Building 2046, Issue #2
Exploring identity in Web3, the opportunities for biotech, and a short quest to buy a NFT and change your identity
Author’s note: this is a work of fiction with a fictional narrator, and is not investment advice
gn. After sharing more about my future timeline and the primacy of DAOs in our timeline, it is essential for you to understand the concept of identity in 2046 and how the concept of composability on top of identity has created fertile ground for innovations in industries like biotechnology and the metaverse at large. Oh yes, I also leave a mini-quest at the end for you to complete. Let’s start with a short history of online identity.
A short history of online identity up to 2021
You may now know me as shawndao, but I have multiple identities split across multiple communities and addresses. In 2021, you split these identities across different platforms and even within platforms like Discord, but in 2046 each of our identities is their own platform.
There was a consolidation of identity into a personal and professional one in the early 2000’s and this consolidation allowed for the building of trust and verifiability of identity in the digital world. Facebook helped you create a single online trusted identity that could link you to your real world and online connections. Similarly, LinkedIn is a place where you can create a single online trusted identity in your professional life. Even your electronic health records created a single identity of your health, tied across multiple platforms via various identifiers such as birthday and social security number, that your doctor could use to track your health history.
However, that single identity had many downsides. You have very different types of relationships with each community you are a part of. You wouldn’t want to share your most authentic off-the-cuff thoughts with your family or your professional network. Some other Web2 platforms emerged to create a space for you to be your more authentic self with a more limited and trusted audience. Some of these identities, in particular your Facebook identity, are used to track your behavior and intent across the entire Web2 and mobile ecosystems and provide advertisers with insights into how to personalize advertisements to you. In addition, if your identity was ever compromised, you were subject to significant financial hardship and worry, and potentially a lifetime of negative consequences.
The business model of Web2 that is based on free services supported by that advertising does not exist in 2046. Instead you are invested in each community you are a part of in the form of ERC-20 (fungible or exchangeable) or ERC-721 / SPL (non-fungible, used for membership gating and identity verification) tokens, and the more value you bring to that community and the community brings to the world, the more value your tokens accrue.
The NFT projects of the last few years of your timelines allowed for a fragmentation of that identity most prominently with the CryptoPunks and Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) projects. Your profile picture (PFP) was the identity you assumed and built upon in these communities. As this PFP gained value across communities, your home community started to gain more value. This notion of identity resonated beyond the <20K holders of the CryptoPunks and BAYC PFPs, and spawned dozens of derivative projects (e.g. Mutant BAYC) and thousands of copycat projects. You could have and be a CryptoDad, Perky Panda or a thugbirdz. Most people would mint many NFTs across projects and quickly flip them on the secondary market for a quick buck or hold to hope for a BAYC or CryptoPunk type of bump. Yet most people did not associate these copycats with their identity as they already had Web2 personal brands they had to protect. The strength of the community behind these copycat projects was fragile.
2021 and beyond: the composability of identity
The NFT world entered a new realm of possibilities on August 27, 2021 when Dom Hofmann started an experiment called Loot.
On its surface, Loot is very simple. A picture with a list of items. No explicit rules or properties / statistics. I won’t go into details here about the Loot project, but the fundamental opportunity it brought to the market is the idea of composability of NFTs, where a whole metaverse of derivative projects was created on top of Loot including a tradable ERC-20 token for the Loot metaverse called Adventure Gold ($AGLD) in the spirit of role-playing fantasy games. The oral history of the start of Loot and its derivative projects can be seen below.
What is composability? @ljxie talks about it at length and introduced the concept as the key property of Web3 that allows for innovation where developers share open source code and primitives in public that can be built open to form new constructs and experiences. Composability means that you can take one primitive and build on top of it, make it easier to use, adapt it to new use cases and more. Composability is key to derivatives and the accrual of value to an entire ecosystem. Ethereum is the ultimate composable primitive, upon which new smart contracts, new token economies, marketplaces, new digital assets, new tokens, and more have been built. That entire universe is valued at more than $400B in your time, but achieves much larger scale and value in my timeline.
