#DappCon22 : Day 1 - Communities And The Future Of Ownership, Thomas Scaria

Transcript

please welcome Thomas from Prism talks to us a little bit about communities and web3 [Applause] can everyone hear me yeah so first of all thanks for coming out um obviously giving a talk on communities in the future of ownership I gonna use the term co-ownership a lot and by that I mean Community ownership quickly on me I am the founder and CEO of prism prism is the web3 platform for Community ownership we really help groups of friends purchase nfts as a team and use

them together things like that and our mission is to redistribute Capital to the edges so first of all what is capital capital is a resource that someone has access to that allows for them to get some sort of undue value from it whether it's influential value Financial value things like that so we often hear the terms Financial Capital which we all know about uh very well and then we hear about social capital and political capital Capital right now is really in the hands of billionaires and institutions whether it's a a cultural capital item that's also Financial in nature like a sports

team it's owned by billionaires or creative Capital that's really owned by a lot of web 2 platforms the average people are starting to fight back and how they're doing that is by organizing themselves into communities so we're seeing movements like this in the web 2 world and in the web 3 world so let me compare and contrast them just for a moment we all know about Wall Street bets it's a community of about 12 million uh people on on Reddit and in 2021 of January last year they coordinated at least in a human way to take down Melvin Capital by buying a bunch of gme stock and I'm going to

compare that to Constitution Dao which really is a same pent-up angst but distilled in a much more precise manner because they really used ethereum to enable not only human coordination in a loose way but in a much more precise way but also Capital coordination so ethereum is a substrate for for really human and capital coordination and underpinning that is this new superpower offered to communities called co-ownership so what co-ownership allows you to do is pull funds and really own anything and it's enabled by these

Primitives that we've built uh over over really like the last five years since ethereum was concepted so first of all we have multi-signature wallets which are really great for Capital coordination human coordination we have tokens which allow for on-chain representations of ownership then we have nfts which of course got popularized last year which are really A Primitive for digital property rights so let's break this down all three of the components right so nfts like I mentioned are our digital property rights um what it really is is just a file format to hold all sorts of capital so it's been an it's been an instrument to

upload Financial capital from The Real World but I think what's even more interesting is that it's it's bringing markets um to to intangible forms of capital um uh like social capital and media Capital that previously just did not exist so lots of nfts represent IP ownership behind media and if he's can represent content like what when we purchase a mirror Edition perhaps on on a mirror they can also um represent in-game assets and why this is really important is we're really a generation that is creating a lot of value on the internet

internet economies are much more um large nowadays than than the real world right but in the web 2 form of doing things I'm going to compare and contrast web 2 content platform YouTube which we all know about with web 3 content platform mirror um YouTube really was this way for creators and consumers to form around their ecosystem they contribute they contribute either to their Network effects uh through creating content or consuming content but the value ends up occurring completely to YouTube and contrast that with mirror where it's a

direct relationship from Creator to Consumer creators are creating content capital and consumers are purchasing that and owning uh that piece of capital themselves and like I described earlier because capital is power what's really happening is nfts are redistributing power to this internet native generation so it's a really important primitive to understand for later Parts as uh of the presentation so why is capital uh well I guess I just described why Capital ownership is important is because it allows for you to control that asset right and nfts are a big part of that what does ownership really mean there's a reason why at prism we don't brand

ourselves as a group investing platform we brand ourselves as the group ownership platform ownership takes transactions like investing in consumption into control it's the ability to add net new value when you have a stake in something so let me paint a few examples let's say for instance you own some land through ownership you can input labor input construction and actually builds a city on top of it right so suddenly you've created more value through ownership if you own IP then you can actually develop content with that IP let's say you own a moon bird or something like that you can

create a TV show with the moon bird as a character or get it in some in your favorite game and you can also put a assets that you own to work right so we're seeing this in the play to earned economy um where these assets are actually just completely monetizable so now let's pivot to all the community infrastructure that that allows for co-ownership uh we're all familiar here with multi-signature wallets if you're here at the dapcon conference so multi-signature wallets are are really multiplayer accounts in in web 3 which allow for multiple people to coordinate both in a human way and coordinate capital

