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Greetings all, in this week’s episode of Ventures, my guest Crystal Berger (https://www.expertbookingsonline.com/) and I talk about how her new company Expert Bookings Online (EBO) is working to create a simple marketplace solution for content producers and a wide diversity of subject-matter experts. In addition to making it fast and efficient for content producers to book experts, EBO will also help surface and train experts from all over the world - who would otherwise be overlooked - to be ready to be guests on shows to share their opinions and perspectives.

Check it out: The importance of diverse perspectives in media, and the Expert Bookings Online (EBO) story :: with Crystal Berger

Tokens

Part of the reason why 2017 was such a bubbly market for Web 3 was because everyone was doing Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs). Despite the name, that was the year “tokens” became a more common term in Web 3 along with “coins” (i.e. a coin is a type of token used as money, but tokens can represent tons of different things - which we’ll talk about below).

In fact, when discussing what “real world” applications that Etherem could enable, 2017 proved that a global world computer was mostly used to generate and sell tokens. 😊

Most of those tokens were of course “fungible” (i.e. a key term in Web 3, meaning two things - like physical US dollar bills - can be swapped and functionally be the same thing). The technical term for most fungible tokens created on Ethereum is ERC-20 Tokens, which - as the page describes - ”..can represent virtually anything in Ethereum:

• reputation points in an online platform
• skills of a character in a game
• lottery tickets
• financial assets like a share in a company
• a fiat currency like USD
• an ounce of gold
• and more…”

Some of the key types of ERC-20 tokens out there (and equivalent on other chains besides Ethereum) include platform tokens, security tokens, transactional tokens, utility tokens, and governance tokens (you can follow rabbit trails here to learn more, most people have slightly different ways of describing all the different types of tokens out there).

Importantly, ERC-721 Tokens - and the equivalent on other chains - are the now-famous Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). One of the best places to learn more and follow tons of rabbit trails on NFTs is A16Z’s NFT Cannon page. Because A16Z’s resource on NFT is so exhaustive and fantastic, we’ll refer you there and keep this section short for now (i.e. we don’t need to recreate the wheel).

Why NFTs matter

NFTs are just “things” that you own on the Internet (most usually, on blockchains), similar to your favorite watch, car, shoes, or furniture piece. Similar to IRL (“in real life”), some NFTs are just fun to own - whether they are status symbols or not - and some NFTs have utility, such as getting you into clubs or proving ownership of an IRL asset.

What matters about NFTs, however, is precisely that they are provably unique and scarce resources on the Internet. Even though there are zillions of copies of the Mona Lisa everywhere, everyone knows the “real” one (or at least believes the “real” one) is in the Louvre in Paris. Similarly, it’s now possible to prove that you “own” an NFT on a particular blockchain.

This is a bigger deal than most people realize (even given, I believe, the current hype!), and I’ll be writing about this a lot more in 2022.

Quick DAO update

The “OG 44” - i.e. the first 44 members of our Discord server before we closed it temporarily - are currently meeting to finalize details, operations, and processes. It has been an amazing journey to dive into human organization design throughout history and explore how this can apply to DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) today.  If you’d like to follow along, check out this topic on my Satchel site and subscribe to it (“Web3PMDAO”) directly.

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Have a great rest of your week!

~Will