A glossary of useful terms; a new trend in social; more

📜🔍 Feature: A glossary of key blockchain & internet terms, from A to Z

Chris Dixon and Robert Hackett

From “airdrops” and “APIs” to “complements vs. substitutes” and “open source” to “tokenomics” and “zero knowledge”, this glossary (based on the book Read Write Own) has got it all. Read the whole thing to get a crash course in key internet, business, and blockchain terms — or just jump around the alphabet and follow your curiosity:
check out the glossary
share on: Farcaster | Twitter 

📋🎨 Resource: A 5-step framework for getting the most out of NFTs

Scott Duke Kominers and Steve Kaczynski

NFTs as a technology are poised to become ubiquitous in both online and offline applications. So in this blueprint for builders — for everyone from startup team members and small business managers to big brand executives — we describe a five-step framework for unlocking the power of NFTs for your business: “the NFT staircase”.

The staircase — which is based on the recently released book The Everything Token: How NFTs and Web3 Will Transform the Way We Buy, Sell, and Create — ladders up from “ownership” and “utility” to “identity” and “community”, helping brands evolve ordinary consumer interactions into multifaceted community experiences.
read the summary

🪟🧰 Trend: Why ‘Frames’ matter for this next wave of internet innovation

There’s a powerful new primitive that applies not just to “decentralized social” networks, but to the web overall — they’re called “Frames”, and they were created for the Farcaster protocol by the Warpcast team. Going beyond previous attempts at open graphs and "embeds" (a la Facebook) in web2, this web3 innovation is a simple way to bring interactivity into posts, turning social posts into embedded applications.

Importantly, and uniquely to web3, these Frames are portable across clients — that is, they are *interoperable*. Since the logic of the Frame lives split across the Farcaster protocol, and the server running the Frame, they are totally independent of any one client. Why does this matter? For developers: This means you can create a consistent experience that can be shared all across the web. For users: This makes it possible to have "a universal graph of user actions across consumer apps” (as web2-to-web3 builder Antonio García Martínez observed in a recent post).

Below are just a few examples — from the a16z crypto engineering team playing around with frames in just a couple hours a few weeks ago — because they’re that expressive and easy to make! Their experiments include everything from viewing follower count over time and easily finding storage usage, to a magic-trick based Frame that “reads your mind” and more:
Check out the thread

🟧📖 Reviews: Read Write Own book is a bestseller

Read Write Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet by Chris Dixon is a national USA Today bestseller (including both non-fiction and fiction), and a New York Times bestseller (has been on the hardcover non-fiction list its first two weeks). Fortune described the book as “the most articulate overview of blockchain to date” that also “shines as a history of computing and the internet [and is likely] …to find a place on computer science and economics syllabi for years to come.” Blockworks, meanwhile, not only described Read Write Own as a book you can “proudly hand out to skeptical friends and concerned in-laws" — but also observed that the author “has a real gift for explaining technical jargon to nontechnical readers”, adding that “I, for one, felt like I was wearing a new pair of glasses… grateful for a clarity I hadn’t known existed.”

If you haven’t already ordered a copy, pick it up at your local bookstore or via any of the links below. English-language editions are available internationally as well, and more editions in many more languages/ regions are coming soon!
get or gift a copy now

Finally: Steven B Johnson — bestselling author of many books on technology and innovation, including Where Good Ideas Come From and How We Got To Now — joined Chris Dixon in a wide-ranging conversation about origin stories and evolution of the internet; emergent properties of decentralized networks; and their writing processes:
listen to/ watch the podcast | share

📣🔊 Arguments: On why a better internet matters to all of us

What are blockchains, and why do they matter? The below op-eds (and short arguments also advertised in major newspapers) help make the case for why blockchains matter in a way that you can share with others:

Big Tech killed the internet. Blockchains can help revive it. (op-ed in Financial Times)

"The early internet was a magical place because it was driven by people and their creativity. Builders knew that whatever they made, they owned — a simple promise that established the right incentives for the technology to flourish. But now, the internet is stagnating and it’s harder than ever for new apps to break through.

Consider the app stores: almost all the products that consistently appear on leader lists were founded more than a decade ago: Facebook (2004), YouTube (2005), Twitter, now known as X (2006), WhatsApp (2009), Uber (2009), Instagram (2010), Snap (2011) and even Tiktok’s parent ByteDance (2012).

Big Tech consolidated its control of the internet around 2010. Just a few gatekeepers now determine who or what will succeed online. Restoring a vibrant internet means breaking this power and putting users back in the driver’s seat. The key to doing that is creating new networks that cannot be easily usurped.”
read the full op-ed here

👀📰 see also…

…“It’s time to take back the internet” (ad in New York Times)

Social networks have the power to decide elections. They can deplatform, destabilize, and make unilateral decisions for billions of people. A new generation of artificial intelligence tools cannibalizes real creators, while deepfakes drown us in misinformation. And streaming services earn more from music than the majority of musicians. Our digital world is vast, rich, and convenient. But it comes with a critical tradeoff: We are more dependent than ever on a few tech companies that have all of the power. These big tech companies depend entirely on the people who use their apps and platforms — without sharing control, ownership, or rewards. But there is another way forward: A future defined by digital ownership.”

…”The next era of internet innovation is here.” (ad in Washington Post)

Forget the price of Bitcoin. Forget the star-studded Super Bowl ads. Forget the dog memes, if you can. Crypto is more than excess and volatility. It’s more than grift, gambling, and political talking points. Crypto isn’t hype or clickbait — it’s a technological breakthrough with the power to reshape our digital world. Just as PCs and mobile phones did. …More than cryptocurrencies, blockchains are construction material for building a different kind of internet — one that shifts power from corporations to communities.”

📹▶️ bonus

We made a short video on blockchains, and why they matter, that briefly summarizes the key arguments above in the context of the book:
watch the video

start ‘em early



-- a16z crypto editorial

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