Category: Uncategorized

In recent years, the line between what is real and what is digital has become increasingly blurred. With the rise of virtual and augmented reality, we can now interact with digital environments as if they were physical spaces. This new frontier is called the metaverse.

The metaverse is a persistent, online world where users interact with each other and with digital content using avatars. In this virtual world, users own property and trade goods and services. The virtual world of the metaverse has a developing digital economy around these activities.

One of the new players in this space is Dyme. Dyme is a digital asset platform that is laying the social and financial groundwork for the decentralized web. Dyme gives metaverse development creators the tools to build a digital economy. As a cryptocurrency, Dyme enables users to buy, sell, and trade digital assets in the metaverse. In other words, Dyme accelerates the growth of the metaverse economy.

So what exactly are digital assets? How can you get started investing in them? Can you even invest in them? How does Dyme work in the virtual world of the metaverse? Keep reading to find out.

What is the metaverse? A short history

The metaverse term originated in Snow Crash, a 1992 science fiction novel by the American writer Neal Stephenson. The 2003 virtual world platform Second Life is often described as the first metaverse, as it incorporated many aspects of social media into a persistent virtual world with the user represented as an avatar.

Virtual reality was a term first used in a 1938 essay by French poet and playwright Antonin Artaud, long before computers or the internet. Similarly, cyberspace was first used in the late 1960s by Danish artist Susanne Ussing. Both terms have come to align with a computer-generated shared virtual space, and thus the three terms, metaverse, virtual reality, and cyberspace, are often used interchangeably.

More recently, Meta’s Horizon Worlds (recently renamed MetaHorizon) has shown how a VR space can work. Using their Meta Quest headset, one of the top VR headsets in the market, users can engage in a wide range of virtual experiences. While it requires a VR headset, it’s a cool, powerful example of one of the big facets of the metaverse.

What is the metaverse? An explanation and in-depth guide

To explain the metaverse, we should probable first define the term metaverse!

The metaverse is a persistent, online world where users interact with each other and with digital content using avatars. Just like in the physical world, users own property and trade goods within the metaverse. And also, like the physical world, there is a thriving economy around these activities.

Digital humans in virtual worlds

Beyond the virtual worlds being built and used today, the metaverse is also a vision of what many in the computer industry believe is the next iteration of the internet: a single, shared, immersive, persistent, 3D virtual space where humans experience life in ways they could not in the physical world.

Some of the technologies that provide access to this virtual world, such as virtual reality (VR) headsets and augmented reality (AR) glasses, are evolving quickly; other critical components of the metaverse, such as adequate bandwidth or interoperability standards, are probably years off or might never materialize.

Metaverse technologies have been gaining traction recently as technology companies build virtual spaces with greater fidelity. At the same time, users are increasingly open to a virtual reality experience as the need for global connection and socially distant interaction grows. This has led to the creation and use of virtual worlds where people come together, build and explore without the limitations of physicality. This guide provides an overview of the metaverse, its features, and potential applications so that readers can gain perspective on this digital universe and how it could shape our future.

Dyme’s role in this mixed reality is to provide economic structures to stitch these virtual worlds together. Part virtual currency, part community governance, part economic structures, Dyme’s community of innovators and creators focuses on building an interoperable economy across the metaverse. The metaverse presents a chance for many users to connect, socialize, spend, and earn. Dyme is working to provide a valuable interoperable network of currency and financial exemplars to make that chance a reality.

Metaverse visions blend multiple technologies into multiple worlds

At its core, the metaverse is a shared online space that functions similarly to a digital universe, with people from all over the world connecting via devices like smartphones, tablets, and computers. Within this 3D space, users can explore detailed virtual worlds created by others or create their own. These digital environments are rendered in real-time using advanced graphics capabilities. In newer cases, these virtual worlds are enabled by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies.

In addition to using avatars as the basis for near-human interaction in virtual reality, the metaverse also allows for social interactions between users through voice chat, video chat, and text-based messaging. People can use their avatars to represent themselves in these virtual settings — further immersing them into a completely new world. Furthermore, augmented reality (AR) techniques bring elements of the physical environment into this sophisticated digital landscape — making it even more realistic. Lastly, blockchain technology serves as an infrastructure layer within the metaverse — allowing all transactions to be securely stored on an immutable ledger.

An economic platform for digital spaces

But “storing all transactions on an immutable ledger” is sort of dry. The right cryptocurrency has the potential to power the metaverse economy and help it grow. That’s equal parts powerful, cool, and transformative for metaverse technologies.

