Stadium Gates Issue #10
TL;DR
Permissionless x Covid
NFT.NYC
NFT Opportunities
NFTs need a powder keg
Timeclock.eth
Permissionless x Covid
Two super-spreader events in one week took down the best of us, probably. I say “probably” because I don’t want any problems. I don’t know where I got my Covid after two years of being an L1 super hero and dodging all Covid outbreaks, but I went to Permissionless feeling fine, and they “BAM!”…a family with Covid and a wife canceling flights for Memorial Day weekend.
Look, Permissionless was fine. Lot’s of DeFi progress, lot’s of people working in the halls while the presentations and panels were going on a few feet away. Palm Beach is always beautiful, etc. I think the most notable thing for me was to learn just how tight security needs to be to fight against the SIM swap rings that are descending on these events. ((No, I’m not going to talk about Permissionless much)). My plan was to take my meetings in the hallway, but security quickly led me to registration. My other option was the door. I respect that effort, honestly, but isn’t an organized group happy to pay $1,500 if they’re going to drain some ETH? It’s all good. My time was well spent. DeFi is building, so don’t sell the many bottoms we’ll see over the next 24 months. ((NOT FINANCIAL ADVICE)). The OGs of 2021 were the holders of 2018-2021. You can be a “star” by building, holding, and/or accumulating the right asset. This is a great time to look behind the curtains of your favorite project and find out if it’s a real project or a sales deck.
NFT.NYC
What can I say, let’s go to NYC and do our best to return to Miami healthy. As of this writing, we’ve all just been whacked by the crypto gods and are feeling more than a little jittery. Consensus just ended last weekend, so everyone’s heading up to the city to lighten up for a bit. Let’s get out of the DeFi scene for a bit and have some fun with on-chain jpegs, access tokens, and communities of people out for a good time. No leverage, no CeFi and stETH locked up and locking down fortunes, just some parties and amazing creators talking about how to increase utility for our communities and our holders. Reach out if you want to meet up. We all really just need to start our summers off right.
@damon_peters on Twitter
@damonpeters on Telegram
I have four checklist items for the event:
Tell everyone about OnePass
Tell everyone about our Biggie Drop
Tell everyone about our Muhammad Ali Drop
Hang with Boki Holders. Here’s my guy, Mr. Boki 2489
NFTs 2022-202X
Remember NFTs in 2017? There’s a few of you, but not many. I remember Ethereum going down and everyone talking about Crypto Kitties and that was one of the biggest missed opportunities of my life. My reaction at the time was that of a normie, “why would anyone…” and then some nonsense about $BTC being better because of X, Y, Z. Oops.
Well, here we are, again, and it’s time to pay attention. The NFT “community” is still very small, and that’s good for everyone who is already here. Yes, we’re going to spend the next two years onboarding as many people as possible to crypto and NFT adoption, but that will take a bit of time to create new behaviors. Adoption curves are pretty curvy, so we can pick up some gems as speculators during the dips and these lags in adoption. To say we’re getting in on the ground floor may seem hopeful, after all Crypto Punks, Beeple, and Apes owned this cycle (Rocks were fun, too), but there are only a few projects that have real momentum and businesses (we see you, Doodles).
If we all see five cycles in life (“two to learn, three to earn”), then this is one to earn. There are gems sitting on the floor, but we’re going to have to sift through the bargain bins to find them. We’re on the ground floor, but it’s a different ground floor for the next cycle. This note is a reminder that it’s time to do the work to carry water and stack wood. These are the most exciting times.
NFTs Need a Powder Keg
NFTs are currently a grind by true believers, and the inflection point hasn’t even come close to happening. This comment isn’t hopium or the post of a shill, it’s just quite factual to any measure of adoption. NFTs in their current form are the toy version of a future full-scale model.
If we take the acronym back to the phrase, non-fungible tokens, and leave aside jpegs and gated Discord communities, we’re left with tokenization, ownership, and security. Apes this, apes that, yada yada, is all fun and necessary, but have you ever tokenized an IRL asset and created liquidity? Very few have, and that’s the point. We haven’t even started down the path of creating real value. It’s been fun and games until this week, but now we need something important to increase onboarding. We need to provide real-world value for the most common utilities.
The Internet needed “WWW”, social media needed the iPhone, and crypto needs real-world assets. Our current practice is to tokenize digital assets and facilitate liquidity and trading. This is an outstanding initial adoption, and we have lots of runway before this practice really takes off. We've simply boarded the plane. However, a true explosion for NFTs and crypto will not occur without real people in the real world abandoning one practice and adopting a new practice. When oil is traded in $BTC as common practice, or when the smallest assets are able to be collateralized and leveraged, then we’ll have our explosion. We need to move beyond artwork over the next two years, or we’ll have wasted an incredible opportunity. We just need to build bigger.
