“Real” work in crypto

IRL activity allowing users to earn tokens in an on-chain network

Concept

Be incentivized to do something in-real-life that allows you to earn tokens in an on-chain network

Longer Description

As we continue to search for the next wave of adoption that brings net new participants into the crypto ecosystem, it’s likely “real” activity that incentivizes behavior through a token network will drive this adoption. Part of the reason for this is that much of the activity these networks do happens off-chain and so today’s existing architecture is actually performant enough to handle the workload. We don’t need higher throughput in order to see these types of networks flourish.

We’ve seen some forms of traction with projects such as Helium (5G) or Hivemapper (dash-cams) but there are still significant questions around the demand side of these networks.

When we think about this concept, it’s important for us to see how the inherent distributed nature of the network *is* the defining advantage over existing designs (or yet to be developed/explored areas). Decentralization for decentralization sake is not compelling enough.

The most intriguing elements here are the speed and cost advantages for spinning up new networks (be that infrastructure networks or data networks).

As with most crypto-related networks today, the demand-side of the equation will be the more difficult piece. What is the purpose of the token (i.e. what can it be used for) and how do you drive value to it?

Other Thoughts

Elephant in the room is health data for many reasons, though this will likely have significant regulatory obstacle
It’s possible the most compelling cases here come from non-obvious (from crypto perspective) places like space or deep-sea data collection
A common difficulty across crypto continues to be the lack of multidisciplinary teams — said another way, the best teams building these types of networks are likely to understand crypto deeply, but also the adjacent industry they are building the network in (be that telecom, healthcare, farming equipment, deep-sea data collection, air quality measurements, education, etc)
This thesis is adjacent to another one we share specific to distributed compute & storage networks