🌴⛓ Chainletter - LimeWire, the Status Quo, and the Importance of Being More Than Preservation

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🌴⛓ Chainletter

Our weekly newsletter covers Chainforest - a recap of our latest happenings, our members’ accomplishments, the conversations in our Discord, and an in-depth dive on a project or issue our community is focused on.

TLDR;

• LimeWire is set to return as a NFT marketplace in 2022

• Is Crypto and Web3 shifting the status quo of diversity and inclusion, or is it more of the same?

• Chainforest Members set to meet IRL and the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco

In the past week, 12 new Rainmakers have joined the forest.

The top three channels were: 🎙│general, 🟣│solana, and 💸│defi.

From the Mouth of the Forest

The Return of LimeWire

Growing up in the 2000s, LimeWire was the place to download music for free, circumnavigating the $0.99 cost per song on iTunes. Eventually shut down in 2010 for copyright infringement (and probably rightfully so), LimeWire has been dormant for over a decade. Until now.

LimeWire will relaunch in May of 2022, this time as a NFT marketplace, focusing on music (limited editions, unreleased demos, etc). The service intends to be more user friendly for the average person, with prices denoted in USD and the ability to purchase tokens via credit card. Starting off as a centralized trading platform, eventually additional capital will be raised via the LimeWire token, which will grant the ability to vote on changes to policies and artists featured.

Will the nostalgia of the name be enough to catapult LimeWire into competition with the likes of OpenSea, Rarible, and others? Their Discord boasts over 30,000 members and their advisory board includes the manager of the Wu-Tang Clan, Tareef Michael. Nostalgia may be enough to draw users in, but ultimately it will come down to the quality of the artists they can draw in and the community they build. Join the waitlist for LimeWire here.

Diversity and Inclusion In Crypto

Conversation broke out in the general channel regarding diversity, inclusion, and harassment in Web3. The beginning of the thread can be found here. Beginning after Amit posted about Bain Capital’s tweet highlighting their all male, mostly white team on International Women’s Day. Bain Capital was quick to apologize (tweet).

Unfortunately, all-male teams and panels are all too common in Web3. Additionally, several news stories of bullying and discriminatory actions by major players in crypto including Brantley Millegan of ENS posting homophobic and racist tweets. There is also the story of a woman who was ‘virtually gang raped’ in Zuckerberg’s Metaverse. Should these actions get said people ‘cancelled’ or should freedom of speech and a free economy dictate crypto, no matter how offensive or harmful it is to others? Amit continues the conversation by connecting it to the NBA’s Daryl Morey and cancel culture:

Chainforest member Tom - @tmcleod3 highlights that the concept of ‘cancel culture’ is not black and white but really a nuanced topic:

Finally, Azi - @MagniofAzi connects this topic to the Metaverse and how the concept of pseudo anonymity and less accountability will impact online harassment:

Game Developers Conference

The Game Developers Conference (GDC) will take place March 21-25 in San Francisco. Designed to bring the gaming community together to “exchange ideas, solve problems, and shape the future of the industry”, this year’s conference will feature a heavy crypto presence.

Immutable, Axie Infinity, FTX, and Solana are all hosting events the week of GDC. Chainforest members in the Bay Area should consider reaching out to Alex - @awettermann, as he is creating a Telegram chat with events and meetups at GDC.

Around the Fire: Community Events

Town Hall

At this week’s town hall, we continued to focus on building ChainForest as a brand. Discussions included talk about sector mod’s role as helping create a ‘deal team’ for SLCF on a deal by deal basis. Sector mod’s would create a team of experts to help SLCF evaluate potential investments. IRL events were discussed and the desire for a variety of events, not always dinner and drinks, but also speakers and other team building activities. Greg and Lisa discussed the need for our brand messaging to be cohesive, the brand strategy document can be found in the links below.

• Link to Chainforest’s brand strategy doc can be found here.

• Find the Chainforest Town Hall presentation here.

• Find this week’s notes here.

Ancestry, Immutability, and Dynamic Artifacts: The Renata Morais Interview

Renata Morais recently joined Chainforest as a Community Builder. She is helping us strengthen our own efforts towards diversity and inclusion, and with her strong transdisciplinary academic background and design strategy expertise. Renata is also a fellow at both FWB and Kernel and likes to describe herself as a multipotentialite who “ticks every box but does not fit in any.” In our conversation, it became clear how polymaths such as herself bring a colorful edge to Web3.

