Why, what, and how we read; compensating creators; more
Editor’s note: This post originally appeared in our web3 newsletter — a guide to trending topics in crypto with insights and resources from developers/ engineers, researchers, and others on the a16z crypto team. Subscribe to see it in your inbox weekly.
👑 NFT royalties: Designs, challenges, and new ideas
by Michael Blau, Scott Kominers, and Daren Matsuoka
Royalties have always been a key value proposition of NFTs: With NFTs, creators could automatically enforce royalties on secondary sales onchain, allowing them to continue getting compensated for their work. The problem, of course, is that royalties were never actually enforced onchain until very recently.
It’s difficult to tell the difference between NFT transfers that are sales — and that should pay out a royalty — and other types of transfers that should not (like when transferring an NFT between your own wallets, or gifting an NFT to a friend). And while creators have a few different solutions to choose from — such as blocklists and allowlists — each comes with tradeoffs that can be difficult to navigate. In particular, imposing restrictions on transferring NFTs also restricts their applications and innovation, making them less composable.
Since NFTs are a fundamental primitive of web3 with many uses for many different types of users, this question matters. But how do NFT royalties work, and why have they been so challenging to implement? In this piece, we survey current royalty design approaches, as well as propose some novel ideas for enforcing royalties onchain.
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🔖 Lists to bookmark: What to read this summer
Looking for a summer read? Here are some books the a16z crypto team is reading and recommending. Our list covers everything from dark academia fantasy to free market economics texts, and chronicles of engineering history to classic literature adaptations.
Repeat recommendations reveal our longstanding interests. This season’s repeats include Unreasonable Hospitality by Eleven Madison Park’s Will Guidara on lessons learned in the restaurant business (that are applicable well beyond); Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, a memoir and meditation on an ancient art; and various books by the late James C. Scott, the Yale political scientist whose treatises on statehood and social planning are perennial favorites.
➡️ check out our summer 2024 list
➡️ also see our reading lists from seasons past: including summers 2023, 2022, 2019; and winters 2023, 2022, 2018, 2017, 2016
🎧🎙 Listen: What, how, & why we’re reading… and more picks for you
Sonal Chokshi, Robert Hackett, Tim Sullivan, and Stephanie Zinn
In this fun hallway-style conversation we discuss picks from our summer reading list — as well as evergreen and Lindy picks that show up on our what-we’re-reading lists again and again. We also share our top picks of ALL time.
Throughout, we also discuss HOW we read — whether audiobooks count as reading or listening, graphic novels, read-alouds; multiple modes of reading when you’re a busy parent or always on the go; and technologies for reading, and how they have changed us over time… from printing press to AirPods. Which books are better as movies and TV shows, and games too? Also, are collaboratively-filtered recommendations via family or friends really that great, or should we avoid them? What other heuristics — and “anti-heuristics” — do we use to read?
Finally, WHY do we read?? Is mythology and fantasy filling a hole left by religion? Wherefore nonfiction vs. fiction — or newer genres such as “infotainment,” “romantasy,” and others? From Shakespeare to Prince Harry to erstwhile seafarers to modern mermaids, this episode is a rollicking ride — and love letter — to all things books, and reading, from team a16z crypto. Curiosity is magic, after all…
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