In 2014, Vitalik defined DAO as follows: "an entity that lives on the internet and exists autonomously, but also heavily relies on hiring individuals to perform certain tasks that the automaton itself cannot do…" "Automation at the center, humans at the edges" The reason “automation at the center” is so| Jesse Walden
Variant had its annual investor meeting on Tuesday. I shared the below ideas in my keynote update on the market: Crypto is exiting what I would describe as a consolidation phase of the industry that has lasted the better part of the last 2 years. During this consolidation, there’s| Jesse Walden
The first ten years of smart contract blockchains were born of bitcoin’s original cypherpunk values: censorship resistance, open source, permissionlessness, and a new glimmer of building a democratic/equitable internet on top of a shared world computer. Today, those ideological values are meeting with market pressure, because the mainstream| Jesse Walden
“Only with crypto” has been facing headwinds (apart from SOV) while "better with crypto” has been gaining steam. Will this change? If so, how?| Jesse Walden
My crypto journey started with a startup in 2014 (Mediachain) - we wanted to put all the world's media onchain. What we believed then, I still believe now: onchain media allows media to simultaneously be abundant, distributed everywhere—and also valuable, with attribution for creators, provenance for collectors, and programmability| Jesse Walden
Library: a stateless code pattern/schema. The success of a library can be measured by the number of times it is copy/pasted, replicated, re-deployed, and custom tuned. This is the tested and true thing that open source does well. Examples: Linux, ERC721. But as the history of open source| Jesse Walden
I’m writing this post quickly for a more permanent record of developing thoughts. This style and many of the ideas were spurred by a few blog posts Wilson Cusack wrote last year, which I recently read and reference below. Highly recommend reading them too! In Wilson’s Fees for| Jesse Walden
I was struck by Matt Huang's "Web3 has done much damage" tweet, which disparages the term Web3 in favor of “crypto.” Crypto is a 100x better term than web3, always has been Web3 has caused much damage and misplaced expectations — Matt Huang (@matthuang) January 9, 2023 "Crypto" has its| Jesse Walden
In 2006, Paul Graham wrote a great post wherein he concluded that Web 2.0 was a credible term because it meant “using the web the way it's meant to be used.” I think this is a good lens to interpret the term Web3, and why it is still a| Jesse Walden
Three popular narratives emanating from the crypto community as to how DeFi can touch billions of end users.| Jesse Walden
Originally published as a Twitter thread, here is my high level reading/summary of @RobertJShiller’s book: "Narrative Economics"| Jesse Walden
Crypto founders have a unique challenge in front of them. In addition to building a product that people want, they also need to consider how that product can successfully run in a decentralized manner — that is, as a protocol owned and operated by a community of users. This is a| Jesse Walden
When a new go to market strategy becomes clear, a wave of innovation and opportunity often follows. In 2024, you can go to where the wallets are.| Jesse Walden
Crypto can be viewed as the “democratization of investing.” Robinhood did it for stocks. Crypto does it for many other forms of internet-native value: money, digital art, memes, and early-stage technology projects.| Jesse Walden
Many entrepreneurs and investors think that crypto projects can’t capture value because they are based on open source code. The thinking goes that if you develop open source code, someone will come along and copy it, luring away your users and any potential for revenue. That doesn’t seem| Jesse Walden