At Nobody, we have a goal of creating amazing new businesses. That means we need to be on top of the latest developments in technology, business and social engagement. With that in mind, I want to share some of the ideas we’ve been collecting and generating about the use of crypto in Nobody Studios.
We can split the story into three separate sections:
- Platform – Crypto platform is core to Nobody
- Features – Crypto features are compelling for users
- NewCos – Crypto companies, are commercial
Crypto as a platform
If Nobody mints a crypto coin or crypto-token, which represents value in the Studio, there’s a great deal we can do with it. We can truly break down the traditional distinctions between investors, team members and users/customers. Being a Nobody becomes a matter of scale rather than a matter of kind.
The ability to own a small fraction of tokens enables a very democratic approach to investment and incentives. Somebody who has contributed a million dollars gets rewarded with a token. Still, if you contribute a video, you are rewarded with a token too, even if only a small proportion. This shared platform can build a sense of shared purpose that I think is very compelling. It’s also very different from traditional inventive models where investors receive shares and users, or contributors receive money at best, sometimes vouchers and often just social badges. With a coin or token, everyone can be a Nobody.
Tokens can drive engagement with all the work of our Newcos (companies created by Nobody Studios). One scenario I’m really interested in is gamification. As I mentioned before, people often get little badges and vouchers intended to encourage them to kind of push on and commit to a program or service. People do this with meditation apps, language apps—all sorts of things. The problem is that for some of these scenarios, the competitive nature of gamification is not very healthy – to be publicly engaging and publicly measuring your wellness or calmness. And it’s not aligned with our Nobody values to avoid gambling and highly competitive scenarios. So for some of the mental health scenarios that we’re interested in, tokens can offer a much less aggressive incentive.
Crypto features
We create particular applications and companies that have features that leverage crypto functionality. One that everybody’s talking about nowadays is the concept of an NFT or non-fungible token. For us, there are so many things of which we might create NFTs. On our Ovationz platform, a specific talk or presentation offered by our talent could be created as an NFT. This would give the customer a digitally secured piece of content that they can reuse within their business – it is distinctly their content, not just a generic video.
Very soon in the metaverse, we’ll have the ability to buy real estate, cars and fashion as we work, play or just hang out in virtual environments. Already people buy costumes and weapons for virtual characters in gaming environments. It is really taking off. But people want some sense of guaranteed ownership over metaverse goods, and, as more and more money is spent in this way, they need some governance of the marketplace in virtual goods. That seems, again, a very natural scenario for Nobody to be looking at.
NFTs can also be used in certifying real estate and other real-world goods as well.
Blockchain is essentially the central pillar of crypto technologies. Think of blockchain as a digital ledger. In a physical ledger book, we enter debits and credits, but we can’t erase them, and we should not make changes to a transaction after it is entered – every transaction stands on its own. The blockchain digital ledger does something similar, using advanced encryption techniques to link every entry in the ledger (every block) and secure them. But there is no central administrator of all this. The blockchain is publicly distributed: it’s as if there were thousands of copies of a physical ledger, and every user had to agree before a new entry could be added. (There’s an excellent and straightforward explanation of Blockchain principles here:
We can do things uniquely with Blockchain, taking advantage of this publicly shared, synchronized and validated ledger. We could create and certify crowd-sourced certifications for appraisals of collectibles, weighted with a kind of “credibility” score. Secured on the blockchain, this becomes much more authoritative, believable and reliable than current crowd-sourcing scores, especially less prone to astroturfing with fake accounts because not only the score but the entire network that contributed to it is certified.
If we want to share healthcare data, we can anonymize and encrypt it back to service providers. So, for very personal data sets such as sleep or ADLs (activities of daily living which are very important in measuring health care for the elderly) – that’s very personal, very private data. We can secure that with Blockchain and encrypt it with an audit trail.
Crypto companies
Finally, there are these companies (Newcos as we call them) we can build: commercial ideas that we can put forward. So, for example, we’ve been looking at whether people could build and share their own crypto algorithms. I could build an algorithm, and it will become the Donald Farmer algorithm. People who liked my blog or my articles might want to follow my algorithm because they think I know what I’m talking about. Highly unlikely scenario! But I’d say if the Ray Leonard Jr. algorithm was available, there are people who admire him and his business expertise and his background, and there’s his knowledge and his connections … Yeah, Ray Leonard knows what he’s doing! I’ll follow his trading strategy! People could create their own algorithms and share them, creating a marketplace.
What we need
To make this happen, we need skills: people with experience who know how to build tokens, exchanges, etc. And we honestly need speed – we have to move pretty quickly at this. As everybody is aware, there has been a downturn in crypto, and encrypted coins’ value has gone down. But it’s going to come back up again. A war in Europe has resulted in a commodity crisis and a currency crisis – we’re going to see those prices go back up. There’ll be surges, and there’ll be drops. But most importantly, at some point, the overall trend of value and adoption will pick up again, and we need to be ready for that second wave or that third wave of value and adoption.
Still a skeptic, but a positive one.
One last thing – I admit and many of you have heard me saying I am a crypto skeptic. I actually still am. But I am not skeptical about the value of crypto to Nobody. In a future post, I’ll share some of my doubts and some of the reasons why that uncertainty isn’t absolute. I actually still find a lot of value and a lot of interest in what we’re doing. More later…
You can watch Donald’s video presentation on Nobody and Crypto HERE.
