(2021-09-13) Burger Minimum Viable Participation In Crypto: Games Costs Accessibility

Elena Burger: Minimum Viable Participation in Crypto: Games, Costs, & Accessibility. When people talk about the recent past and envision the distant future of crypto, conversation always comes back to the cycle of wealth creation and redistribution.

“I think what was perhaps one of the best things that came out of the 2017 ICO boom was the people were spending their eth and that led to reorganization and further distribution of eth across many many hands.” — Santiago Santos

Let’s say that the number of crypto users has at least doubled — if not quadrupled — in the past year. What this number doesn’t convey is that the price of Ethereum — and thus the price of participating in what is today’s most active crypto network — has increased significantly as well. This is arguably bad for new entrants.

People often compare this time to the early days of the internet. And there’s a lot of truth to that: At the end of 1999, the top three internet providers in the U.S. covered roughly 26 million households

But most early users of the internet also were lucky enough to see prices go down every year: In 1996, AOL switched from usage-sensitive to flat-rate pricing, which not only drove more consumer adoption of the internet, but also led to more time spent online.

things feel different today: The gas prices are higher, the participants are more ambitious

The next wave of projects should prioritize not only speed and cost, but function as well. I do wish we saw more projects that made simply having a wallet — not holding a particular currency or NFT — as the only barrier to entry.

The past few weeks have demonstrated some promising examples. Dom Hoffman’s Loot project was a kind of crucible for all kinds of opportunities

my personal favorite variant amid the flurry came from Dom himself, who proposed creating “Synthetic Loot,” a way to general a virtual NFT from the keys of any users’ wallet (link to contract here). In the words of Dom, “creators building on top of Loot can choose to recognize Synthetic Loot as a way to allow a wider range of adventurers to participate in the ecosystem, while still being able to easily differentiate between ‘original’ Loot and Synthetic Loot.”

Synthetic Loot didn’t generate as much excitement as other accessible forms of Loot, like mLoot, the mintable Loot expansion pack.

As Brian Flynn of Rabbithole pointed out a few days ago, Dapper Labs also enabled developers to build on top of CryptoKitties, in the same way people are now building atop nascent NFT-oriented computer games. And on other chains too, there’s evidence of tremendous progress. (platform)

Andre Cronje, the founder of yearn (which itself has been compared to Loot), published a blog post called Loot & Rarity

where are the opportunities for more people to engage in crypto in a capacity that isn’t buying or flipping NFTs, using DeFi, or working for a DAO? And how will people learn the joy of collaboration and collective ownership over a network that has already priced them out?

A few days after posting about Synthetic Loot, Dom also wrote about a way to make Loot expansion packs immediately available to all Loot-holders, without requiring users to pay for gas. This was another fascinating proposal: It would require developers to refer to a kind of standardized registry of all Loot expansions, perhaps demanding more coordination, but also unifying the ecosystem in a more network-friendly way. While it doesn’t seem like developers have adopted this standard.