Whacky Ethereum - The Daily Gwei #307
The future of the new internet built on Ethereum is very exciting.
EIP-1559 is not the only thing that people have been going mad for over the last few days - NFT mania is still in full swing with boatloads of money still flying around. One interesting new project that’s popped up in the NFT space is called PartyBid which is managed by PartyDAO - this project allows people to band together to bid on NFTs and then share in the rewards.
Over the last few days there was an active auction for a Zombie CryptoPunk on ZORA as part of their new CryptoPunks auction house feature. There was a reserve price of 500 ETH on this punk and anyone was able to bid on it - though in the end the punk was actually won by 478 people who collectively bid on it via PartyBid. I didn’t personally participate in this auction but I did watch on in the final hours of the bidding process and it was really fun as you can see other users cursors on the site in real time and they can display messages to each-other. This made the auction feel a lot more personal instead of robotic as online auctions typically tend to feel like. Even more interesting was that after PartyBid won the auction, the zombie punk NFT was fractionalized and the winners each got a piece of it - essentially creating collective ownership of the punk.
Orthogonal to NFTs is media and I think the future of this is decentralized and user-owned - whether that be publishing long-form pieces on Mirror or hosting videos on Glass - it gives creators true ownership over their content. For example, each piece published on Mirror is also published to Arweave (a decentralized data storage blockchain) so that the piece lives on forever (or at least for as long as Arweave lives). Once you have this open and decentralized storage of content, it becomes portable and you can take it with you anywhere - this is especially true for things like NFTs. Want to issue an NFT to go along with your blog post on Mirror and have your community “buy into” your work? You can do that very easily - all on Ethereum and all from the same wallet address. Then this NFT can be resold later via many different open marketplaces or even fractionalized.
The other major feature that these new tools enable is new ways to monetize content to maximise the amount of value that is going to creators instead of middlemen. For example, Audius is a project building tools that enables artists to release their music without having to do things like sign record deals - this means most of the money goes to artists instead of middlemen. Another example is all of the NFT platforms that allow artists to sell their work to anyone in the world - and even though these platforms take a small cut, most of them don’t actually own the artwork or any royalties to it.
So far in Ethereum we’ve had the DeFi revolution, the NFT renaissance, an explosion of DAOs and we have the beginnings of a layer 2 summer. In addition to all of this, I think we’re going to start seeing more and more web3-related apps and services come to life in a big way over the coming months as it feels like the ecosystem is finally ready to embrace it all - whether that be decentralized social media, new ways of publishing, or simply creating more open platforms - the future of the new internet built on Ethereum is very exciting.
Have a great weekend everyone,
Anthony Sassano
Enjoyed today’s piece? I send out a fresh one every week day - be sure to subscribe to receive it in your inbox!
Join the Daily Gwei Ecosystem
All information presented above is for educational purposes only and should not be taken as investment advice.