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Token Daily for Dec 21


"I'm so into crypto I won't even ride in a Fiat."

- David



🔮 A compilation of crypto predictions for the next year from builders and investors in the space. One's already come true since time of publication (see: Tony Sheng's).



📖 Old Words I've written about this before, but in order to better understand how to think about "what's next," it's important to read what people wrote during previous innovative eras - to understand how they thought about the world at the time, how movements were pushed forward, and what people at the forefront of "revolutions" saw that others didn't. And to that end, I've been reading The New New Thing by Michael Lewis. 

I've heard the statement "crypto needs its Netscape moment" enough times I figured it'd be a good use of time to read a book from '99 about Netscape's - and by extension the Internet boom's - genesis story. I could write a separate post that gathers all my learnings, but the two striking similarities between what happened then and what's happening now are unbounded greed and limited lexicon. 

Greed's self-explanatory, but the idea that technological advancements render present language obsolete and force its "upgrade" is an old lesson that feels new each time it's encountered. When the language in use is insufficient to communicate what begs to be communicated, then it's time for a new language.

But until we adopt new vocabulary, communication around new tech is frustrating.

As we see in Satoshi's post above: "writing a description for this thing for general audiences is bloody hard. There's nothing to relate it to."

And laughably inadequate, like "horseless carriages" to describe the automobile in 1894.


What's paradoxical is that although new, made-up words are necessary, they are also the very reason the mainstream easily dismisses the "new, new thing." New, made-up words initially seem childish, unfounded, and risk being meme-ified easily because they're different. Until they're the norm. And the cycle repeats itself once more. I'll conclude this ToTD with one of my favorite quotes from Ted Nelson (who coined hypertext): you can't think new thoughts in old words.




A few days ago I wrote about the importance of putting more emphasis on DX (developer experience) than UX (user experience) at this stage in the space. One of my favorite responses came in from Quartz product manager Kevin Kim:

I don’t think DX and UX are mutually exclusive at all! You need to max out both to even have a shot at adoption if you’re a dapp. Developer tools like Remix, Truffle, Ganache, tester faucets have been great - web3.js is essential. More developers are coming in and building hacky solutions that become developer tools. For instance, a few people are working on delegated transactions right now, and several Metamask competitors have emerged.

The UX is bad because the ecosystem is still early. So, users have to download all these browser extensions and save keyfiles and copy and paste addresses just to use a basic dApp. UX is what individual developers need to focus on, but even before that, problem space research, idea validation, and the like are critical and happen through user research.

Kevin included a recording to a previous DevCon talk he's given where he takes his learnings from Quartz, Facebook, Microsoft, and Google and shares the first step towards mainstream user adoption for dapps: effective user research.



🗞 For today's trending headlines head on over here



📖 Fast Accumulation on Streams A technical post on achieving high throughput with slow SNARKs - a technique that could make a lot of other zk-SNARK applications more feasible. 



🚀 CoinList Build A new product that makes it easy for crypto companies to pull together online hackathons in little time.



🕵️‍♀️ Crypto Tracker A curated list of crypto project trackers and analytics dashboards. 


So far, as part of its public governance peer review process, Storecoin has shared their vision for why a balances governance provides benefits as compared to current models, and provided an overview of their proposed implementation of that model. 

This week, they begin deep diving into specific governance issues, starting with enforcement. In other words, governance rules are important to establish - but what happens if people don’t follow them? This essay puts blockchain governance enforcement in the larger historical context of property rights and markets.

To join the 50+ members of the public peer review and give quality feedback on the project, sign up here




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