David: How did you end up in Web3?

Renata: A key element in my academic work has always been about exploring the relationship between culture and technology. The first time I worked on the intersection of technology and diversity was when I wrote about how Afro-Brazilian communities had used social media to build an entire Afrocentric school curriculum focusing on Afro-Brazilian history. I have always been interested in the ways we can use technology to promote cultural diversity, especially through digital art and aesthetics. Other than highlighting diversity, my work also focused on a search for universality, for what we all have in common as humans and a common sense of responsibility for our shared Earth. These universal values are there to be found at the crossroads of technology and art.

From 2015 on I became interested in digital aesthetics in art, and I started to review works by artists such as Tara Donovan and Fabien Bürgy. From there, I started to curate a lot of digital art and became involved with Ello, which was the first social network that was focused entirely on digital media design — specifically 3D images and GIFs. I connected to a lot of important 3D artists such as Alessio De Vecchi, who went on to become a highly influential NFT artist, and who showcased his art at Transductions, an art exhibition I’ve curated in Melbourne around that same time. That same exhibition also featured Holly Herndon as well, who was a speaker at the Alien Aesthetics panel I’ve organized. Bruce Sterling, the iconic sci-fi author, was part of the same panel as Holly. That exhibition was already representative of the culture and aesthetics of Web3, and was the seed of a book I’ve organized and published in 2017 called Transductions: A Global Experiment in Digital Art Curation.

David: You have minted some NFTs as well, right? Can you tell us a bit about that.

Renata: In 2019, I started to do a research project on data visualization with the Department of Psychological Sciences at the University of Melbourne, in collaboration with Dr. Simon Cropper, who specializes in visual cognition. We started to experiment with how artificial intelligence could be used to visualize dreams. I discovered ArtBreeder, which is this Open AI platform where you can mix various visual “genes”. So I started to use AI to “breed” images that were correlating to the dreams I was having. These images I made, based on a mix of visual “genes” of symbols from my dreams at the time, I began to mint as NFTs. Some of these I have minted on Tezos, and are a collection called House of Metamonsters, which has its own metaverse gallery. That was my first introduction to blockchain. I had no idea my entire life would be transformed by this encounter with Web3.

This was the beginning of a really powerful process of transformation for me. It’s hard to put into words, but it changed my life completely. The dream research that I was doing with the University of Melbourne, working so closely with my own subconscious, created these feedback loops within my dreams. They started to be populated with themes of my Indigenous ancestry, my Indigenous grandmother, and all the memories from my childhood that were telling me about my Indigenous ancestry but that were lost. This one particular time there was a powerful image of this gaping wound in my belly which represented to me this wound of the trauma of the erasure of my own ancestry that I had to heal. Jung calls it the ancestral unconscious, and it was emerging right there in my dreams. I wrote a paper that chronicles this entire journey and shared it with the Kernel community. Andy Tudhope read it and did this beautiful, loving gesture: he named me Blue Phoenix and committed my entire paper to the Kernel permanent repository on Github. Blue Phoenix was one of the symbols that emerged in my dreams to signify this rebirth of my Indigenous ancestry and identity. It has been my handle ever since.

From there I stopped everything I was doing. All the research I was doing with AI and psychology. Everything. I knew then that I had to dedicate myself to healing this wound of cultural genocide and erasure, not only in myself but most importantly to stop the chain of intergenerational trauma from happening again. We need to preserve the little that is left from extinct cultures and to safeguard those who are under threat of extinction for future generations so that my children and their children don’t go through the loss I went through. I knew that blockchain has a huge potential for supporting cultural heritage and also economic sovereignty as well. NFTs can provide economic incentives for immutably preserving and maintaining ancestral cultures. I then partnered with André Blas, who also happens to be a Brazilian anthropologist with Indigenous ancestry, and Bacely Yorobi, who is an internationally-renowned diversity expert from Ivory Coast and also a Solidity developer, and from the three of us working together Tapuya was born as a Web3 project. We are a highly international team: I’m based in Dubai, André is based in New York and Bacely is based in Paris. I spend a couple of months per year in Brazil as well.

David: Fascinating. What is Tapuya about and where do you see Tapuya going in the future?

