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The difference, of course, is that no one needs to be convinced that crypto is a good business. It’s an already trillion-dollar industry that has created dozens of giant companies, created dynastic wealth for early adopters, and attracted many of the best and brightest minds in Silicon Valley.
And as I looked beyond the New York slump, I could see Web3 weaving themselves into what real people might want.
For example, on Monday night, I went to Greenpoint, Brooklyn to attend a party hosted by Friends With Benefits, a new kind of leaderless crypto club known as the “decentralized autonomous organization,” or DAO. Currently, DAOs – which are specification as “group chats with bank accounts” – it’s mostly an experimental game. But optimists think there may one day be a way for businesses and communities to organize themselves.
Instead of selling regular tickets to a party featuring a performance by Russian punk-protest group Pussy Riot, Helpful Friends asked attendees to scan their crypto wallets at the door. If you have the group’s membership tokens for at least five $FWB (which costs about $140 as of party time), you’re in. You need to have $75FWB or about $10,000 to bring in a plus one. (There was a way to skip the queue altogether: the party’s official NFT, which, despite selling for more than $50,000, was a poor choice for the budget-conscious raver.)
All this velvet rope exclusivity may seem to contradict crypto enthusiasts’ claims that Web3 is a democratizing force that will expand access to financial services, level the playing field, and get rid of legacy middlemen. And sometimes I wondered, were the Web3 kids trying to break down the old social hierarchy, only to replace it with a new, tokenized one where they were at the top.
But the arrangement seemed to work for everyone – at least until midnight, when the place was full and $FWB token holders stuck on the sidewalk could no longer get in.
“I paid $600 to go to this party,” a man in line grumbled. “Well, at least the coin can go up.”
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