Web3 and the common good

Sometimes it takes a single act of kindness to brighten up your day, some days are so bad it takes several. Going out of your way to make someone’s life any bit better is a noble trait, one we have seen since history can recall. The rapid modernization of the world brought with it increased reach to a scale never seen before, most things we dream of are the closest they have ever been. Traditional acts of kindness had limitations in their reach, but with technology, new ways and speeds of interacting with the world have been introduced.

Effective Altruism is an ongoing project determined to find the best way to use the available resources of anyone willing to donate to make a change in the world. The global population is very diverse, so there are so many potential areas to contribute to. It can be money, clothes, food, healthcare, anything that held meaning to you can do the same for someone else. The true limit is how much you are willing to donate.

Common good shares the philosophy of Effective Altruism while also being of benefit to the contributor. Sure, you may have $10000 that you use as effectively as possible and get to a large number of people, but it still is a set amount, it runs out eventually. Doing something for the common good which helps you in a way or which you are passionate about is the biggest way to give sustainable contributions to a worthy cause. The contributor will keep coming back and the project will attract even more like minds to it as a consequence.

With so many common good projects out there making a difference, Kodadot is my biased case study. Biased partly because I am a developer with interest in web3 and have interacted with the project, and partly because it part of a wide ecosystem of projects with similar philosophies such as Polkadot.

Kodadot
Kodadot is a multi-chain NFT marketplace enabling the easy sale and minting of NFTs across different chains. For digital artists in the web3 space, this is revolutionary. There are different standards for interacting with NFTs, all supported by different blockchains. Having to make a decision on where to mint and deploy your art is already tiring for a newcomer, so having a dedicated platform for it is quite convenient.

Most importantly, Kodadot is open source and encourages support from the community in form of bounties for solving issues in their repositories. This motivates contributions from anyone anywhere seeking to freelance for how long they would like. Bigger bounties are available for those issues that require more effort and are very beneficial to the project. The project contributes back tools and documentation to the community which includes future builders of the platform.

Kodadot is working on being more eco-friendly as well. With first class support for Polkadot’s Asset Hub, a lot of gas fees is saved which may not be significant for just one transaction but accumulates pretty quickly with the large community present. The carbonless programme enables a user of the marketplace to select a tiny fee (relative to real carbon credits bought for said fee) to go even below carbon neutral (carbon negative) and have a positive impact on the environment.

Honorable mention: Metaprime
This is the meaning of the word “Metaprime” as written on the Metaprime website.

A hypothetical future (counterpart or continuation of the) Internet, created by the convergence of virtually enhanced physical reality and physically persistent virtual space.

Metaprime is a blockchain project seeking to build infrastructure to seamlessly connect web3 and the metaverse, providing interfaces for popular web3 items such as tokens and NFTs (including physical NFTs). Like Kodadot, they sponsor builders with grants to better the project while sustaining the minds behind it.

Conclusion

In a world filled with billions of people, it may seem really challenging to make a difference and stand out. If you’re already making a difference, great job. If you feel you aren’t, there’s lots of projects that could really use your help, some you use everyday. If you’re a developer, let’s go change the world, one pull request at a time :) .