On The Other Side ep 23 - Mark Beylin: Abundance in web3 + dangers of linking self-worth to tokens
Primer: How do we reward both old and new members in a DAO fairly? How does Web3 contribute to our spiritual and personal development? What are his thoughts on intrinsic motivation? All these philosophical questions and more in this episode of On The Other Side Podcast.
Background
Got into crypto in 2016
Got an internship at Deloitte and they were focusing on blockchain technology, specifically Ethereum
Went for another internship with ConsenSys
Created the Bounties Network, a platform for bounties and freelance tasks in this era of tokenized communities
Helped run Ethereum community meetups
Worked on the first performance art NFT back in 2020
Have been building Myco for the past 1.5 years
Performance Art NFT
Got connected to an artist. The artist and another individual were leading a project during COVID, where they were trying to get different performance artists to make a clip of themselves and what they were experiencing during COVID
The project is called How Are We
Issued the 20 minute video on-chain as a NFT
Every contributor of that project received an ERC-20 token
Was an early experiment on a performance art NFT
What Does Social Looks Like In Web3?
Views it from an information architecture perspective
Thinks that it is a misnomer as social interactions do not need to be on the blockchain
Another trend was incentivized social media such as Steemit and similar others. It caused a lot of problems as it could be gamed
When people think of social these days, they think of Telegram, Discord, etc.
Sees that there is a meaningful market opportunity around messaging addresses
“The only thing that's like really that interesting is send a message to an Ethereum address, because there's just no other way to do that. And there are a number of instances where that would be useful.”
- Mark Beylin
Currently, most of Web3 social is overhyped (e.g. metaverse)
Myco
A DAO platform targeted at people who do not know anything about DAOs
For a group of people who want to build a social network business together
It enables the group to have shared ownership and to move money around efficiently compared to the traditional way of starting a company
Is Web3 A Philosophy Or A Technical Implementation?
Thinks that it’s more of a philosophy
His mentor at ConsenSys used to say to him that crypto is a way to get private keys into the hands of individuals, enabling them to do powerful stuff
Plenty of entities call themselves DAOs, but are not actually DAOs
The same thing applies for tokens. Most tokens do not actually grant ownership rights over the protocol
“I think there's a lot of like things that are calling themselves Web3 which are actually like very Web2, just on the blockchain.”
- Mark Beylin
What Makes Something A DAO?
Thinks that it comes from the approach of the people building it
Distribution of responsibility and ownership to the edges rather than aggregating it in the middle
For a lot of DAOs, there is a core group of people making the decisions in private channels and the community automatically assumes that the proposals are going to pass
For actual DAOs, the people running the DAOs do not want the power and responsibility
DAOs are a mindset. The approach and intent has to be one that is moving towards decentralization
Handing Over Power To Contributors
It’s extremely difficult to trust other people and to have no oversight over the things they are doing
Thinks that it will help if one can decouple their personal brand from the activities of the group, such that in the worst case scenarios, the risk is not as high for the individual/creator
The flip side is the creator end up doing everything themselves, which will be even worse over the long run
“This is something that we see in the Web2 creator space as also being super damaging where these creators are on this hamster wheel, they have to keep producing content once a week, every week, can't take a break, can't take a vacation, the second you step away, your audience starts to melt away.
- Mark Beylin
Are We Creating A New Hamster Wheel?
💡 Mark has been through 2018/2019/2020 bear market. It was a traumatic experience. He puts a disclaimer before sharing his insights.
Tokens have reflexivity
Community gets tokens —> token value goes up —> community works harder —> pulls in more people —> price goes up more
In bull markets, there is a positive feedback loop that allows cool and exciting things to be built
As a member of the Ethereum community, he has seen the opposite
When tokens dip, it affects the livelihood of holders. Even if someone’s livelihood has been taken care of, it still affects their mental state
The identity of builders gets entangled with the token price
Builders with intrinsic motivation do better at tuning out the criticism. For those who were not able to do that, they left and never came back after the bear market
“And that becomes like super necessary in a bear market. But from what I've seen, it causes so many people to not just leave, but leave and never come back. Because the whole experience is so traumatic that not only do they leave, but anytime even when the token maybe returns to that original price, like the whole experience ended up being traumatic that they still won't come back, or they have a sour taste in their mouth.”