um and like any wallet they allow for you to log into different web3 interfaces and initiate any sort of transaction when you initiate a transaction let's say You and Your Friends set up a notice safe you just want to buy a board ape with your friends right so you're chucking in money into the noses safe and a problem arises John might be chucking in to eat to eat and then Cindy might be chucking in three eth so either they need to start an Excel sheet and start tracking who owns what or they need to use another web3 primitive which is really tokens so I'll get into that in a second another problem really

arises when you start really getting going with this multiplayer account to co-purchase things maybe you bought that board ape with Cindy and John and then now you want to bring five other friends onto the cap table if you will you suddenly need to value your your assets in the gnosis safe and open up some sort of priced funding round bring in those five friends and and really print ownership again on on chain So Soft show here for prism we're really a protocol that stitches together these Primitives like multi-signature wallets on-chain representations of of ownership and DOW valuation to allow for friends to raise funds

um we actually issue nft membership cards with your owner State ownership stake uh connoted in them there's some other fun stuff you can upload in there and then once you have your ownership stake and everyone's comfortable what they what they own you can put those assets to work by nfts and then you update the valuation open up another funding round and rinse and repeat right so we're protocols like prism enable this Syndicate is also a a protocol that enables us pretty well Juice Box can be used with gnosis to accomplish the same goal so what does co-ownership actually allow communities um to do right so of course we went over

this example of purchasing a board ape with your friend so you can access expensive assets that's one primary benefit and then I suppose if you're some sort of like Art Collective um you may be chucking in not just ethereum into this noses safe you might be sharing all sorts of generative art that you co kind of identify with so it allows for you to kind of share assets with your friends bond in a deeper way things like that and then if you're purchasing an asset with actual utility which sometimes an nft world uh it's not typically the case you can actually use that asset with friends so a good example is Creator cabins they've kind of rebranded just to cabins which allows

uh really for people to pull together money take that take those funds and purchase real world real estate right so they're trying to be like a network City by by allowing multiple people to own different pieces of property and then they can all kind of co-use them so if you're a skeptic you might think okay co-ownership allows you to access assets you can't afford all right that's a good benefit but really fractionalization of any asset allows for that there's many different web 2 platforms like Otis web 3 platforms like fractional which allow you to buy fractional shares of board Apes so that can't just be the benefit on its

own so maybe it's just about sharing these assets with friends co-utility and things like that but actually there's a lot of great renting and lending platforms on ethereum like nft5 that allow for that so these benefits are good but it's not enough to make co-ownership I think a really compelling compelling alternative what what how I think about like how co-ownership can be different and better than those um those Alternatives is co-ownership leads to co-creation it's the ability for communities to come together um coordinate around the asset create some sort of like positive input some sort of

positive some labor to extract more value from that asset so let me break that down through my favorite example right now that's going on in the space so we can all talk about future examples but this is actually happening right now as who here is familiar with moon Birds okay so those those of who uh are not moonbirds is really an nft ecosystem it's an IP universe that's created by the proof Collective they've um they have 10 000 different uh unique Moon birds that they've launched people buy uh these Moon Birds which give you kind of like rights to use the underlying IP um and effectively what's going on in

this nft ecosystem is that there's several Dows sub communities that have prop uh that have popped up that are kind of like accelerating all the activity within the ecosystem so there's poor Birds now hot wings Collective floor bird style dead bird Society they all have different missions so for example dead bird Society uh formed with the mission of of really creating a sub-community of moon birds that owned the skeleton trait right and then once they kind of form that Community with that IP ownership that's starting to create more content and then create more value around the nft ecosystem so so just like Define nft ecosystems a

little bit more um and contrast it perhaps it to like a Disney or something like that and the ecosystems are headless Brands where they Loosely Define the brand and story to some extent but then they allow for community members to take the assets that are you know the IP within that universe and create stories and and and create an interoperability from it right and different nft communities have different kinds of like um strategies and ways they go about this so I a good comparison is the board ape community and and the nouns community so board ape Yuga um they're VC funded they have a

business development team they're going out there they're getting like you know Kanye West and like Eminem to purchase these board apes they're developing Partnerships with uh Dows in different communities and games and it's much more of like a centralized approach whereas nouns it's a meme right they haven't defined much other than the noun itself and then uh communities have formed to to accelerate that so Community ownership around these ecosystem is really multiplying and driving cultural output before um before web 3 Brands were really top down with how they bring down culture you know the cool kid uh in high school

