Weekly Learning: NFT, Digital Assets, Web 3.0, and Design

NFTs

Why NFTs are hard to explain provides a quick explanation of the concept:

…NFT is a process, rather than a product. To NFT something is to assign it a distinct serial number that lives on a public blockchain. That’s it. ‘NFT’ conveys no additional information about the purpose or nature of the content-being-serialized aside from that.

And despite all the rage and fury on Twitter, NFT as an abstract concept seems to be something that should be taken a little bit more seriously:

The notion of a serialized, public-blockchain-residing, innately financialized instrument is clearly a useful wrapper, and it will absolutely persist.

Digital Assets

What are digital assets? is a “systematic exploration and discussion of digital assets.”

Firstly, it explains the core concepts of asset and contract:

…a contract is the most basic and general expression of assets, a standardized contract is a special form of contract, a bill is a special form of standardized contract, securities are a special form of bills, and the currency note is a special form of securities.

Secondly:

…digital assets are an aggregate of economic rights derived from digital objects, not the digital objects themselves. So far, most of the discussions on digital assets do not distinguish the two.

Then it points to the concept of digital assets as “the digital expression of assets,” rather than the actual content in digital format.

Followed by an enlightening take one the role of blockchain in contract digitalization:

…blockchain (in one narrow form) as a distributed system maintained by many parties and supports the creation, verification, storage, circulation, execution and other related operations of digital contracts. The precursor technologies of blockchain are text contract, signature, standard contracts, bills, securities, currency notes andother contract technologies.

The implication:

Since contracts and laws are the basis of human institutions, blockchain has the potential impact to all institutional infrastructures.

Accordingly, digital expression of assets in blockchain is defined by the type of contract being expressed:

…since the blockchain can digitally express general contracts, it can also digitally express standard contracts, bills, securities and currencies.

Web 3.0

What Is Web 3.0 & Why It Matters argues that Web 3.0 is:

…a leap forward to open, trustless and permissionless networks.

Where:

‘Open’ in that they are built from open source software built by an open and accessible community of developers and executed in full view of the world.

‘Trustless’ in that the network itself allows participants to interact publicly or privately without a trusted third party.

‘Permissionless’ in that anyone, both users and suppliers,can participate without authorisation from a governing body.

The critical implication:

The ultimate outcome of these new open, trustless and permissionless networks is the possibility to coordinate & incentivise the long tail of work, service, data and content providers that are the disenfranchised backdrop to many of the worlds most acute challenges such as health, food, finance and sustainability.

So what are the key components of Web 3.0?

Where Web 2.0 was driven by the advent of mobile, social and cloud, Web 3.0 is built largely on three new layers of technological innovation: edge computing, decentralised data networks and artificial intelligence.

The promise:

Web 3.0 enables a future where distributed users and machines are able to interact with data, value and other counterparties via a substrate of peer-to-peer networks without the need for third parties. The result: a composable human-centric & privacy preserving computing fabric for the next wave of the web.

And here’s something particularly important to remember:

The most important evolution enabled by Web3.0 is the minimisation of the trust required for coordination on a global scale. This marks a move towards trusting all constituents of a network implicitly rather than needing to trust each individual explicitly and/or seeking to achieve trust extrinsically.

Why Would You?

Why Things Happen?

The Key to Understanding Why Things Happen is the iceberg model.

Yeah, it is.

Design. Think. Make. Break. Repeat.

Just got the revised edition of Design. Think. Make. Break. Repeat. A Handbook of Methods, which includes “20 additional methods, three new case studies, and a new chapter introducing life-centred design.”

The book introduces the reader to the changing role of design as a way of thinking and a framework for solving complex problems and achieving systemic change.

Yeah, you need to get a copy at hand.

{END}