Given its intricate combination of underlying technologies and numerous possibilities for virtual experiences resulting from those combinations, the metaverse is disruptive enough to revolutionize our current way of life. There have already been talks about various applications such as education, healthcare, and entertainment that could benefit greatly from these immersive online platforms — though few have been implemented yet.

Digital avatars rocking out

One example of an intriguing application for the metaverse is virtual concerts — where musicians would play live shows for attendees worldwide who are represented by their avatars in an interactive 3D environment.

This would enable more people than ever before to experience live music from any location — thereby eliminating geographical barriers that often prevent shows from taking place in certain areas due to cost restrictions or other reasons. Moreover, this opens up new opportunities for independent artists who may not have had access to costly resources necessary to organize large-scale events before this technology became available.

In 1991, Moscow hosted the Monsters of Rock festival. Over 1.6 million people attended the concert. No tech giants, no tech companies, no digital twins, just a lot of people experiencing awesome music in the real world. It was more than a concert since it was held in Moscow in 1991. It was a political, social, and global moment.

Imagine how enormous a global moment like the Moscow festival could be in a virtual environment. The power of the virtual world is that it further shrinks the real world in much the same way as the airplane.

Real-world office spaces meet extended reality

Besides concerts and other entertainment applications, business collaboration can benefit greatly from these cutting-edge platforms. Virtual meetings are the first thing everyone talks about, but enabling new economic activities is a much broader topic. Virtual reality opens up possibilities that may not be possible in the real world for cost or distance reasons.

Similarly, augmented reality can create a mixed reality where users can both gain the benefit of working from home and the social connection of interacting in an office environment. Where a digital twin would be the user’s avatar in VR social metaverse, virtual workspaces can use extended reality to blend human interaction with metaverse technology. This can answer the problem of social interaction in the workplace raised by Business Insider

Business models adapt using metaverse technologies

When real-life issues like a pandemic impact work and society, businesses can adopt augmented reality experiences to continue operations.

For instance, large companies could leverage these platforms for conferences or meetings between their employees located around different parts of the world. Small businesses might take advantage of virtual marketplaces, which offer increased reach at lower costs than traditional brick-and-mortar establishments or existing e-commerce platforms. Even entrepreneurs with limited resources can set up localized stores without worrying about renting physical space or investing heavily in constructing retail shopfronts.

Game developers make 3d virtual worlds for more than games

Game consoles are terrific. PC games are classic and powerful. The work of game developers to make immersive environments in games like Myst, Everquest, and Fallout 3 speaks to the desire of many users to access a world outside their own. Using the word metaverse is tough without including how users access games to experience an alternative, immersive reality.

The mainstream success of games speaks to the potential for meta platforms to similarly succeed. One flaw many games have is in their fragmented, often isolated economy. While game users have accepted this isolation, they’re more likely to play a game in a shared economy.

As spatial computing grows more powerful, AR will become more lifelike. This has literally a game-changing impact as games will evolve beyond consoles and start to look like what was previously science fiction. The tech industry saddled us with data collection as a business model; they can help the world by making this more democratic and open.

Dyme intends to play a key role in the democratic, open metaverse.

Digital assets in digital space: Dyme and the economy of the metaverse

Dyme doesn’t make a virtual reality headset. We don’t have a video game. We don’t even build augmented reality glasses. What we have are a particular set of skills. Dyme is a digital asset platform that is laying the social and financial groundwork for the metaverse and the decentralized web.

While tech giants are fighting over which VR headset is better, Dyme has been focused on a niche real-world problem: building economic models and a technology that can work across multiple platforms to serve as an underpinning economic foundation for the metaverse. Whether virtual reality, mixed reality, or augmented reality, one real-life problem exists in them all. The problem is the need for a common medium of exchange.

The power of Cosmos and Ignite

Dyme is built using Ignite CLI (formerly Tendermint BFT) and the Cosmos SDK framework. By transforming a decentralized blockchain network structure into a generalized consensus engine, Ignite provides a platform for interoperable, sovereign decentralized networks that resembles the early days of the world wide web and the very first e-commerce transactions. When combined with the Cosmos SDK, Dyme has a platform to create the natural next step for the future of the metaverse and Web3: a cross-network cryptocurrency, a decentralized but standardized economic engine for the decentralized internet.

Virtual objects, digital assets, and virtual avatars all have persistent value

The digital world is new and growing. The value of assets in the digital world are much more volatile than those in real life. At least, that’s a common thread in media articles about the metaverse.

The thread has validity in a mature economy. Digital real estate is much more volatile than real estate in Kansas, for example. In a less mature economy, the examples are less precise. Essentially, comparing the economy in the metaverse to the economy of the United States is unhelpful.

