated. These companies and their activities have given web3 a bad name. We have also seen high-profile decentralized projects, like Terra, fail due to flawed design but those failures happen out in the open in a transparent way that is much healthier than the way centralized companies fail.

Contrast that with regulated web3 businesses like Coinbase, Kraken, and Anchorage that operate in the US and you will see that the companies that have followed the rules and behaved properly have weathered these storms. Coinbase’s early innovation was creating a secure, easy-to-use, regulated bridge from fiat currencies to crypto and a safe place to store crypto assets. Coinbase provides a number of important services that have allowed the web3 ecosystem to grow and thrive. 

The most important software innovation of the last decade, which started with the Bitcoin white paper fourteen years ago, is the emergence of open-source software and decentralized protocols that are the foundation of web3.  These protocols have survived recent market volatility. It is the promise of software that is not controlled by a company, but instead by an open-source community with built-in safeguards and increased transparency relative to today’s tech and financial systems, that gives us so much confidence in the future of web3.

These web3 protocols are in active development for mainstream adoption and some key features are still missing. For example, blockchains as they were originally architected are public by default. This is not suitable for most applications. Imagine if your email, banking, and social data were public for everyone to see on a blockchain. Also, blockchains are slow and complex networks. Improvements to performance, scalability, and privacy are happening at the infrastructure level of the web3 technology stack. Emergent technologies like zero-knowledge proofs and rollups are starting to address these issues without compromising decentralization. These breakthroughs are still in the early stages of deployment among a small subset of developers. This is the kind of important work that happens behind the scenes without any coverage. But it is these developments that are preparing web3 for the mainstream.

Eventually, as the web3 infrastructure improves, the user experience gap between self-custody and storing assets on centralized entities will shrink. More users will feel comfortable self custodying their assets in software they control and managing the keys that provide access to their assets themselves. This is how many web3 users interact with decentralized applications, like NFT marketplaces, today.

When web3 becomes a credible alternative to web2 for the masses, large centralized companies like Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Google will have to compete for access to our data thus redefining how we use the web. Software development will be more open-source and composable. And large financial institutions like banks and brokerage firms (which includes the FTXs of the world) will no longer control our assets and lend them out without our permission.

Ironically, web3 is about giving control of data and assets back to the people and taking it away from large centralized companies. But the transition from web2 to web3 has been slow and messy and many of the early web3 companies have been copycat versions of what came before them. That is where the risk has been in the web3 ecosystem and what we need to move away from.

The lesson of these recent events for policymakers should not be that web3 is bad and must be constrained. It should be that pushing innovation offshore is bad. We need trusted and well-regulated centralized entities to survive and thrive and we also need decentralized web3 protocols to flourish and provide a path to a fully decentralized web. Both are possible and the good news is we are already on a path toward both. We need to stay that course, provide for a healthy web3 sector in the US, and stop pushing US users to risky/shady offshore entities with unclear, uneven, and unfair policy actions.

This is another hard moment for web3 and we will see negative headlines about “crypto” for some time. But it’s important to remember that these headlines are all about the speculating/trading part of web3. The much more important underlying software innovation continues unabated. And that is what we remain so excited about and will continue to fund and champion. 

This post was also shared on the Haun Ventures blog.

#blockchain#crypto#Current Affairs#digital collectibles#non fungible tokens#Web3

Creator Royalties

One of my favorite things about NFTs is that they contain a mechanism for the artist/creator to collect royalties on all of the sales that happen after the initial sale/mint. The creator specifies the royalty percentage when they initially mint the NFT and the NFT marketplaces/smart contracts collect the royalties on future sales and pay them to the creator.

Some forms of creativity have had ongoing economic participation by the creator for many years. In the music industry, there are publishing rights and recorded music rights that are paid to the creator and/or the creator’s financial partners (ie record labels and publishing houses). In the television industry, there are syndication rights. Many of the most successful musicians and television talent have made significant sums of money on these rights.

But for many forms of creativity, the ability to participate in the future value of the work has been absent.

So when I saw the NFT standard emerge, I was really excited about the potential for artists to participate as the value of their work escalates over time.