sort of Aging myself here would would rock Supreme and um they would he or she would be an early consumer they're flexing they're getting more adopters they're actually putting in a little bit of work here and taking a bit of social risk too but then all of the value of careers the Supreme whereas in these IP universes where Dows are forming around this IP let's just focus on the dead birds example what's actually happening is moonbirds is creating a very loose story around their IP some something like dead birds is co-purchasing all of the skeleton trade Moon birds and through the IP ownership they're actually inputting labor to create different

kinds of content and assets so they've launched their own pfp collection to kind of expand their community and their plan is to create you know different kinds of written content comic books things like that and ultimately that accrues value to not only scale and trade Moon Birds but also to the Moon Birds ecosystem at Large so now if you're taking that risk that social risk and putting in the work and being the early adopter um in an open ecosystem and you're doing it obviously through these uh communities hopefully where you can coordinate positive some labor then it's really the communities that end up winning when the ecosystems are more open in nature so my vision for the world is

is really like let's say like an open metaverse for example there's going to be public buildings places to hang out that are owned by communities that are larger than the metaverse platform itself it may be perhaps even a bigger brand um uh than than the platforms that actually create the the metaverse so what does this mean for us as a society well um in a world where we're feeling more distant from our governments we're we're feeling uh more distance uh physically when you know we're working from home and things like that open worlds and digital communities become a place for us to connect and find meaning and purpose and through the web 3 superpower

of co-ownership it's not just a communities don't just become a place to hang out but it's a place to to build together find find Value find purpose and ultimately becomes a whole new frontier for what we think of as belonging thank you [Applause] do you have time for questions yeah we have a couple of minutes for questions so anybody we'll shoot down the mic to you later uh interesting yeah am I a loud speaker okay yeah uh

interesting uh chat but I think I've been in in the nft space for like or at least we've been observing it for a year there seems to be this kind of meta um almost that that sort of flows from from Project to to project so you you can you can sort of see a project gets hyped up and and then and then you know next thing you know maybe maybe a few weeks late or maybe one week later there's another meta there's another matter so I think that that's the first question how much of it is really true community and how much of it is sort of this this matter that the Traders are almost almost sort of jumping from one project to the other yeah the second thing is is that a lot of these you know the example they use Moon birds I mean

it is too expensive for the average person to afford it is impossible that they'll be able to scale it um and still still maintain that that kind of ten thousand member member Community um for for that that kind of price it's either it has to go go down and become cheaper for everyone to upgrade a community um how where where where does that seat what's your opinion on that that's okay so so first question I would say over 90 of these nft ecosystem projects PFE projects are complete garbage um so there are a five percent I would say we're with very great teams good Visions good storytelling they're putting in a lot of effort um and effort to be interoperable with with different

um end opportunities like games for instance metaverse things like that and then really trying to power more communities to build stories around their ecosystem so moonbirds I think is a primary really good example um Community ownership actually allows for access to these expensive assets so a lot of people start by forming maybe like a a quick group on prism purchasing these assets and if there's enough Talent within there or or enough intention and emission then they take off to become you know actually value add and value creative to the ecosystem that they're around but I can't say that for all of the groups that are buying uh buying Moon Birds but uh you know to

answer your question it is a way to access expensive assets as well hey uh yeah uh really great um presentation really enjoyed it thank you uh how do you see uh social evolving in these nft ecosystems do you think we'll still be on Discord in in three years time how do you see that evolving great question um so a quick show here for a new product that is coming into the web3 ecosystem called Geneva um they're they're coming alongside and and competing against a lot of initial uh like like Discord native sorry web3

native discords like metallink for example so I do Envision that some of these products will end up being a new home that's much more crypto native and and you know hopefully like trumps the problems that Discord has from what I've heard internally at Discord they're really going through some soul searching uh where they're trying to see how much they want to lean into web three and and not right because they're really focused on Gamers um and I think the answers are not going to lead into web3 that much so there's really an opportunity for these new competitors to emerge um so I do believe that those communication platforms are probably going to be where Dao is primarily hang out there's going to be a lot of supplemental platforms built around it

too like uh like a backdrop that's a bit more about you know an activity feed and things like that