Spotlight curates ideas and experiments worth collecting. Every two weeks, the Forefront community curates a new capsule in an effort to highlight great work and support creators publishing onchain.

This capsule was curated by the team at Mirror.

***CAPSULE 008: ***From Satoshi’s whitepaper to the blog era of crypto Twitter, the crypto ecosystem has always been fueled by powerful writing. Capsule 008 seeks to capture some of the best onchain writing in the last few weeks, highlighting impactful ideas and supporting the creators pushing the ecosystem’s thinking forward.

These are ideas and experiments worth collecting. Collect to support creators publishing onchain.

Rethinking Token Incentives for Consumer Adoption

This piece from Icebreaker Labs highlights a key problem around token incentives, which were once thought to be crypto’s killer consumer use-case. As we build in consumer markets, we need sustainable incentive systems that work outside of bull markets. This means that we need to design products and experiences that are actually delightful and useful. Token games, while effective in driving behaviors, often drive the wrong behavior, and so should come much later in a project’s evolution: only after it has demonstrated real value.

In Conversation: ripcache

ripcache is an artist featuring a “1-bit pixel visual language and themes that cover the ever looming surveillance state.” This is a fascinating conversation covering ripcache’s art, their views on surveillance and privacy, their journey in web3, and more. Definitely worth the read for existing and aspiring cryptoartists.

Retracing on Memetic Icons

This isn’t LGHT’s first feature in Spotlight, and it likely won’t be his last. This piece touches on his conception of “memetic icons,” tracing his thinking and concluding that memetic icons could “include colors, words/phrases, as well as symbols.” This is a short piece, but you’ll be seeing memes everywhere after reading.

Future History of the Open Internet

Published back in November of last year, Gitcoin co-founder Scott Moore raised his concerns about the present and future of web3, arguing that “[web3] has become a place where we can engineer our own disasters more openly and transparently.” The piece is a reminder of our duty to work “towards a new world powered by open source, community owned infrastructure.” Fantastic, concise read, and a great reminder for those working in crypto.

Understanding Nouns.

What is Nouns DAO? There have been many explainers, but this one from Liam really brought things home for us: “It’s not a technical achievement, moreso a psychological one - understanding how rational self-interested agents, combined with verifiable value (whether it’s hashcash for energy, or $ETH for money) and mechanisms (the Bitcoin protocol, the Nouns DAO protocol, etc.), can build a self-sustaining reification loop for an idea that eventually becomes money.”

Protect the Open Source Ethos

“Copy-pasting source code without attribution and making misleading claims about the original work is against the open source ethos and hurts the ecosystem.” More than a thinkpiece, this is a bit of a callout. However, the piece touches on some core ideas around the open source ethos in the Ethereum ecosystem and the importance of keeping it alive.

Why Onchain Games Foreshadow Crypto’s Future

Just look to friend.tech to see how “onchain games” can be trailblazers of better crypto UX. This piece argues that the experience of using blockchain apps will follow the trail blazed by onchain games. Transactions will be near-zero and you won’t have to sign a million of them. Onboarding will be as easy as opening a website. If you want to predict where the future of crypto UX is headed, look to onchain games for the answers.

Season One: Digital Physics

We won’t attempt to summarize this one, just read it. The piece explores the concept of “Digital Physics,” particularly blockchain physics, through the lens of Autonomous Worlds. “…we hope to finesse our understanding of digital physics, and how to build autonomous worlds with the same degree of resilient, enduring, immutable physics that exists in the universe.”

Crypto Needs its Captcha Moment

More than just the top Spotlight collector this week, Kairon is also a fantastic writer. This essay explores crypto UX, onchain behavior, and why crypto needs a “captcha moment” to really take the next step. He clearly defines this new term and extends it in a whirlwind tour of the onchain experience. Awesome read.

Spotlight curates ideas and experiments worth collecting. Every two weeks, the Forefront community curates a new capsule in an effort to highlight great work and support creators publishing onchain.

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