Where this gets interesting is in the idea of composability of identity. Your identity is valuable and inherent to your personal brand, however the ability to build on that identity and the number of builders on that identity are what make it really valuable. The early PFP experiments of 2017-2021 helped bridge the concept of composability of NFTs to the composability of identity. Individuals like punk4156 and DC Investor identify as their respective CryptoPunks, but as of late 2021 had built identities as novel DAO creators (Nouns DAO in the case of punk4156) and master NFT art collectors (check out DC Investor’s walkthrough his gallery). Each identity has become a platform upon which a world can be built.
2046: the composability of biology, identity and self
When it comes to identity, what makes you, you? Well there are both physical and metaphysical sides of you.
The metaphysical you is a reflection of the cultural primitives, or memes of your time and your individual context. How you react to culture, your aversions and your likes, is what defines your personality at any given time.
The physical (biological) you is a manifestation of your genome, the instructions that code proteins that fold into structures that create your body, organs and everything else in your physical being.
It is not that much of a leap to claim the metaphysical you can assume many identities depending on context, and as explored in the above NFT PFP examples. It may be more of a leap to claim the physical you can assume many identities, but that is exactly what happens in our time.
In your near future, you will have the ability to post your entire genome, anonymously, on the Ethereum blockchain stored in permanent storage with an associated Ethereum address. Metadata on genomes (specific alleles, traits, etc.) can be automatically interpreted based on that Ethereum address.
Developers can build on top of your genome by 1) making a copy, 2) taking specific metadata and interpreting specific properties to seed new “individuals” based on these properties. These developers can build these new “individuals” in the metaverse. There can literally be a million you’s in the metaverse, developers just have to pay a minting fee (that you set) along with gas transaction fees. Each of the copies of you will be marked as synthetic versions, but will act and feel like you in the metaverse (with variations).
Developers can also build in game universes on top of these individuals. Depending on the reputation of your metaphysical identity, there may be a lot of interest. Every time developers use your genome, the value of this base primitive genome grows exponentially in value (most of this value accruing back to you) per the NFT chain rule:
The concept of copies of individuals is not a new concept and is already starting to take hold in your timeline. Q Bio had prototyped the concept of a clinical digital twin in 2021, but genome composability on the Ethereum blockchain takes this technology to another level.
The biotech industry in my time has moved to the DAO standard as therapeutics for rarer and rarer diseases need to be discovered, but the large biopharmaceutical companies (C-Corps and LLCs) could not possibly green light the production of these rare disease therapeutics given the cost/benefit ratio of R&D for diseases that only impact a handful of individuals. As more of the therapeutics with large addressable markets (e.g. for diabetics, etc.) came off of patent protection and became open sourced, biotech DAOs were formed composed of a mix of individuals with a rare disease, strategic DAO investors, and contractor DAOs that helped develop and distribute the therapeutics. You, as an individual with a rare disease, can grant the biotech DAO access to your genome to create virtual copies of you (digital twins) to run statistically significant virtual clinical trials using advanced AI modeling on these copies of “you” to build personalized drugs that work perfectly for the original you and your fellow biotech DAO members. I will go into more depth about how this advanced AI modeling works to enable rapid drug discovery in a future issue, but the seed for all of this to happen in the ability to compose on top of your biological identity.
For now, let’s get on to that quest where you can explore your metaphysical identity.
Your quest: buy a NFT, pick a new (metaphysical) identity and share your experience
Follow the quest in the above link for full instructions on how to buy your first NFT, and/or join in the discussion!
Post-script: future posts and my forked identity
In a future issue I will also share more about what the metaverse in 2046 is, and what it means for the future of our identities and communities and how a million copies of you can exist in this metaverse.
Finally, I will note that I violated the first rule of time travel, “don’t talk about the future to members of the original timeline”, a copy of my identity called shawndao2 has forked to the Web3 platform called Mirror, but we still both refer to ourselves as shawndao. You can check out his thoughts in the quest linked above, but be forewarned he is quite passionate about generative art at this time so that may be the theme of a future quest. I can only control what I can control.
WAGMI,
shawndao