How blockchain is becoming a force for good
As individuals and companies increasingly turn to the NFT market to raise money for important causes, the metaverse is shaking off its gamer associations and proving itself to be a space where strong communities can form around social goals — and avoid the will of big tech and government agencies
Written by Mattha Busby
Illustration by Morten Kantsø
As the US Supreme Court decision that had enshrined abortion as a constitutional right was overturned in June, the artist and activist Molly Dickson was already fundraising for reproductive rights groups — by selling cowgirl images on web3.
Her swiftly assembled decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO), which has so far raised more than $42,000 (about £36,700), is just one of an increasing number of NFT collections springing up to gather funds for worthy causes as interest in NFTs, hosted on the blockchain, shows no signs of letting up despite sales hitting a nadir amid the cryptocurrency price crash.
“It’s just a whole different way of working,” Dickson told a Twitter Spaces meeting in May. “All of a sudden I have assets I never did as a photographer. I could have sold prints until the cows come home and never have raised $30,000 in a few weeks.”
The goal is to raise $3 million through a set of 10,000 pieces of a new cowgirl design. The inspiration for the project is Ukraine DAO, led by Pussy Riot founder Nadya Tolokonnikova and the activist Alona Shevchenko. They amassed more than $6 million after the Russian invasion through sales of simple Ukraine flag NFTs. Another philanthropic platform, Metagood, has been donating the proceeds of sales to help bring internet connection to schools around the world.
It all sounds great, and as web3 continues to take shape — through the proliferation of the NFT market, cryptocurrency advancements and the nascent metaverse — giddy predictions of a new, more open and egalitarian era reminiscent of the same pronouncements at the dawn of the internet age are not difficult to find. During a cryptocurrency bear market, following the biggest real terms crash, however, these can sometimes be difficult to square. Especially when both the crypto and NFT bazaars are already flooded with get-rich-quick schemes.
But if a fully decentralised and permissionless internet, where everyone owns the means to access and control their own information and funds, does come about, then web3 will have lived up to at least the baseline promise. After the Canadian government forced banks to freeze the accounts of organisers of a protest earlier this year, the seemingly inalienable right to participate in the financial system feels ever more important. Advocates insist web3 guarantees users’ rights and helps create communities around social goals.
“Web3 activism goes beyond sending a one-time monetary donation online and closing your laptop,” says Corban Villa, senior blockchain applications developer at the NFT company Owl Protocol. “There’s a relationship formed between those donating and those running the organisation. Communities form around projects and their members often stick around, making friends and working side by side with other advocates to find real solutions and produce real results.”
He says that through the receipt of tokens and NFTs for contributions to movements, real value is provided to donors, who become more vested in the initiative. Some question whether an NFT sale is even necessary to raise money for a good cause, but total transparency regarding finances, which are stored on the blockchain, are set to keep public trust high.
“Many of these projects are governed democratically, where the allocation of charitable funds is a topic discussed and voted on by members,” Villa adds. “Web3 empowers people to use their skills and talents to organise the change they would like to see, then find other people like them and form entire communities around it.”
New communities are forming on Mastodon, an open source decentralised social network that proclaims to be giving people back control of their social media as the traditional companies increasingly ban users on flimsy, almost Orwellian premises through opaque diktats. “It’s interesting and promising because it enables people to form social media communities in which critical governance decisions, like content moderation, can be made on a democratic basis and in which a co-operative of users can come together to determine how their social media community should be run,” Internet for the People author Ben Tarnoff recently told Wired.
The peer-to-peer model stands in contrast to the brazenly profit-driven schemes of the big tech giants Google, Twitter and Meta. While social media platforms use the same algorithmic techniques as gambling firms to create psychological dependencies and ingrain their products in the lives of their users, while selling people’s data to big business, the emerging alternatives are transparent and free of advertising, at least for the time being.
“If something is free, you’re the product,” said the artist Richard Serra in 1973. However, the nature of web3 appears, to some extent, impenetrable for capital. Since web3 is a system without intermediaries, with trust vested in the users who simultaneously participate within and co-provide (mostly through coding) the network, it seems big tech could have a difficult job barging in.
