The Road Ahead
By Elliot Koss, Founder @ Future Mints
This week, let’s take a step back.
The broader blockchain space is currently experiencing a downturn. As a result, user adoption is going to be slow in 2023 and likely throughout 2024 with 2025 being the year of the comeback. Because of this, Future Mints is going to survive by operating lean and taking a long-term view. And I intend to use 2023 to explore the various use cases that will make blockchain essential technology for the future.
To narrow and enhance our focus for 2023, I wanted to spend this week outlining a general plan for what we will write about in the coming months. And as I put this week’s newsletter together, it dawned on me that a lot of our 2023 focus is fundamental information about blockchain that will allow us to build in the future. This foundation should have value for everyone - newcomers, builders, and investors.
One key outcome of all the writing we’re planning in 2023 is that we’re going to turn these weekly newsletters into a book at the end of 2023 / early 2024. The intent for the book is that it becomes an easy-to-use reference with 3 to 8 pages covering basically every topic that you’d encounter in blockchain. Knowing this targeted outcome has also informed the structure of our newsletters.
As an added bonus, all Genesis NFT hodlers will receive a digital version of this book for free, and we’re going to put together a bigger vision that continues to reward our earliest supporters. More to come.
If you want to skip the narrative and just look at the topics we have planned, there’s a convenient schedule further below, though it is subject to change as we receive feedback and spend more time thinking of our goals.
Please reply to this email with any feedback. It goes directly to me, and I reply to everyone’s feedback.
For now, let’s look at the 2023 writing plan.
Exploring The Blockchain
This weekly newsletter is attempting to strike the delicate balance of being useful to the crypto natives while also being straightforward enough that newcomers like my dad can follow and get excited (he has never bought crypto or NFTs, isn’t a techie, and only knows about blockchain from this newsletter and the Wall Street Journal).
This year, we’re going to take you on a journey, and it’s always good to start at the beginning.
Blockchain Fundamentals
Harrison has already kicked us off with a detailed breakdown exploring Bitcoin (part 1 and part 2), the cryptocurrency and blockchain that started it all. It’s critical to understand how important Bitcoin is in the context of blockchain history.
After Bitcoin, we’ll dig into the history of Ethereum. From our perspective, those are the two primary blockchains that are critical knowledge for the foundation of what’s coming next. We’ll dedicate one more newsletter to ‘other’ blockchains, but we won’t go into too much detail covering each blockchain in 2023. This doesn’t mean they’re not important, it’s more that we could write a newsletter about every blockchain for the next few years and never run out while also never talking about practical applications of blockchain technology.
We’ll round out our exploration of blockchains with a review of the recent blockchain failures including Luna and TerraUSD.
Before moving to the next topic, we’ll use one newsletter to cover a few areas such as how payments are facilitated in a blockchain, how tokens and blockchains work, and how the public ledger works for transactions. Plus, we’ll be open about the current limitations of gas (ie transaction fees) and transaction speed. We’ll compare these with credit cards, ACH (ie bank checks), and wires will help you make sense of it all. If we realize we need 2 newsletters, we’ll expand it a little.
Crypto & Finance
Once the basic blockchain and cryptocurrency knowledge is established, we’ll talk about the importance of exchanges and DeFi. This will lead into a separate breakdown of the failures we’ve witnessed in 2022, particularly FTX, the largest exchange to declare bankruptcy ever and one of the worst financial messes in history.
Next, we’ll look into crypto lending and explore how it enables money to move around. It’s a part of DeFi, but we’ll treat it slightly separate given that it’s a space that also grew to a massive size and then had a dramatic 2022 with a series of bankruptcies (which we’ll focus on in a follow-up article).
At this point, we’ll need to spend a week or two talking about the importance of wallets and custody, both central concepts in the way crypto is owned and used.
You’ll notice the pattern that we’ve been going heavy on the finance side of things. This is partly because these use cases have been the most developed with the most investment. It’s also because the economics of blockchains is essential for understanding not only how everything works but also how this new future will be built.
To round out our overview of the economics of blockchain, we’ll begin exploring the world of staking, Play 2 Earn, and gaming. It’s likely going to require a couple articles to walk through the concepts of gaming, general P2E, and tokenomics plus at least one more to discuss the collapse of various P2E tokenomics and hacks that happened with Axie Infinity along with the craziness I experienced with Creepz.
NFTs, Gaming, and The Metaverse
It’s almost impossible to talk about P2E and crypto gaming without NFTs, so we’ll introduce NFTs and smart contracts at this point. This may take us a few weeks to work through, because there’s the general concepts around smart contracts and what makes NFTs useful, the art use case, the gaming / metaverse use case, the country club membership use case, and several more.
By this point, we’ll also have introduced the metaverse concept, so we’ll probably need to spend a week or two dedicated to writing out the big picture. The metaverse cannot be completely explored without an in-depth overview of VR and AR, so that’s potentially another couple weeks.
