Meet the NEAR VCs at the MetaBUIDL Hackathon
On August 27th, Illia Polosukhin, Co-Founder and CEO of NEAR, inaugurated the beginning of the NEAR Metabuidl Hackathon. During sixteen intense days, anyone will be able to join the Metaverse for a series of live workshops delivered by experts in the NEAR community, build projects, and win prizes.
Prizes, however, are not the only way for builders to get access to funding opportunities. The Metabuidl offers incredible opportunities to meet VCs and showcase one’s ideas. At the opening ceremony, Illia introduced three VCs participating in the Metabuidl: Li Jin from Atelier Ventures, Richard Muirhead from Fabric Ventures, and Maria Shen from Electric Capital.
During their interviews, they shared their insights on the passion economy, future trends in crypto, NFTs, and the space’s future. In this article, we will then navigate into their vision that will help us better understand the development of crypto.
Introducing The Passion Economy With Li Jin
Li Jin is the founder of Atelier Ventures, an early stage venture firm focused exclusively on the passion economy. The firm’s vision is to empower entrepreneurs to monetise their unique skills and knowledge while retaining full ownership on their creations.
During her interview with Illia, Li shared her view on passion economy and the problems it helps addressing:
“The passion economy is the economy in which people are leveraging different platforms and tools in order to be able to make their living from their non commodified skills and talents and knowledge. I often use the term passion economy in contrast with the gig economy which was really about monetising discrete commodified tasks and services. The gig economy was definitely a step forward for online work. It gave workers much more freedom but it also fell short of its promises of having people be their own boss, decide what kind of work they wanted to do, and a lot of gig economy platforms commodify their workers and have them be locked in closed platforms that dictate when they work, how they work, or how much they were paid and intermediate with their customers”.
Since Web3 allows for the creation of tools and platforms that help creators and their communities retain the value they create, it opens up a whole new field of opportunities to turn people’s passion into jobs. Crucially, it addressed the old problem of misaligned incentives between creators and the platforms they use:
“ In the Web2 world the passion economy will always be limited by this tension between the workers (those starting their own ventures) and the platforms on which they are leveraging those tools. And this tension is created by the fact that these platforms need to extract value such that the platform and its shareholders are able to do well, and that goes in contrast with the interests of the participants on the platform who want to keep as much of the value that they create. I couldn’t see a way to align these interests in the Web2 space, and that brought me to crypto and the notion that the future of these platforms could align incentives much better if they were actually owned by the platform participants rather than a small crypto founder.”
The passion economy is possible when people are allowed to retain ownership over their creations and have the means to decide, together with those participating in the creation of value, how to monetise their creations. The passion economy is a more humane and community focused approach that emerged thanks to the rise of Web3. Hence, it is still in its early stage. As Li points out at the end of the interview, there are still some questions that need to be addressed:
“ I think that in the near future there will be further developments that may address the questions of how to distribute the value created more equitably to all the participants and how ownership can be distributed in the form of tokens. These will be crucial questions to address.”
A Reflection on The Future of Crypto by Richard Muirhead
The second interview that took place at the Metabuidl opening features Richard Muirhead, managing partner of Fabric Ventures, a firm specialised in helping projects in decentralised Web3 scale. During his talk with Matt Hussey, new head of content at NEAR, he reflected on the future of crypto and his views about its potential to create a new social shift.
The interview started off with outlining the past year of developments in the crypto space and the implications of it. According to Richard the development is stirred by a clear desire:
“The developments we have seen are driven by a long held dream in the technology business. A dream of accessing and using other people’s software to spur a new wave of innovation on top of it.”
What Web3 effectively allowed, is to create a different busines model, a model that does not reward a single central entity but fairly incentivises all contributors and participants thus creating a distributed digital economy.
“This ability to stand on the shoulders of other innovators in the community I think is something that is coming to fruition. And both of those things are important to point out. You bring them together with an element of community and that’s what’s so exciting for entrepreneurs at this particular juncture. You never had a flatter world from a perspective of innovation. An individual or a team anywhere can take that concept of digital ownership and take the most rich and complex building boxes of innovation and anyone in the community can take them and build their own community around what they build. This is creating a tide of talent and taking a shorter lens on it, last summer we had a summer of DeFi, getting some of the maturity of stable coins, the aggregation of different assets into what automatically bundled and unbounded funds, the concept of yield farming, the aggregation of different underlying DeFi elements that have been generating different yield or paying out made people see the potency of it. People begun to see the applicability of that digital scarcity and digital ownership across assets and understand the real value of it all.”