“Web 3.0 aims to combine the ease of Web 2.0 with the control and privacy users enjoyed in the early days of the internet,” Marlene Ronstedt, co-founder of dataunions.org, has written. “Data belongs to those creating it, but users don’t need to build their own websites praying that one day someone will stumble upon them. This is done through interoperability of services. Meaning you can, for example, send a WhatsApp message to a friend on Telegram. Or host your Facebook data on a server not owned and controlled by Facebook.”
The metaverse, despite the popular conception of it being a virtual reality world in which people play games, represents a truly libertarian nation-state due to what its citizens can do with cryptocurrency, Ronstedt tells me. It can levitate above the jurisdictions of the physical world. “It could be quite disruptive in the long run,” she adds. “Especially when it comes to sanctions and taxation, because with crypto you can basically go round it.”
So will Russian oligarchs, finally unwelcome in London, soon be buying property in the rapidly growing metaverse real estate market? “Crypto is an interesting mechanism to go around state-set boundaries, regardless of whether people morally and ethically agree with them,” Ronstedt says. “It’s not something that’s going to go away, you cannot bend the mathematics of cryptography.”
Ultimately, sanctions always hit undeserving victims also. Friends of Ronstedt’s recently were unable to pay a group of Russian artists with whom they were collaborating due to the sanctions placed on the country, so they simply sent them the cash via cryptocurrency.
Even while the top 10% of Bitcoin miners control 90% of the mining capacity, and the top 10,000 individual investors control a third of the market, migrant workers can circumvent an exploitative remittance transfer market to send money to their home country through cryptocurrency, a disruptive and progressive step forward. Some cryptocurrencies, like Cardano, say they will provide financial stocks to marginalised people who are effectively locked out of the financial system.
Traditional luxury brands in the fashion and cultural space have also used NFTs to raise funds for causes. Almost 2,000 editions of an NFT named Pride, launched by Givenchy, are being sold, with all the proceeds going to benefit the French LGBT organisation Le MAG Jeunes. Revenue from the sales of a Cadbury NFT collection comprising works by children will be donated to Save the Children for its education campaigns in India. The founders of Change, a start-up that helps charities process donations, have suggested the web3 community is “inherently giving in nature” and believe “crypto donations will continue to grow because they are publicly verifiable at scale”.
Other projects, like the Nori Token, which provides financial rewards to farmers using regenerative techniques such as soil carbon sequestration, leverage the security and transparency provided by the blockchain to prevent the otherwise fairly common issues of fraud and double-counting of carbon credits.
But Jon Callas, director of the technology projects group at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is unconvinced that putting carbon credits on a blockchain is a panacea, not least because there is little to prevent large numbers of resales that waste energy, especially on the Ethereum blockchain.
He is also concerned that many people appear to wish to use NFTs to create forms of digital rights management, which impose a manufactured form of scarcity on a technological world that inherently rejects the notion. “Someone could make a movie that would only be watchable on their own system,” Callas says. “These are the sorts of things that the media companies are trying to do already. There are also people who want to undermine long-established conventions like the first sale doctrine, in which you can buy a book or a record and resell it without restrictions.”
Nevertheless he is ultimately optimistic about the direction of travel. “The promise is there but it’s not yet ready for primetime,” he says. “However there is a chance that we can have a world not controlled by just a handful of companies.”
—
About the author
Mattha Busby is a freelance writer based in Mexico. His work has appeared in the Guardian, the Observer, Vice, GQ, Leafly and other publications. @matthabusby
About MMBP & Associates
MMBP & Associates is a creative consultancy that imbues brands with cultural capital. We believe that having an awareness of, and sensitivity to, societal shifts is crucial if innovation is to happen. We are reshaping worldviews by connecting local culture with a global audience.
Based in London, MMBP & Associates collaborates with an international network of partners who value immersive, real-world analysis as the foundation for creative ventures. Directed by Hank Park and Julien Beaupré Ste-Marie, the company takes a holistic approach to brand design, working to detect potential business challenges while developing creative solutions.