Dyme’s thesis is that interoperability will drive persistent value for virtual goods, services, assets, and objects.

More helpful is a recent publication from the Pew Research Center writing about the metaverse in 2040. The paper speaks about the potential for usefulness, the need to avoid today’s dominant platforms, and the effort to mature the foundational systems of the metaverse.

Returning to the roots of an open, friendly Internet

The heightened interest and investment in extended reality prompted Pew Research Center and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center to ask hundreds of technology experts to share their insights on the topic. One significant theme was returning to an open, friendly Internet.

The Internet developed primarily because of decentralized governance. The Internet Engineering Task Force was developed as a community of engineers and scientists, often from competing companies, to share ideas, protocols, and structures that became the foundational elements of the Internet. With no formal membership roster or requirements, the IETF works to create voluntary standards that maintain and improve the interoperable network.

The metaverse and Web3 need entities similar to the IETF. For the currency and economic structure, Dyme’s structure as a DAO satisfies the key elements the IETF got right: voluntary, democratic, open, focusing on bottom-up creation, and open standards.

Avoiding the pitfalls of crypto that isn’t purpose-built for the metaverse

The Chainalysis 2023 Crypto Crime Report said more than 1.1 million tokens were launched in 2022. Just 40,521 of them achieved minimal traction. That’s just under four percent.

Fewer than 4% of all tokens launched in 2022 achieved a minimum of 10 swaps and four consecutive days of trading in the week following their launch. And about 25% of those who showed traction lose 90% of their value in the first week of trading.

In that environment, the need for a purpose-built economic structure for metaverse and Web3 builders is obvious. Even if metaverse companies picked one of the winning 30,000 out of the 1.1 million that failed to thrive and avoided the 10,000 that plummeted in value, is the currency suitable for the purpose of underpinning one virtual world’s currency and interoperating with others?

Dyme views itself as a community of like-minded creators and helps shepherd the economic policies and the growing metaverse creator community toward greater economic interoperability.

Closing

The economic structure seen in Web 2.0 treats users like merchandise.

The computing power of current social networks is directed at monetizing users and user-generated content.

The siloed nature of tech giants risks the growth of mixed reality. The metaverse differs from e-commerce, social networks, and chat. Metaverse refers to the potential for immersive, positive, supportive worlds beyond our own.

Rather than a zero-sum game of winners and losers seen in Web 2.0, public blockchains and integrated blockchain networks can blend both the size of the existing Internet economy and the growth of the emerging economy of the metaverse. This is where Dyme is positioned: by avoiding this zero-sum game scenario, the Dyme cryptocurrency can evolve into an egalitarian, decentralized entity with persistent, growing value.

Dyme puts control back in the hands of users. That’s how Dyme adds value to the metaverse.

Web 3, a term coined by Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood in 2014, addresses the imbalance in economic participation, data security, privacy, and information ownership currently centralized around a small group of “Big Tech” companies. Dyme is a cryptocurrency that helps Web 3 projects solve exceedingly common and complex economic, financial, and governance challenges. These challenges limit the interoperability of Web 3, which stifles adoption and growth.

Dyme was developed to promote the adoption and growth of Web 3 by addressing these challenges. Dyme is part of the Cosmos Interchain, built on Ignite and using Cosmos SDK. We believe Dyme expands on the Cosmos “Internet of Blockchains” in a positive way by providing the economic models and exemplars of use for Web 3 projects and by offering a reserve cryptocurrency for those projects to use.

Dyme tackles the challenge in three main areas necessary for a decentralized but standardized economic structure: democratic governance, decentralized management, and transparent economic structures and goals.

In this Dyme Piece, we’ll look at Dyme’s governance structure to answer the question, “Is Dyme a DAO?”

What is a DAO?

The topic of decentralized autonomous organizations has received significant attention since the first decentralized blockchain was described by a person (or group of people) known as Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008. The blockchain design was implemented the following year by Nakamoto as a core component of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin.

Decentralization is an essential element of blockchain-based cryptocurrency. By storing data across the peer-to-peer network of the blockchain nodes, decentralization eliminates some risks that come with data being held centrally. We use a sovereign instance of the Ignite (formerly Tendermint) blockchain to create Dyme and Cosmos SDK to connect to the broader Internet of Blockchains.

Decentralization also enables a trustless transactional environment. Every node in a decentralized blockchain has a copy of the blockchain. No centralized “official” copy exists, and no user is “trusted” more than any other.

