This Week in Writing and NFTs #7

This post was originally published on my Mirror weblog where there is a 2/2 fixed edition of the piece as a writing NFT on the Optimisim Network.

tl:dr as generated by GPT4:

1. Cultural objects like books and songs will retain their traditional essence but will see innovative experimentation in form.
2. Smart contract wallets will evolve into cultural objects, resembling books, magazines, and bulletins.
3. Subscription models will innovate significantly. Traditional models will merge with web3 features until 2026, when new subscription methods will emerge to reduce financial burdens for consumers.
4. dAppchains and rollups on Cosmos and Ethereum will become both artistic works and cultural production/distribution platforms.
5. Curation DAOs will likely lead these developments, creating systems similar to onchain MoMAs with for-profit branches that manage risks through real-world asset investments and integrated banking or crypto exchange services, possibly including Solana.

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Read: 10 Theses on the Onchain Art Markets in 2024

Thoughts on the Crypto Media in 2024 I

It’s been more than a year since I wrote the last This Week in Writing and NFTs post. It was a series where I mainly delved into the latest trends in nonfungibles ecosystems in terms with the practice of writing—as in either .pdfs pinned to IPFS and hashed to an ERC721, or metadata, or the art of permanent storage, let alone the smart contractual artistic enterprises that utilized the infrastructure available back then.

Lately, I have been thinking about it all again whilst federating my content over many a platform whereas I am more interested in the relation betwixt medium and datum as leveraged by decentralized technologies in the most blockchain-agnostic probable—preferring EVM supported systems over the others, though. I am yet to explore Cosmos IBC, and the currently marketually triumphant Solana. I do not think anyone will be able to christen me into any of the latter duo—I met one of my favorite artists in the space in Istanbul for an earliesh morning coffee a couple of months ago who also happen to have contributed to the Cosmos ecosystem, and that might be the only reason I am intrigued in Cosmos alongside some developments in intents-centric architectural quarters thereof when it comes to dAppchains.

I have not checked Solana since that wallet deleted their frontend, and also for I just cannot find the seedphrase—I have about 50 active wallets across 5 blockchains with all of their seed phrases and private keys registred in 2 stone books, 2 paper books, the most important ones on a titanium key registrar, not a single one of them on any password manager even though i used 4 password managers seamlessly along with passkeys.

However, that Solana seed phrase is nowhere to be found. This requires the question: Do our socially recoverable smart contract wallet infrastructures expand on their features and modularity enough? I think Privy is doing great job as long as the protocols who incorporate such technologies make use of the former and their competitors’ security features.

Now, where am I coming at? Is this another word salad with extra virgin hikikomori oil who touches the grass in the humdrum and publicly humiliating instances of Midjourney civilizations? No.

Think about the following briefly:

• Intents but in terms of mechanism markets through what Flashbots’ SUAVE and Anoma projects offer will determine the real composability plays across cryptomedia, which deserves another entry since with intents you can either build a zk-proof dating markets where anonymous individuals can share their medical history in order to turn the immediate environment of theirs into an STD pool; or, you can publish fully anonymous literary works without having to use hardware-based tweaks at all times, and can log them for a memex of yours without revealing the world that you are that partypooper..
• Recently Rafa from the Folklore Institute was tinkering on a subscription flow where the reading experience is utterly tailored to our immediate individual needs:

I think that people will be working on the intents architectures and programmable smart contract wallets with systems akin to mailing lists that had physical counterparties back in the day. We will start to see the emergence of crypto-systems native e-flux, Boomkat, Soundohm types of services that will be catering to the needs of ours at the nexuses of artistic, cultural, and consumer-ends thereof which will provide for these utterly tailored consumption patterns—digestion? I for one just consume data and digest the knowledge, which are not necessarily negative terms in the fashion I perceive the world with this second language called English.

Hence, my ideas regarding cryptomedia, crypto-native publishing, and the subscription models in the 2024 is as follows:

1. We will not be re-inventing cultural objects. That is, books will be books, and the songs songs at the meta-layer. However, we will be experimenting with their form more.
2. We will see self-composable smart contract wallets that are cultural objects themselves as a book, as a magazine, as a bulletin, and whatnots.
3. The main innovation will take place at the subscription models. For some time, we will be witnessing the traditional subscription understanding of the contemporaneous hybrid media ecologies as in web2 exponentiated by web3, however, by 2026 we will have heretofore unbeknowns modes of subscription that will ease financial burden on the “consumer”—audience, reader, citizen, denizen…
4. We will see entire dAppchains, and rollups respectively on Cosmos and Ethereum as both pure work of arts and standalone cultural production and distribution suites. I assume curation DAOs will take the lead and build up such systems to turn into onchain MoMAs with a for-profit subsidiary treasuries that will be hedging against black swans by purchasing RWAs via custodian cryptograhically integrated banking or CEX services—Solana might be another frontier there for whom I am not sure right now.