What’s crazy to me is that we’ve still barely scratched the surface of blockchain technology, but it doesn’t make sense to keep digging when there are several critical risks that we need to explore first.
Risks
Over a couple months (we may spread this around to avoid being pessimistic for weeks on end), we’ll spend time talking about the various risks that currently exist in blockchain. These will include energy consumption, 51% attack, the lack of anything backing each blockchain, wallet hacks, blockchain exploits, that one time Ethereum was forked, NFT scams, and general fraud.
The last risk that we’ll explore this time around is related to regulation, an area that I personally believe we need more of and until it happens, the legitimacy of the entire industry will severely lack.
Timeline
Below is the timeline for what we’re planning to publish. It’s subject to change since we are using this outline as a guide to focus our writing in 2023.
As always, if you have feedback or ideas, please let us know! Until next week.
Jan 20 - Bitcoin, Pt 1 (Published)
Jan 27 - Bitcoin, Pt 2 (Published)
Feb 3 - The 2023 Plan (Today)
Feb 10 - Ethereum, Pt 1: History
Feb 17 - Ethereum, Pt 2: Future
Feb 24- Blockchain vs Cryptocurrency, what’s the difference?
Mar 3 - Other Blockchains & Use Cases
Mar 10 - Blockchain Failures (Luna and TerraUSD)
Mar 17 - Payments & The Public Ledger
Mar 24 - Exchanges & DeFi
Mar 31 - The FTX Failure Wasn’t With DeFi
XXX - Other Exchange Failures (Mt Gox, etc)
Apr 7 - Crypto Lending
Apr 14 - Crypto Lending Failures
Apr 21 - Wallets & Custody, Pt 1
Apr 28 - Wallets & Custody, Pt 2
May 5- How Blockchain Replace The Current Financial Industry
May 12 - Play 2 Earn: Pt 1 What is it?
May 19 - Play 2 Earn: Pt 2 The Future of Gaming
May 26 - Play 2 Earn: Pt 3 Tokenomics 101
Jun 2 - Play 2 Earn: Pt 4 Axie Infinity, Hacks & Risks
Jun 9 - Play 2 Earn: Pt 5 Staking & The Story Of A Magical 2 Weeks (aka the Creepz madness)
Jun 16 - Smart Contracts
Jun 23 - NFTs and General Utility
Jun 30 - NFTs and the Art Use Case
Jul 7 - NFTs and Gaming
Jul 14 - NFTs and the Country Club membership
Jul 21 - Why every digital item will be an NFT
Jul 28 - What the f*** is the metaverse?
Aug 4 - The Metaverse and AR
Aug 11 - The Metaverse and VR
Aug 18 - The Metaverse and Blockchain
Aug 25 - Blockchain Risks: Energy Consumption
Sep 1 - Why the skeptics are right about blockchain
Sep 8 - Why the skeptics are completely wrong about blockchain
Sep 15 - Blockchain Risks: WTF is a 51% attack?
Sep 22 - Blockchain Risks: The case against crypto as a reliable currency
Sep 29 - Blockchain Risks: Wallet Hacks & How To Protect Yourself
Oct 6 - Blockchain only has bank accounts. Credit cards haven’t been invented yet
Oct 13 - Blockchain Risks: That one time Ethereum was forked
Oct 20 - Blockchain Risks: NFT scams
Oct 27 - Blockchain Risks: Fraud is rampant with new technology adoption
Nov 3 - Blockchain & Regulation Pt 1
Nov 10 - Blockchain & Regulation Pt 2
Nov 17 - Summarizing the blockchain big picture Pt 1
Nov 24 - Summarizing the blockchain big picture Pt 2
Dec 1 - Web 3: The next frontier
Dec 8 - The Decentralized Internet & IPFS
Dec 15 - Everything we’ve learned about publishing a book
Dec 22 - 2023 Lookback on our predictions
Dec 29 - 2024 Predictions Pt 1
Jan 5 - 2024 Predictions Pt 2
Jan 12 - The Plan for 2024
News of the Week
Floor acquired WGMI.io last week in a move to further accelerate their analytics and goal of being the go-to app for NFT collectors. Floor has experienced a 700% increase in users amid the bear market, and has over 10,000 total active users. Elliot wrote Insight Reports for the Gen 2 and Gen 3 NFTs in the early days of Future Mints plus he’s a hodler of 15+ Gen 1, Gen 2, and Gen 3 NFTs (one of his top 2 favorite communities).
The California Department of Motor Vehicles is putting car titles on the blockchain, through a collaboration with open-source blockchain Tezos and Oxhead Alpha, a crypto-focused software development firm.
Opensea announced the next stage of their Drops rollout. The feature will be expanded to more and more creators, with the eventual goal of allowing anyone to “drop collections across any chain with an immersive, safe storefront, without needing access to robust technical resources or expertise.”