2023 — Starting a New Chapter
Read what’s next for crypto and where I’m moving my new blog.
2023 — Starting a New Chapter
Eight years ago, in December 2014, I published my first blog post on Medium, to give an account of Smart Contracts and their meaning from a legal perspective. Albeit being quite explorative, that post has been shared and read tens of thousands of times across the Internet and hopefully helped some fellow lawgens get excited about blockchain and law.
Not only did I discover that I really enjoyed blogging back then but I became obsessed with thinking deeply about what crypto and blockchain would mean for an information-based society. In the two years following my first blog post, I wrote about
- modes of contractual governance in an on-demand service economy (2015), proposing on-chain social graphs and reputation systems to solve platform lock-in for workers in networked digital environments, a phenomenon that’s just now taking off;
- about the political economy of computing (2015), scoping new forms of regulation in the age of platforms, now a hot topic with the EU’s Digital Market Act;
- about smart contracts, platforms and intermediaries (2015), where I predicted MEV in the Ethereum blockchain, 5 years before it arose;
- and about a blockchain token taxonomy (2016), where I explained why tokens were the single most important social innovation in blockchain, foreshadowing NFTs, and some reasoning why the Metaverse will only become real with blockchains, now being discussed as web4 — or the spatial web among researchers.
Looking back, I’m quite proud of these reflections, since they essentially captured the evolution of the crypto space for the years to come. You could say I was ahead of my time.
Get ready for the next chapter 📖
The internet has become political. Social movements are the new change agents, fundamentally transforming work, politics, community, how we live and everything else.
That’s why I’ve decided to build Common Ground - a web3-powered platform for collectives of all kinds, helping them grow and collaborate.
Behind Common Ground stands an incredible team of builders, investors and communities, that are united by a shared vision of a better internet.
Check out https://commonground.cg/
Common Ground brings together essential features for communities, including chat, voice, blogging and much, much more. Hence, I’m moving my blog there. I’ve already published one significant post under my new moniker “ada” about what I call the “Builder-Operator-Separation”, explaining how builders in the web3 space can create extralegal spaces with radical decentralization.
The platform has been in closed alpha since June 2022 and will be open to the public later in January 2023. If you want an invite to get early access, join our telegram group and ask for a referral link. You’re very welcome!
So long, fellow traveler. See you on the other side.
By Florian Glatz on December 29, 2022.
Exported from Medium on January 3, 2025.