I am struck by the difference in approach taken by the top onchain entrepreneurs and the top entrepreneurs from earlier internet eras (web1 and web2).
The earlier internet eras have been marked by companies and founders focused on selfishness:
"Your margin is my opportunity" - Jeff Bezos
"You know, one of my favorite Roman orators ended every speech with the phrase Carthago delenda est--Carthage must be destroyed" - Mark Zuckerberg
But when I look at the top onchain entrepreneurs I see generosity:
The Satoshi mic drop is the greatest entrepreneurial act I have ever witnessed. They created what has become a 1.4 Trillion economy and then just walked away. They gave it to the world and said "it is yours".
Vitalik stuck around but has taken a similar approach. He has welcomed other entrepreneurs to create systems that take value away from the Ethereum blockchain. I would say he has even encouraged it.
How can giving something away or letting others take value from you be good business?
It is all about zero sum thinking. If you think that the size of the pie is fixed, then you need to grab as much of it as you can. But if you are making a pie that can grow and grow and grow, you just take a small slice and let everyone else eat.
That is the Satoshi mic drop.
And it is the key to winning onchain.
Don't be selfish.
Be generous.
A few weeks ago I started a new series on this blog talking about how I've moved my Internet presence onchain over the last few years. The first installment talked about blogging onchain.
This installment is about tweeting.
As many of you know, USV led the first round of investment in Twitter back in 2007 when it spun out of Odeo. I sat on the Twitter board for a number of years and was an active user of Twitter until it was bought by Elon Musk.
When Twitter was put in play back in 2022, I said this:
Unfortunately, what transpired is the opposite of what I believe should have happened and so I left Twitter and have been casting instead of tweeting since then.
Casting is like tweeting but it happens on a decentralized social protocol called Farcaster which launched in June 2021. I joined immediately and I am Farcaster ID number 169 meaning I was among the first two hundred users of the protocol.
Farcaster is still relatively small. It has less than a million total users and something like fifty thousand daily users.
But it has something Twitter and Instagram and TikTok don't have. It has a decentralized and open social graph and protocol. Just like the early days of Twitter, anyone can build a social app on top of Farcaster and they will all work together.
The leading client for Farcaster is called Warpcast and it was built by the Farcaster team. But if I choose to use Supercast, Nook, Kiosk, or some other Farcaster client, anyone on any app can read and reply to my casts and visa versa. It is exactly like the early days of Twitter with Tweety and Tweetdeck and many other third-party clients.
In a world where the company operating the social media app can de-platform a politician, can change the algorithm to optimize ads, or can be shut down by the US Government, we need a different model.
And, ironically, the early days of Twitter showed us the way, but we did not have a business model back then to make that approach sustainable.
Satoshi’s Bitcoin white paper in 2008 laid it out but it took another few years before the onchain business model was in plain sight and could be adopted by anyone.
So that's what Farcaster is. Simply put it is the Twitter ecosystem circa 2007 with an onchain business model that ensures that it cannot and will not ever be closed.
Developers are not just building short text social (like Twitter) on the Farcaster protocol. They are also building social image sharing (like Instagram) and social video sharing (like TikTok) on Farcaster. They are also building blogging and marketplaces and more. All with interoperable identity and onchain posts.
I am certain that onchain social is the best answer to the problems of monolithic big-tech social and that it will yield an enormous diversity of social experiences that are not attention optimizing and advertising driven and controlled and curated by a single entity.
If you want to experience onchain social, you can follow me on Farcaster.
Once you do that, you will have an onchain identity that you own and is not controlled by anyone other than you. That will be your gateway to many more onchain social apps that will be built over the next decade.
We are going back to the future with onchain social and I am incredibly excited about it.
Disclosure: USV is an investor in Farcaster and a number of other onchain social apps that were mentioned in or linked to in this post.
I posted this on AVC.com today explaining that I've moved here to AVC.XYZ.
Over the last few years, I’ve moved my internet life from web2 to web3 and rarely use any web2 services anymore.
So I am starting a series called “I’ve Moved Onchain” to explain this journey to everyone and today’s opening post is about blogging, naturally.
I’ve blogged at AVC.com for a very long time. I started out in September 2003 at avc.typepad.com but moved to avc.com a few years later.
AVC.com has been my home for blogging for over twenty years.
AVC.com has served me very well over the years but it lacks a few things that really matter to me.
First, the posts are stored in a closed database hosted by me in the cloud.
Second, the services that I use to create AVC.com are not “composable” meaning that others cannot build things on top of AVC.com and the services that create and display the posts I create here.
Third, the identities of the authors (me) and readers (you) here at AVC.com are not tied to any sort of portable identity and reputation system.
While none of these issues may seem like a big deal to you, they are huge deal to me as I will explain in a bit.
So when web3 blogging services started cropping up, I started to use them.
My first rodeo was at Mirror.xyz where I kept avc.mirror.xyz for most of 2021, 2022, and 2023. This was my first post at avc.mirror.xyz on March 18, 2021.
I really wanted to blog at AVC.xyz and that became an option for me in November 2023 when I joined Paragraph.xyz and wrote this Hello World post.
These web3 blogging platforms store all of my posts onchain at Arweave. These posts are available to anyone to read regardless of what blogging platform I use. And if I get abducted by an alien and fail to pay my hosting service, they will still exist onchain. Forever. That’s a huge deal to me.
They are also composable web3 services. Any developer can take what I create at AVC.xyz and build on top of it. That’s also a huge deal to me. My partner Nick describes the composability benefit so well in his post today on USV.com.
And my identity and the identity of my readers are mapped to a web3 wallet address that authenticates who they are, what they do onchain, and allows developers to create reputation systems on everyone. Given my fight with spam and trolls and jerks and assholes that largely drove me away from blogging and commenting in the latter part of the last decade, this last bit really matters to me.
At the start of this year, I took everyone who receives an email when I post here at AVC.com and imported that email list to Paragraph.xyz. So a lot of the AVC readers have been getting emails of my posts at AVC.xyz this year. But even so, I still get a ton of daily traffic here at AVC.com and I have not posted anything new here since January 10, 2024.
I do not plan to post here at AVC.com going forward, but I will keep the archive up and I may choose to cross-post a thing or two here whenever I want to reach the broadest audience.
My home for blogging is and has been onchain for a while now and if you want to follow my writing, please go visit avc.xyz and subscribe to receive my blog posts via email by clicking the green subscribe button on the upper right.
But what about Mirror.xyz and avc.mirror.xyz? you might ask.
Well, I am also thrilled to be able to say that Mirror and Paragraph have merged and these two leading web3 blogging services will now be one. And, as you may know or suspect, USV has invested in both of them and now will be a major shareholder in the merged company. I am very excited about that. Here is Paragraph’s blog post about the transaction and here is Mirror’s.
The team that built Mirror.xyz is now turning their attention to a new app called Kiosk and they blogged about that today. So USV is now also an investor in that project.
Over the last thirty years, our lives moved from offline to online. They are now moving onchain. That’s a wonderful thing and I hope you will join me in moving onchain as well.