Web3 did not only facilitate innovation and lowered entry barriers for creative minds to develop their projects and visions but it also inspires new solutions to social problems:
“If we can give people a stake in the environment they operate in perhaps all of the assets that exist it will produce better citizenship and a better functioning society. Effectively it can also be the way to tackle the issue of preserving the environment through a sensive ownership motivation.”
From Web3 is emerging a new infrastructure and tools to mobilise individuals and communities to address common problems. Web3 and DeFi are only at their very beginning, and according to Richard, we are soon going to see them expanding and growing immensely:
“The way we think of it at Fabric is that we think about the open Web, the open finance, open media, open healthcare, open education. We feel like the first three have happened to some degree we think the next two are coming to pass but we see all of them iterating, there’s still more infrastructure being built, there’s still more to be built in the open finance space, there is still a lot to do before we shift from a world dominated by ad revenues and take titans.”
The road to mainstream adoption is long but new tools are being built by the day opening up a host of new use cases. The engines on innovations have been started and it is only a matter of time before new systems establish themselves as new paradigms.
Maria Shen on The Future of NFTs
In the last interview, Maria Shen, partner at Electric Capital, was interviewed by Brady Dale, a crypto journalist from The Defiant. Working for a VC firm that specialises in investing in projects built on top of Programmable Money, and being an active NFT user, Maria had valuable insights to share on the future of NFTs.
Maria starts off by highlighting the components that make NFT a very interesting crypto asset:
“The Electric Capital’s thesis always was around crypto. The idea is to re-build a new financial infrastructure in a native way with crypto. NFTs for us are programmable assets, they are digital crypto native assets and assets are inherently financial.”
By talking about her experience with Crypto Voxels, a metaverse where avatars can build with NFTs (parcels), she also points out something more peculiar about NFTs, namely, their emotional and community driven character.
“NFTs put the emotional aspect on top of financial products. You are emotionally attached to the assets that you own in a way that you can’t be attached to ERC-20s.”
NFTs are financial products that allow us to program assets and build communities around that. This is facilitated by the fact that NFTs trigger human’s desire for ownership and emotional attachment to the assets we possess.
NFTs have already reached mainstream unlike DeFi, but Maria points out that there is still one step missing in their development:
“There is one obstacle in the NFT space before it can really take off. The special thing about NFTs is that communities naturally aggregate around them, you have this huge Discord servers with thousands of people waiting for drops and that’s a very common phenomenon. And the other superpower of NFTs is that they exist as DeFi stack that they can theoretically plug into. We have all the infrastructure for swaps, for lending, but there is something missing. There is a step two missing, that is mainly liquidity. It is very difficult to get liquidity for NFTs. Cryptopunks has probably the most liquidity and then some of these top collections.”
According to Maria, some solutions to this problem have emerged, such as fractionalisation, but that is still not avoiding all issues:
“Fractionalisation is probably the best solution that we have come to to really solve this problem. We basically take NFTs, we make them fungible through fractionalisation and then turn them into ERC-20s and then theoretically they can seamlessly plug into the DeFi stack. But still, pricing the asset is still very difficult.”
NFT have managed to reach mainstream and because of their properties they are likely to attract further adoption. In the near future, however, those working with NFTs will have to grapple with several questions to unlock NFTs’ potential:
“There are still some questions to address when it comes to NFTs. How do you associate rights with NFTs? How do you price tale assets and how do you build liquidity around them? How do NFTs actually start connecting with the real world? These are crucial questions to tackle if we want the NFT market to bloom.”
Discover More About VCs In The Crypto Space
The world of crypto evolves at incredible speed. The space is full of creative minds that aspire to build a different future and that experiment relentlessly with the tools that Web3 and programmable money offer. As these three interviews testify, VCs that work in crypto share the same eagerness to build a different future and play an active role in discovering and nurturing potential.
To learn more about these VC firms visit their website: Atelier Ventures, Fabric Ventures, Electric Capital.
To watch the full interviews:
LaDevochka is a writer for 4NTS Guild. You can check out their Medium for more content or follow them on Twitter.