Renata: We’re currently co-creating Tapuya right now, and I’m the ambassador of this project as a fellow at both Friends with Benefits and Kernel. At base, Tapuya is using NFTs to decentralize cultural expression and to preserve ancestral heritage. We are being careful and taking things slow, starting small with Indigenous communities who are facing the threat of extinction such as the Dâw people and currently working with the Pataxó people in Brazil. My co-founder, André Blas, who’s based in New York, is currently in Brazil collaborating with Tanara Pataxó.

Our latest achievement for Tapuya was partnering with fellow Kernel member Sparrow, who is launching Blackboxdotart, a curated NFT gallery soon to be launching on the palm.io ecosystem. I feel we’re totally aligned because their position is to be a place where all of the art is surrounded by detailed social and cultural context. For Tapuya, we want to create these capsules of experience so that people don’t simply buy an NFT, but rather have a cultural encounter through an artifact. The subtlety of this encounter is at the core of the intercultural experience we want to create, and it can not be constricted just around heritage and preservation. It has to be dynamic, about activating a data sovereign node in each Indigenous community, activating financial sovereignty for that specific people. Another exciting opportunity is that I’ve joined ArkiveDAO as a curationist, collaborating with their team to rethink cultural preservation in Web3. Tapuya is about co-designing ancestral futures. That’s what we are building as we go through the incubation process now at Kernel and Friends with Benefits. Anyone can get in touch with us to get involved or learn more and also to donate to the project at https://tapuya.xyz/.

David: Can you tell us a bit more about this idea of Ancestral Futures?

Ancestry is not in the past. There is a misconception about what ancestry means, that it is something that is not here right now, some kind of memory. However, the true meaning of ancestry is continuity. We are our ancestors. They live in us right now, and at this moment, we embody the ancestry of the future generations. By becoming aligned with this core value of Indigenous culture, that of reverence towards our ancestors, we are empowered as active representatives of our lineages in the present moment. We can then create the conditions for the flourishing and transmission of our cultural legacy for future generations. Ancestral futures happen through the present, through our conscious alignment in the present moment that connects past wisdom to future generations. Our actions matter, what we do at this moment shapes the future.

David: What are the challenges you see for building community in the Web3 space? What are the best practices a community builder can implement?

Renata: For me building community is about belonging, it’s about making sure that people have an open space where they feel safe. For me, that’s the most important thing: a nonjudgmental space, where you have a community of care, and people feel that they are welcome, where there’s a sense of being welcome. It’s also about creating value together and sharing our resources together. I think it’s really connected to Indigenous ways of knowing and community culture. For Indigenous peoples, community is always about sharing. My personal experience as an ally of various Indigenous peoples is that the moment I arrive in any Indigenous community, the first thing that happens is the children come running to greet me. Instantly. The children immediately and intuitively know that if you are there, it means that you’re part of their community. So they come and they immediately start to share basically everything with you: watermelon, cassava, you name it. There’s no sense of this is mine, this is yours. You are part of the community, so everything is ours. And that’s just the way it is. I think we have so much to learn from Indigenous ways of coexistence and community, especially in relation to sharing common responsibilities for the well-being of everyone. It’s not just the stewards or leaders that have responsibilities, everybody in the community is responsible for everybody else as well. So I think that culture is the most important element in a healthy community because what connects us as a community is our values. Amit always talks about values. I think he places so much emphasis on values because, without values, you cannot have a culture. When there are strong values, people know what kind of behavior is or isn’t accepted. That’s why it is important to have leadership roles in the community as well, so the right behaviors are being displayed within the community.

David: What do you think are examples of healthy community culture in the Web3 space?

Look, the first one that comes to mind is FWB. I’m going to be honest here, I haven’t seen any kind of community culture that can compare to FWB. It’s simply the best one, the ultimate standard. We are lucky in Chainforest to have so many cross-membership with FWB, because they really are role models when it comes to community. I think one of the reasons why the community is so strong at FWB is that lifestyle is at its core. You might think that most community members at FWB would just focus on the NFT channels, or just chasing alpha across various channels, etc, but that’s not how it works. You know, it’s the silly things that make FWB great. It’s about sharing dog pictures, memes, sharing about how your day went, etc - this human, authentic level of empathy and connection. We should strive to also have a culture in Chainforest where we are not only about the alpha and the nerding out all the time, but also feel safe to be silly and personal and vulnerable, so we can build a community of care as well.

The Chainletter is written to promote the projects and discussions within this community. Do you have a topic or a project you find interesting? Reach out to David or Elijah on Discord.

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