However, there are clouds on the horizon right now. Some NFT marketplaces have chosen not to enforce NFT creator royalties. There are some valid reasons for this and some not-so-valid reasons.

One valid reason is that “market makers” need very low transaction fees to provide liquidity to a market. A market maker is a participant that trades assets and does not hold them for long-term appreciation. They make money on the spread between where they buy and where they sell. These market makers ensure that there is always a bid on an asset that is being sold and an ask on an asset that is being purchased. Liquidity is essential for markets to work properly and so finding a way for market makers to avoid paying royalties is important. If a creator royalty is 20%, for example, a market maker would either need to underbid by 20% or overprice by 20% in order to break even. That’s not reasonable or feasible.

But there are also less valid reasons. Some newer NFT marketplaces are not enforcing royalties in order to take share from the larger more established NFT marketplaces. While one could argue that is the market working and competition is good for innovation, they are using the NFT creator as a “pawn” in this fight and that really sucks. The NFT creator’s only recourse is to “blacklist” certain NFT marketplaces that won’t enforce royalties and many are reluctant to take that step as it potentially reduces the interest in their work.

Yesterday, OpenSea, the largest established NFT marketplace, partially addressed this issue by announcing a “tool for on-chain enforcement of royalties for new collections.” This will allow NFT creators to require the collection of on-chain royalties when they mint new collections. It is not clear to me whether this tool will only work on OpenSea or if it will work across all NFT marketplaces. Obviously, the latter is the correct approach. OpenSea acknowledged that it does not yet have a good answer for existing NFT collections and is interested in hearing from “the community” on what to do about that.

Another important development in this area comes from USV’s portfolio company Uneven Labs which shipped the Forward Protocol a few weeks ago. The Forward Protocol allows NFT creators to specify that market makers/liquidity providers will not pay royalties on their assets but collectors/long-term holders will. This seems like an incredibly sensible approach and one that the creators and NFT marketplaces should adopt.

Here’s the bottom line for me. A critical part of the NFT innovation is the ability for creators to specify a royalty rate on their work and have it collected in the secondary marketplaces. This is every bit as important an innovation as on-chain art and everything else that comes from the NFT standard. Everyone in the NFT world; creators, marketplaces, collectors, market makers, etc, etc should insist that creator royalties remain a fundamental aspect of NFTs and do whatever is necessary to ensure that happens.

#art#blockchain#crypto#digital collectibles#marketplaces#non fungible tokens#Web3

NFT Screens

I have enjoyed collecting NFT art over the last few years and I have very much wanted to display it in a physical space vs just having it online on a profile, like this one.

So when we started designing the new USV offices last year we started thinking about NFT screens. We were inspired by these amazing NFT screens in the Bright Moments NFT Gallery in Venice Beach California.

So we bought six large displays for the new USV office, three portrait orientation like the photo above and three landscape orientation and hung them around the new USV office. Here are a few photos I’ve taken of the USV NFT screens over the last few months:

Here is how we manage the screens:

We bought Yodecks, one for each screen. A Yodeck is a raspberry pi-based inexpensive device made for the digital signage market but works great as an NFT player.

There is a web app to manage the Yodecks and you can put all kinds of media onto the device. We chose to make a simple web app that runs a playlist of NFTs on each screen and shows the artist, title, and owner on the bottom left and a QR code to view/buy/etc the NFT on the bottom right.

We curate NFTs into a Google Sheet, we use a script to construct a web page playlist from that curated list, and the Yodeck runs the playlist.

It is really simple and works great.

I recommend the larger (4GB) memory Yodecks for displaying rich media NFTs. I also recommend auto refreshing the web app in the Yodeck interface with some frequency to avoid crashed web pages blanking the screens.

My partner Nick wrote the simple web app and we’ve had a lot of fun getting it working well in our office and curating the playlists. Anyone who can fill out a Google Sheet can curate a playlist in our office. So everyone can and does.

Here is the GitHub repository for the web app that Nick wrote.

If you collect NFTs and want to display them in your home, office, gallery, store, or somewhere else, I highly recommend doing some version of what we’ve done. It’s great to showcase digital art on large format screens.

#art#blockchain#digital collectibles