Daily insights for city builders, delivered every morning at 6 AM ET. I’m Brandon Donnelly — a Toronto-based real estate developer and founder of Globizen. I’ve been writing here since 2013.
This past weekend Bright Moments opened up their NFT art gallery in New York’s Soho. This is the company’s second gallery. The first was in Venice, California. And there are plans for eight more cities, with Berlin being the next one. (When is Toronto?!)
Bright Moments is a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), which is interesting in its own right but is a topic for another post. You can read a bit more about Bright Moments and DAOs, here and here.
What I would instead like to talk about today is how Bright Moments is operating at the intersection of NFT art and real-world spaces. They are in effect a community. It’s a place for artists to release/showcase their work and a place for people to connect.
One of the things that the company is doing with each gallery launch is minting an NFT collection that is tied to the city and that uses the local demonym. When they opened their popup in Venice, they launched the CryptoVenetians. And last weekend in New York they launched the CryptoNewYorkers.
In each case, 1,000 NFTs were minted and the idea is that once they have expanded to their 10 cities, there will be a collection of 10,000 NFTs.
I have said it before, but this is an exciting time in the world. Maybe this current NFT craze ends up being a massive bubble, or maybe it doesn’t. Either way, things are exciting.
But here’s the thing.
Organizations like Bright Moments show you just how important physical spaces, live communities, and cities continue to be. It doesn’t matter that this is digital art being displayed on a screen and that one could be viewing it from anywhere. People want to hang out in the same room and experience these sorts of new things together.
Yesterday, Jack Dorsey published the below tweetstorm about Twitter’s efforts to create a decentralized internet protocol for social media. What does this mean? Think along the lines of the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (or SMTP). Some, or many, of you may not know what this is, but you almost certainly use it every day. It is fundamental to modern email communication. It is how emails get sent.
Twitter is funding a small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media. The goal is for Twitter to ultimately be a client of this standard. 🧵
I would encourage you to click through to the entire thread. It all feels very topical. We are living in a world of recommendation algorithms and content designed to “spark controversy and outrage.” Arguably, this is the result of social media companies being platforms (i.e. proprietary systems), as opposed to being based around open protocols. Twitter is trying to change that by funding a team. And that feels like a great — and timely — idea.
One of the
most profound shifts taking place today – because of new technologies – is
that of decentralization. I’ve written about this before, but I keep coming
back to it because I find it so fascinating.
It’s
happening to varying degrees, but as a general trend, I believe it is leading
to better data (less information asymmetries), more efficient markets, and the
removal of many middle people. In the past, some intermediaries were necessary in
order to act as proxies for portions of the market. But I believe that is
changing.
So what’s
an example of this? Bitcoin. Bitcoin is an example of decentralization because
no one entity controls it. It operates through a decentralized public ledger.
And because of this, it has the potential to be highly disruptive to the way we
think about currencies today.
Put another
way, I see decentralization as a way to leverage the wisdom of crowds. I am
convinced that large groups of people can be incredibly intelligent when they’re
allowed to contribute in the right ways. And I think this could solve many
different problems, from the infighting we see within cities to broader market phenomena.
As another example,
there’s something new in the venture capital space called DAO – which stands
for Decentralized
Autonomous Organization. Essentially it’s a decentralized VC platform based
off of a Bitcoin derivative currency.
But perhaps
the most noteworthy and relevant feature is that it allows its large pool of
investors to anonymously vote on which investments to pursue. This is in
contrast to a more centralized approach where an investment committee would
meet behind closed doors in a big boardroom and make a decision. This would be the
more typical approach.
If you’re
not in the tech space, the above may not seem all that exciting to you. But I
see many parallels between venture capital and real estate development, which is
one of the reasons I follow the space. So I can’t help but wonder what this
trend could ultimately mean for real estate, design, and other city building industries.
I can
certainly imagine a world where the forces that shape our cities are more
collective and decentralized in nature. It’s already starting to happen through crowdsourcing, social media, ridesharing, and other online platforms.
To start off the year, I thought I would talk about something pretty geeky, but very forward looking: Bitcoin.
I wrote about Bitcoin just over a year ago when I was first starting to wrap my head around it, but a lot has happened since then. Many of you might know that 2014 was a terrible year for Bitcoin and that its price has declined significantly (chart from Coinbase):
But does that mean Bitcoin is a flop, or that the hype has just died down a bit?
If you follow what’s being discussed within the tech community, you’ll know that there are still lots of people who are bullish on Bitcoin. But more precisely, they are bullish on the underlying architecture behind Bitcoin and something that is called the Blockchain.
I’m not going to get too technical in this post (if you want that, go here), but I do want to talk about three things (that I’ve mostly learned from the folks over at Union Square Ventures): the Blockchain, why it matters, and what it could mean for specific industries such as transportation and real estate. I promise to make it relevant at the end.
The way to think about all of this is in layers.
The Blockchain is the foundation or base of Bitcoin. It’s essentially a decentralized public ledger that keeps track of all the Bitcoin transactions. Decentralized means that not one single person or company owns the database. It’s free for anyone and everyone to see. This structure is important because it enables peer-to-peer transactions across the internet, as opposed to going through a bank or other intermediary.
But the key takeaway is that Bitcoin is simply one example of a “protocol” built on top of the Blockchain. And there are many others in the works, including a protocol for realtime ride sharing (Lazooz) and a protocol for a decentralized peer-to-peer marketplace (OpenBazaar). And so the real innovation is the Blockchain, not Bitcoin itself.
Why does this matter?
It matters because these protocols are, again, not owned by a single entity, which is remarkably different than the way most things work today. Take for example the residential real estate industry. In the Greater Toronto Area, the data that emerges from home listings and sales is owned by the Toronto Real Estate Board.
And since this data is privately owned, a lot of it remains only accessible to “members” or real estate agents. The Competition Bureau has been fighting for more openness, but the Toronto Real Estate Board obviously wants to keep as much of this data as it can to itself. Who can blame them.
But what if somebody came along and created a new protocol for a decentralized peer-to-peer home marketplace? In that case no one would own the data, which means everyone would have access to it. And that would completely change the landscape. I’m fuzzy on what this protocol would even look like, but it seems entirely possible given what else is in the works.
And if this Bitcoin Blockchain revolution does actually take place, it wouldn’t be restricted to only non-tech legacy industries. Joel Monegro of Union Square Ventures believes that “decentralized protocols” such as Lazooz and OpenBazaar (mentioned above) could even have a big impact on companies such as Uber and eBay, respectively.
I’m still trying to wrap my head around all of this, but I want to understand it and I thought you all might as well. Because even though it seems very tech right now, the implications would also be very non-tech if it turns out to be true.
