A key dynamic of early communities is that by empowering each and every individual, you create an environment where more often than not, compromise and loyalty to the whole happens as a sense of collective belonging.
From blog communities to artisanal markets to political movements, this is invariably present.
What’s telling is how this has been developing in the early communities and markets that are bubbling up around the NFT space.
Where cross conservation, digital art, blockchain gaming, metaverse-like virtual worlds, there is a rising tide of diverse communities, unfettered creativity, and a strong sense of conviviality and comradery.
While still a miniscule subset of the larger blockchain space, the NFT community and creative inclinations of this almost salon-like mashup of artists, writers, game creators, community builders is becoming influential beyond its small size and niche application set.
The reason is that while small, it is functional. While messy, it is directional, and pressing on in spite of what doesn’t work as yet.
I fell into this segment early, before I understood it, finding it an easy wrapper to leverage as a frictionless off/online ramp for community connections with a charity conservation project I was involved.
I’ve struggled a bit since to find a clear narrative for the why of it all.
Why something so simple has captured such passion and commitment, notably my own.
When I fall back on the dynamics of community and personal empowerment, not fiscal market design, it gels.
The more I start with the idea of personal agency and empowerment, and think of the blockchain, above everything else, as an organizing principal of these independent people and decentralized objects, the narrative just comes together.
The examples and use cases then flow easily.
Agency for the artist, when you can program into a digital artwork an annuity where every time it is sold cross any number of exchanges, part of the revenue can go back to the creator. True as well for a fine wine producer, any maker of a luxury goods in fact.
Agency for the planet itself in a wonderful way–if you think of a collectible tied to an endangered species or ecosystem, creating a perpetual, immutable annuity stream for the supporting conservation project around the NFT itself.
Agency for the exchanges themselves as leverage to build community with artists and causes, using social good to drive market demand.
As well, agency for small groups, even families who can mint NFTs, distributing them to their extended communities, trading on interoperable exchanges, driving education and financial benefit even at limited scale.
With new tech for unproven platforms, we are by definition future casting that the network will populate, the demand side exceed the supply, that this impossible all or nothing arrangement of forces come together and just work.
With NFTs as a standard, the game could change. Certainly you need to market the value and build want, but it’s not necessarily an all or nothing game.
Zero-marginal cost for artisanal non-scalable endeavors playing by the same rules of software at scale is a bold idea, and may just be possible here.
Making any one person a possible patron of the arts or conservation activist, regardless of their economic status, personal influence, or reach.
This idea of blockchain first as an organizing principal, as the superset preeminent value adding structure in new ways to atomically structured communities and markets may be the overarching secret sauce.
There is also a bit of a perfect wave here, made all the more possible as communities themselves have evolved over time. By definition now less closed and less siloed, more open and interlocking than every before.
I admit that while the excitement around NFTs is wildly contagious, the growth curves way up and to the right, the numbers are still small. Don’t look at this as size, look at it as the first place outside of currency exchanges where utility of the blockchain has met early market fit.
To close on this.
Traditionally communities form, grow, and combine, then morph into markets, most fading over time. The infamous Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da market exhaustion curve.
I wonder whether by rejiggering the building blocks with NFTs, using the blockchain as the organizing and decentralizing principal, we are turning an evolutionary corner and coming up with something new that beats to a different drummer.
With every tech advancement we are betting on a new and different world to bring the idea to economic fruition. Each and every platform that defines my life today–from how I shop, discover information, organize, and communicate are completely different than when I entered the work force. Full tilt change does and is happening.
So maybe my optimism is not that crazy.
This just strikes me as real because it’s about people and what they value, not strictly about currencies and market math.
Not an abstraction but something many can tangibly feel and intuitively understand.
I’m all in on this as it seems much less a gamble, much more an investment as I’m betting not solely on the tech but on the people and their communities first and foremost.
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Huge thanks to @SillyTuna and @YT for sharing their visions, their knowledge, and getting me to this place of understanding so quickly.
