Forte cofounder and CEO Josh Williams does a deep dive on “Opportunities for Crypto and Gaming.” Williams explains that blockchain technology could have an even bigger impact on gaming than the internet because it's not just connecting people, but potentially changing business models by aligning the incentives of developers and players. It can do this by allowing players to truly own the assets in games and verify their provenance, and by enabling developers to code rich incentive systems and rewards into games. By incorporating these mechanisms, Williams believes, an already exploding gaming industry will grow and create multi-billion-dollar marketplaces within games that will truly benefit players and developers.

Andreessen Horowitz’s Crypto Startup School brought together 45 participants from around the U.S. and overseas in a seven-week course to learn how to build crypto companies. Andreessen Horowitz is partnering with TechCrunch to release the online version of the course over the next few weeks.

Find more Crypto Startup School videos plus additional reading and info: https://bit.ly/2ThsHen

Josh Williams: Opportunities for Crypto in Gaming

Sam Williams, founder and CEO of decentralized storage system Arweave, gives an overview of “Mechanism Design,” a field of study that has become newly relevant with the development of Bitcoin and subsequent blockchains that require carefully designed incentives for network participants. Williams uses examples to show that economic incentives, when designed properly, can persuade self-interested people to exhibit useful behaviors at fair market value with minimal central planning. This provides a new tool to bootstrap decentralized networks. He cautions, however, that poorly conceived incentive systems can overpower moral frameworks in ways that can be dangerous. This could be harmful, he says, in decentralized protocols, since self-executing code may not easily be altered to curtail unintended consequences. Williams closes with a case study of his company, Arweave, and the way it created an endowment-style financial incentive system to build a platform where data can be secured forever. This kind of model opens the door to new kinds of community-owned networks that can’t be manipulated by central owners.

Andreessen Horowitz’s Crypto Startup School brought together 45 participants from around the U.S. and overseas in a seven-week course to learn how to build crypto companies. Andreessen Horowitz is partnering with TechCrunch to release the online version of the course over the next few weeks.

Find more Crypto Startup School videos plus additional reading and info: https://bit.ly/2ThsHen

Sam Williams: Mechanism Design 101

Jesse Walden, a former a16z investment partner and Mediachain cofounder, and Robert Leshner, founder and CEO of Compound, do a “Deep Dive on Decentralization.” Walden starts with a playbook for progressive decentralization — the process by which crypto project creators build a useful product, create a community around that product, and then gradually hand over control of the maturing network to the community. This process is in keeping with the cooperative model of crypto networks, which drives rapid, compounding innovation through better alignment of incentives and open participation. Leshner follows with a case study of his experiences at Compound, an automated money market for crypto assets in which lenders and borrowers can come together to transact without the involvement of third parties. Compound, one of the first crypto projects to move through the full progressive decentralization model, built a thriving community of third-party application developers, who have set up shop on top of Compound’s smart-contract protocol. The Compound team has gradually brought this community further into the protocol’s inner workings; in the final stages before handoff to the community, the founding team made changes transparently, with greater reliance on the community’s input, and created a sandbox for experimentation to test governance mechanisms. Decentralizing “allows the protocol to live forever,” Leshner says, which fosters innovation because developers can trust the protocol with their businesses and livelihood.        

Andreessen Horowitz’s Crypto Startup School brought together 45 participants from around the U.S. and overseas in a seven-week course to learn how to build crypto companies. Andreessen Horowitz is partnering with TechCrunch to release the online version of the course over the next few weeks.

Find more Crypto Startup School videos plus additional reading and info: https://bit.ly/2ThsHen

a16z crypto Transcript on Youtube

Josh Williams: Opportunities for Crypto in Gaming

Sam Williams: Mechanism Design 101

Robert Leshner and Jesse Walden: Deep Dive on Decentralization