Yeehaw my friends,
It’s another week in the world of web3 and it seems like everyday there’s news of the broader world picking up on what I began hammering home last year.
And that is that every social platform, media company, agency, and brand are about to be disrupted. Yes, Facebook is actually in the cross-hairs of web3 and it does not look good for them.
Today, I want to share an article published on Forbes and add additional context and notes so that we can better navigate this transition.
FORBES: REVENGE OF THE WINKLEVII
If you didn’t see the 2010 movie, The Social Network, now is the time to watch it.
It couldn’t be more poetic that the Winklevoss twins, who were famously cast as the jocks that tried to steal Mark Zuckerberg’s idea for Facebook, are playing a major role in Zuck’ing Mark’s creation.
“After losing an epic battle with Mark Zuckerberg over ownership of Facebook and being shunned in Silicon Valley, CAMERON and TYLER WINKLEVOSS are back—this time as budding Bitcoin billionaires at the center of the future of money, the creative economy and quite possibly a new operating model for Big Tech itself.”
They were early buyers of Bitcoin back when BTC was $10 per coin and continue to be early pioneers in other areas of web3, such as NFTs.
“The idea of a centralized social network is just not going to exist five or ten years in the future,” Tyler predicts, when asked about Facebook. “There’s a chasm between the old world and this new crypto-native universe.”
NFTs are largely what will bring this vision to life. Along with NFTs, the world will soon be talking about social tokens, community tokens, personal tokens, and brand tokens. All of this represents the melting pot of ingredients that will create the next wave of social media experiences we engage with.
Nifty Gateway is one of the early NFT platforms that are helping to pave the way for this new culture, media, and social paradigm shift.
“Within 24 hours of meeting with the Winklevoss twins in 2019, Griffin and Duncan Cock Foster had received an overture from Gemini to buy Nifty Gateway. The NFT auction house was recently valued at $1 billion.”
If you want to stay on the cutting edge, just look for user experience issues and then start building.
“Everyone had the same complaint,” Duncan said in a 2019 interview. “Buying NFTs was too complicated. We started Nifty Gateway to solve access issues, and we will not rest until 1 billion people are collecting NFTs.”
When I first starting writing and posting on Linkedin last summer about NFTs and social tokens, I had no idea how fast this space was going to grow. I definitely didn’t realize I would be leaving the agency I was at for 12 years to start Parachute and launch the JUMP community.
“The NFT art market has exploded. In February, Nifty Gateway accounted for $75 million of the $91 million in NFT art auctioned on the top seven online platforms, according to data compiled by CryptoArt.io. As of late March, it had sold $132 million of the $188 million worth of such work bought by collectors. When the Cock Fosters launched Nifty Gateway a year ago, monthly sales were less than $100,000.”
The biggest thing that blows my mind is just how early we are, and how many more areas of big tech will be disrupted.
“Another major area of investment for the Winklevii is blockchain-based applications that support decentralization—the idea that tech companies like Google, Facebook and Microsoft will no longer be necessary because web services and applications will be created, operated and governed by users.”
This is the ownership economy. If you thought brands were scared of letting their customers talk publicly about their products on social media, board rooms across the globe are going to have an even harder time with concepts presented by web3’s ownership and governance models.
“In June, Protocol Labs is hosting a workshop to build decentralized versions of Amazon, Google and Facebook that instead of relying on revenue from advertising targeting their users’ personal information will reward them with filecoin tokens. One day filecoin-connected computers could rival the cloud services of these tech giants”
I’m really excited to see all of the new companies, products, and services that will be popping up over the next 12 months. This is why I founded Parachute, and will be launching the JUMP community to help brands and agencies jump into web3.
We’re on track to enter JUMP’s beta phase next week. If you work in a marketing function, or you are at an advertising agency, I think you will be really pumped about JUMP’s mission. The best way to learn is to actively participate in a web3 community and I cannot wait to hang out with you in the metaverse. It’s going to be a lot of fun so bring your forward thinking friends and colleagues.
That’s all for today. Exciting times! Talk again soon.
-Jeff