Excited to share that we've co-led the seed round in @manifoldxyz, which equips artists with creative tools that allow them to push the boundaries of NFTs and web3 🧵a16z.com/2021/10/05/inv…
I've written that the early web and early days of web3 have similar limitations: people's interaction were "read-only" and founders started with skeuomorphic copies of older technologies. cdixon.mirror.xyz/0veLm9KKWae4T6…
Manifold is offering compelling ways to move beyond the skeuomorphic phase by letting creators experiment with novel applications that will push NFTs and web3 into entirely new directions.
Manifold Studio is their new toolkit that deploys creator-owned smart contracts that mint NFTs with on-chain provenance, interoperable with all major NFT marketplaces. There are many features coming soon, including new ways to track and manage royalties. manifoldxyz.substack.com/p/manifold-stu…
Some of the most talented innovators in web3 are building dynamic functionality with Manifold, including @Mad_Dog_Jones, @fvckrender, and @muratpak. The source code for these unique artist collaborations will be available to any artist.
The team -- led by @ediep, @richerd, and @wwhchung -- has deep software expertise and a strong commitment to building protocols that work for individual NFT artists and the entire web3 community. We are thrilled to partner with them :)
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The Web 3 playbook: using token incentives to bootstrap new networks. 🧵
The killer app of the internet is networks. The web and email are networks. Social apps like Instagram and Twitter are networks. Marketplaces like Uber and Airbnb are networks.
Networks get more valuable with more participants, which is great when they are at scale, but cuts the other way when starting out. This is the bootstrapping problem.
Web 1 (roughly 1990-2005) was about open protocols that were decentralized and community-governed. Most of the value accrued to the edges of the network — users and builders.
Web 2 (roughly 2005-2020) was about siloed, centralized services run by corporations. Most of the value accrued to a handful of companies like Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook.
6/ Popular skeuomorphic Web 3 ideas include offline ticketing, supply chain management, and record keeping for offline assets. These may be good ideas, just as read-only websites were a good idea, but they only scratch the surface of what Web 3 can be.
7/ A lot of today’s NFTs are adaptations from the offline world of art and collectibles. This leads people to think that NFTs are limited to those domains, in the same way people once thought the web was limited to brochures and magazines.
8/ Tokens—fungibles and NFTs— are better thought of as new digital primitives, similar in flexibility and generality to past digital primitives like the website.
1/ Tokens are a new digital primitive, analogous to the website 🧵
2/ Major computing waves generally have two eras: the skeuomorphic era and the native era.
3/ In the skeuomorphic era, the design thinking is largely adapted from older domains. For example, the early web was mostly digital adaptations of pre-internet activities like letter writing and mail-order shopping. Websites back then were mostly read only.