Unlock is a protocol. Like any other protocol, it should not belong to anyone but its community of users and adopters. Today, we’re very excited to introduce Unlock Discount Tokens and start the journey toward a fully decentralized protocol, where users co-own the protocol, as well as earn rewards for their use!
Don’t forget to check the step-by-step upgrades and deployments as documented on our wiki!
The Unlock Discount Token (UDT) is an optional ERC20 token that exists to add incentives to actors who are willing to grow and use the Unlock Protocol and network as well as progressively give…
“Organizations of the future” are not the future of organizations!
A lot of this thinking has been a rabbit hole around the idea of “Decentralized Autonomous Organizations”, which are enabled by blockchain and cryptography, but I uncovered a much larger space and I want to share a bit of my thinking around them so you can, in turn, bounce back ideas and examples. Please, share your thoughts ;)
It’s not a secret that homo sapiens’ most unique ability is to collaborate.
Groups of “us” can gather and work toward a shared goal.
In that regard, every technology can be seen as a driver for collaboration. Language is a way to…
Or, how to put a lock on any website without changing its code!
As part of its CDN architecture, Cloudflare recently introduced the concept of “Workers”… These are lambda functions which get executed on every requests going through Cloudflare’s CDN. It’s very similar to the middleware architecture popularized in several HTTP frameworks such as ruby’s Rack or Node.js’s Express.
A Worker can be used to alter a request or a response, or even completely rewrite these. Their boilerplate section shows several interesting use cases which can be added to your website or application today.
Adding a lock
As the web is moving away from ads as its only business model, many websites are adding paywalls or…
First of all: THANK YOU for doing the right thing and purchasing a ticket with your crypto-wallet 👏! If we think we’re building technology which will change the world, then, we need to use it ourselves first.
TL;DR: Make sure that you use the web browser that you used to purchase your ticket!
Getting ready for EthCC
First, there are only a few tickets left, so if you don’t have one, get it now! As you know, the ticket is non-fungible tokens, attached to the Ethereum wallet you used to purchase it.
At Unlock, we believe that the attention driven economy will be replaced by a membership driven economy. In today’s web, creation is rewarded if it is able to attract the eyes, rather than expand the sight: this brought us information overload, endless slideshows, clickbait and fake news.
More and more people are using ad-blockers, but these come with significant problems: first they starve creators of their revenue streams, and they actually do not fix the incentives. Creators are still paid based on how much attention they can steal; even if it is from fewer and fewer people.
Collaboration
If you’ve read Yuval Noah Harari, you know Homo Sapiens’ most unique characteristic is their ability to collaborate at scale, through space and time. This is arguably what lead us to colonize all five continents and bend nature to fit our needs, creating our own anthroposphere.
Collaboration happens through organizations and each age had their own. It started with the tribes when voices, myths and stories enabled the first humans to manage the supply of food that hunters and gatherers were able to collect. When it came time to settle in villages, these stories became cults, religions and culture to…
What if there was a new way to interact with the communities you are part of?
The web needs a new business model — one which doesn’t erode people’s privacy or centralize control into the hands of a few powerful entities.
Luckily, the web is resilient, reliable, and really, really good at lots of things. Here’s one example: it’s great at creating communities.
Today we’re all members of dozens of communities online, from the obvious ones like our own social circles or neighborhood groups, to the less obvious ones like the people we follow and the apps we use. …
We’re proud to announce that ETHGlobal is using Unlock’s ticket application for its ETHWaterloo hackathon, for crypto and non crypto users alike!
ETHGlobal runs Ethereum hackathons all around the world for people to learn and practice their Ethereum coding skills. One of their goals is to “onboard” hackers and engineers who are not yet familiar with Ethereum and don’t already have a wallet or Ether. Yet, they rightfully live by their words and insist on using Ethereum powered tickets! By adding user accounts to our tickets app, Unlock is excited to deliver a great on-boarding experience! Here is how it works:
- A hacker who’s never used Ethereum before, applied and was accepted for ETHWaterloo!
- They’re sent to our registration page. Note: do…
Providing an on-ramp for those who are new to crypto
The decentralized web is great, but we want it to be available for those who aren’t early adopters. Currently interacting with Dapps like Unlock requires the use of a Web3 wallet (like MetaMask on desktop web browsers or the use of a browser with an integrated wallet like Opera). At Unlock we want to provide an on-ramp for everyone, not just those already interested in crypto. Thus, we are pleased to introduce Unlock User Accounts, which allow people with no knowledge of crypto to use our services on selected locks. …
Adding a lock to your WordPress.org website has never been easier!
The world of publishing is moving away from ads as the single way to monetize content. In the last 18 months, most of the largest and most influential publications in the US and Europe have been moving to what they call “direct consumer revenue.” This is a great thing because it changes incentives from trying steal their users’ attention (click bait, fake news, endless slideshows… etc) to creating value for their members.
Unfortunately though, unless you’re a very large publisher with your own engineering team to build and maintain your own paywall, it’s nearly impossible to move to that model.
…