- Mark Beylin
Another case is tokens that do not have the experience of crazy growth at the beginning. Consequently, they don’t dump as much as they have a stickier community
Current market cycle has been incredible as there are many new people who have joined. Feels sad that when a bear market arrives, there will be a lot of pain
Gives conservative takes in bull markets as he knows the pain of bear markets
Mitigating The Pain Of A Bear Market
Nurture your relationships with people outside crypto
Try not to attach your identity too much to the work you are doing
The best advice he could give is to enjoy the ride, both the highs and the lows
Growing A Community
Communities should have a part of them that are open
Communities should have some degree of curation, where they facilitate members to go deeper into the community (e.g. taking more responsibility, getting more ownership, etc.)
This will lead to higher quality interactions
Good example is FWB. Not only do people need to buy the token, but they have to apply to the DAO
Hardest part of building a community is that people spend time on whatever their goals are
Differences Between Community Members And Contributors
Assumes that contributors are people who have been curated while community is for everybody
Thinks of it as a pipeline where community members go deeper and become contributors who do stuff for the project
Though community members have a lot less ownership and governance rights, their opinions are still important
On the flip side, he doesn’t think that it is healthy for the crowd to govern over the contributors and make them at the mercy of the people just because the crowd buys the token (i.e. what’s happening with SushiSwap right now)
In 2017, people were talking about cryptoeconomics, game theory, and schelling points. People moved on and realized that the social layer, such as trust for the team, is more important
His Comment On “Web3 Being Spiritual Just As It is Technological”
Has observed 2 main avenues for spiritual growth/personal development in Web3:
Web3 gives people incredible highs and lows such that it will eventually break them — the biggest moments of personal development happens during those breaking moments
Wealth creation and abundance. Wrote a Twitter thread that abundance is this feeling of having enough. Crypto creates abundant situations for a lot of people
“One great example that comes to my mind is like Crypto Cobain on Twitter, Cobie’s UpOnlyShow. But when you hear him talk, it's clear that he sort of transcended this need to, like make more money, even though I'm sure he continues trading, but he's like, at this point, trying to figure out what will make the world a better place.”
- Mark Beylin
Have seen enough people asking what’s next after they have made it, especially crypto OGs who stick around and give back to the community
One great example is Cobie, who has transcended the need to make more money
Web3 as a spiritual avenue
Building A World Of Abundance But Recognizing That Some People Are Not In That Space
Hears a lot of people in the DAO space saying that people should join a DAO, start contributing, and hope to get paid
The majority of people in the world cannot work for free and hope to get paid
Being motivated by money is not an evil thing
Have seen that extrinsic incentives such as paying people for bounties made them get deeper into the space, where they subsequently contribute out of intrinsic motivation
On Retroactive Distributions
Is a hard problem because you do not know the value of someone’s work until after the fact
This is not an organizational issue, but is something part of life
For Myco, they have a contract period at the beginning to see where people will fit. Equity distributions come after
Testing for intrinsic motivation is more expensive
For a startup like Myco, he has to decide whether to:
Pay a high salary
Give equity, but pay lesser
These are decisions individuals have to make, because they are speculating with their time instead of money
Incentivizing New People To Contribute
Keeping people around is a very difficult task
Recently, Myco settled on a diluted model that did two things:
Encourage people who got early ownership to stick around. They had to keep contributing or their ownership stake would go down over time
Need to reward new people who are coming in to contribute
Every month, there is a designated amount of points to be given out to people, with different pools of points for the different roles
When launching a community, points can be allocated towards:
Creators
Members
Treasury
As more people join the various roles, you are going to get a smaller share of the pool that is released over time
This linear dilution is predictable. People do not have to worry that people joining in the future would overly dilute the former’s stake if the former leaves
It also allows for new people to come in and build up their ownership stake
They are trying to find the ratio of ownership percentage between roles (e.g. creators need to be rewarded such that there’s upside for them relative to being a member while still resulting in a large difference in ownership percentage between the two)
Where Can People Find Him?
Can find him on Twitter @MarkBeylin
He is very responsive
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