The technical and economic sides of crypto services like DeFi, DAOs, ENS, and NFTs have been around long enough to have stood the test of time -- they’ve proven to be reliable enough for people to feel comfortable spending their time and resources to build projects and businesses on, anyway. We’re still very early in the process so the best is yet to come.

What needs to get worked on now, however is the display/curation aspects of these things -- what good is owning NFTs or getting involved with DAOs if you can't tell people about it, really?

Services like Showtime.io does a pretty good job of highlighting artists' works and ownership as its own thing, but platforms like these are really the beginning of a truly Web 3 social media platform. You login with your wallet address, replace your DNS with ENS (in my case, ryangtanaka.eth replaced my .com version), then virtually everyone has access to your ownership and transaction records from thereon out.

It’s most likely that we’ll start to see curation and “display” layers built upon NFTs first since that tends to be the most accessible and visually interesting. But we’ll start to see these types of “badges” emerge with things like DAO roles/records, DeFi “achievements”, ENS delegate statuses -- anything worth bragging about, really.

People want credit for the work and achievements that they’ve done in life and I think that is mostly a reasonable desire to have. The blockchain allows people to do this without the cumbersome process of inviting people over to your house party and forcing them to look at your trophy case and pedigrees. That is typically the traditional method of “bragging”, but how many people can you really reach with such a small, exclusionary approach? (Or the typical reaction to that method, which is to go on desperate spending/marketing sprees at each of your existential/midlife crisis. Pretty inefficient, I’d say.)

All of this stuff is still very early but if you look closer at the problems the blockchain is trying to solve, it starts to make more and more sense. It’s not just the money, but how we can improve the ways in which we interact and socialize with each other as well. And as platforms like the above emerge, it becomes easier to see how this stuff can work in practice -- and how the blockchain can really change how we do things day to day.

Note: If you’ve signed up for an ENS domain, it might be a good time to start consolidating all of your activities, assets, and roles into it to start building up your history and “clout” on your wallet. Be careful, though, since the world is watching and everything you do on there will permanently recorded on the blockchain, of course.