Weekly Updates

NFTs Go Mainstream

My Twitter timeline has been full of NFT talk for quite some time. Beeple, CryptoPunks, MetaFactory, and so many other communities/projects have been on fire for a while. 

In the last couple weeks, NFT talk has spilled over into other areas of my interest graph. First, it was the VC/technology thought-leader crowd with Mark Cuban, Gary Vaynerchuk, Chamath, Naval, etc. That’s not necessarily surprising. They’re all in the business of frontier tech and have expressed interest in crypto/blockchain previously.

This time though, I started seeing mainstream basketball journalists and sports media talking about NFTs in my timeline—specifically NBA Top Shot. Ben Thompson (who’s read by pretty much every startup/tech executive) wrote about NFTs/Top Shot on Monday ($) and put a punctuation mark on NFTs big “moment" in my eyes.

Massive props to the Dapper team and the NBA for pulling this off. This wasn’t an overnight success. They had the vision and executed a product that captured the imagination of hundreds of thousands (their Discord server alone has around 120k members). They distilled major benefits of NFTs and blockchains in a way that a less technical audience could grok. 

The recent volatility in cryptocurrency markets undoubtedly will spill over into the NFT markets. That will scare some off, but the euphoria that brought in this new blood will turn into long-term commitment and passion for others. The crypto community is growing and in the next cycle, we’ll be stronger for it. 

On to the updates...

Technical

  • We launched our own hosted Ceramic nodes to support persistence of linked content. We’ll offer the service for free (with some limits), but there’s much more to come to make our P2P content storage scalable, user-friendly, and robust.
  • We released a draft of our 2021 product roadmap. We’re focused on rounding out the user experience that makes the Geo Web unique (a geo-driven browser) and buttoning up our scalability, security, and usability before we launch in production and start taking “real” money.

Community

  • We received our APOLLO Gitcoin grant matching funds last week. Thanks again to all that contributed! We’re excited to start applying those funds toward network contributions. We’ll start posting bounty issues in our Github org soon.
  • If you’re a creator or developer that’s interested in geo-anchored augmented reality art, applications, or games, we’d love to work with you on the Geo Web testnet. Our Kovan infrastructure can deliver the same basic user experience as production, but without the same economic incentives (or costs). Perfect for experimentation and pushing the envelope with new concepts. Hit us up if you’re interested in helping us shape the Geo Web creator/user experience!

On Deck

  • Setting up the initial Geo Web DAO
  • Drafting open bounties
  • The Geo Web browser!

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