Timeclock.eth
The mission of Stadium Gates is to: Bridge the masses to Web3.
The mission helps me focus on big, broad, opportunities to build meaningful products on a large scale. Stadium Gates’ values include “wealth” as a key focus to help improve general living conditions and make poverty a relic of an inefficient era. Hubris? Perhaps, but why not? The value is to promote “wealth” above “becoming rich”. Wealth is multi-generational, “becoming rich” is a cautionary Rick James' story (Ty, Chris Rock for one of the greatest comedy bits of all time).
One of the great unlocks of tokenization, I believe, will be time, both how we monetize our time during our lives and how we pass the value we create forward to our descendants. Tokenization will aid this value shifting between generations, and it has the opportunity to disproportionately improve the next generations for the current lower economic classes. This premise is easy to consider in that people with the means to protect and pass assets between entities and generations are able to do so, and those without the experience and means fail to pass assets to their descendants. These comments are not intended to open the conversation about who “deserves” wealth, but it’s to outline the impediment present for those who are unable to pass value between generations effectively for a number of reasons. I admire families who are able to say things like “the summer home has been in the family for decades”. What an advantage it is to build one generation upon the work of the prior generation?
One of the exercises I’ve been thinking about is to consider what value could have passed to the descendants of the laborers who contributed to building the Panama Canal if a mechanism had been in place to build wealth over a long time horizon? The production and economic value created by the canal itself has been enormous, of course, and the laborers could have (perhaps) received compensation at the market rate at the time of their work, but the value of their work has persisted for over 100 years. Neither, shares of stock of the entity, nor a pension for the laborers, would have served to deliver sufficient compensation back to the original contributors or their descendants over the last 100+ years since the canal opened. The canal itself, however, has persisted and continued to create economic value for the investors who owned part of the enterprise, namely the U.S. government.
The lightbulb moment pushing me to dive headfirst into Web3 and to level up from cryptocurrencies exclusively was the moment I became familiar with smart contracts and how commissions from secondary-party sales could be paid back to the creator of the work. This was an amazing innovation that has unlocked incredible opportunities for creators, and we are now, as an industry, extending these persistent value generators to fractionalized assets and royalty payments. The payments will be incredible assets to holders of those contracts in the future, and no legal entity or management layer will be required to pass these distributions to account holders when the artworks are sold or monetized. Artists and musicians will not need to operate under such restrictions in the future as they have under the current system. The whole operation will eventually unwind and re-emerge from the compensation demands of the creators themselves.
Artists and creators are early adopters of this new compensation model, as they are already knitting away and unwinding the tangled yarn of publishing and rights holder agreements and gallery representation, if only because it’s an inefficient and restrictive system with a large secondary market that does not compensate the artists for sales after the work is in the market. Though I advocate for these secondary sales, I’m not making the argument that we should ‘rage against the machine’, rather I’m simply observing that the current machine is less efficient and durable than the new machines that are being built today. The managers of the old machines will naturally age out and die off, and the current builders will be successful if only because they will build and adopt more efficient machines and outlive the current managers. This changing of the guard will be a simple generational evolution, rather than some battle fought between competing parties.
As the artists and creators lead the way, we will find opportunities to apply some of their successful operations to other industries and project contributors, such as contributors to large public projects. I have been thinking about the Panama Canal laborers as part of this case, as it was such a grand and imbalanced endeavor. The project, for example, resulted in mortality counts between 10,000 and 27,000 people who were working to build the canal…which is bonkers. Imagine if 10,000 people had died while building Google, or the U.S. space program, or the Manhattan skyline? That’s a crazy human capital cost for which the descendants have not been receiving financial distributions. Of course, it would have been fully impractical to manage this type of record keeping and annual distributions to claimants of the original contributors, whether they passed away on the job or lived to see it completed. The technology did not exist to carry out the administrative work.
Timeclock.eth is a concept I’ve been mulling for a bit over a year at this point. I bought the domain to be used for experiments designed to monetize “time” more effectively. I’ve recently settled on the starting point being the goal to maximize our present value to the benefit of our great grandchildren, which seems fun to me. Why not use the feature of a smart contract to automatically lock funds for great lengths of time earning yield, only to be accessible 100 years in the future by our descendants? There are probably a thousand reasons why ‘not’ to do this (asset deterioration, lost keys, inefficient yield, family lines which end, etc.), but I think it’s worth a shot. We’re all selling our time, and we now have a decentralized way to ensure future holders of our wallets receive funds coded for future distributions—no lawyers, no banks, no CPAs, no documents, just a contract which unlocks funds for the holders at a fixed time in the future.
If this project that sounds interesting to you as a builder, hit me up.
Thank you for reading. Stay safe out there. See ya in NYC.