Before he founded Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin wrote about DAOs

In 2013, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin brought the phrase decentralized autonomous organizations to life. By 2018, the definition of a DAO and descriptions of how a DAO works centered on six major points:

• DAOs enable people to coordinate and self-govern themselves online. Although no mention is made as to the minimum size of the group, the term “organization” is generally understood to refer to an entity comprising multiple people acting towards a common goal rather than a legally registered organization.
• A DAO source code is deployed in a blockchain with smart contract capabilities like Ethereum—arguably always a public blockchain.
• A DAO’s smart contract code specifies the rules for interaction among people —although it is unclear to what extent other governance mechanisms may affect or overrule such code.
• Since these rules are defined using smart contracts, they are self-executed independently of the parties’ will.
• The DAO governance should remain independent from central control. Some definitions specifically refer to self-governed, self-organizing, peer-to-peer, and democratic control.
• Since they rely on a blockchain, DAOs inherit some properties from the blockchain, such as transparency, cryptographic security, and decentralization.

These will be the points we evaluate to answer our question about Dyme’s DAO status.

Is Dyme a Decentralized Autonomous Organization?

Since the author is a coder, the evaluation will be step-wise and hopefully not pedantic. While the technical specifications for Dyme have matured over the past year, Dyme is still in development. Dyme is expected to launch in late June 2023.

Seventeen web developers, UX designers, blockchain developers, and other experts have worked on Dyme for over six months. For this evaluation, we only list services we intend to launch in the June 2023 release.

We also distinguish between those features and future or speculative features.

DAOs enable people to coordinate and self-govern themselves online.

This is the broadest point to evaluate. Dyme operates online, using Discord and a browser-based wallet for governance and coordination services. These services allow for coordination and discussion in different ways.

Once launched, Dyme’s Discord server will provide verified Dyme members a place to interact. While anyone can view and read the governance channels, adding to the governance discussion is available only to verified Dyme wallet holders.

Similarly, Dyme’s browser-based wallet provides information about active proposals and the means to vote inside the wallet. The forms and information on the wallet are drawn from the Discord server, further aligning the governance process.

Thus, Dyme enables people to coordinate and self-govern themselves online.

A DAO source code is deployed in a public blockchain with smart contract capabilities.

Dyme uses a sovereign instance of the Ignite (formerly Tendermint) blockchain and Cosmos SDK to connect to the broader Internet of Blockchains. The smart contract capabilities of Tendermint are modular: they are “in-chain” instead of “on-chain.”

Dyme intends to use validators from the Cosmos community to be a public blockchain. We will publish Dyme’s tokenomics structure before launch.

Thus, Dyme’s source code is deployed on a public blockchain with smart contract capabilities.

A DAO’s smart contract code specifies the rules for interaction among people.

Dyme’s governance logic will be the subject of a forthcoming Dyme Piece, as it is central to Dyme’s thesis. Since we have not yet made this code public on the Dyme Github, we cannot yet claim success in this area.

Dyme has worked to align the governance methods of the Foundation with governance in the DAO. This alignment goes further than the definition of “organization” in the first of the six points, directly linking the two and placing the DAO’s governance as the sole means of setting resolutions before the Foundation’s board.

We also address how the “other governance process” overrides the code of the DAO. If the Foundation cannot legally perform an act, this override serves as a final backstop against bad actors in the Dyme community. This override is expressly limited to those actions which are illegal.

Thus, Dyme’s smart contract code and governance documents specify the rules for interaction among people, but we cannot claim full credit until we publish the materials.

These rules are defined using smart contracts; they are self-executed independently of the parties’ will.

Dyme’s governance process is modeled on the Cosmos on-chain governance methods. As previously described, Dyme also has aligned the organization’s legal formation and management documents with the DAO code. DAO governance proposals are treated like board resolutions, and the only way to bring forward a board resolution is through the on-chain governance process.

This loop establishes that no licit organizational actions are taken outside of the DAO governance process and that only DAO governance proposals that are passed by the vote of the DAO advance to the board for action.

The process of executing “the will of the DAO” is an area of some debate in the community. Positions range from absolute autonomy and automation of the DAO to decentralization only at the infrastructural layer.

Dyme takes the position that DAO governance must not bend to the whims of a small group of actors but should operate with the participation of its members and outside organizations as directed by the DAO. This is the most complex solution to put in place since it requires the alignment of both software code and government and regulatory documents.

An important element of Dyme, and one which is divergent from Cosmos code, is Dyme’s governance concept of “one wallet, one vote.” This will be the subject of a future Dyme Piece. It means effectively that whether a Dyme holder owns one DYME or one billion DYME, their vote counts the same. Dyme leads the industry in this move toward democratic rule.

Thus, the Dyme DAO rules are defined using smart contracts, they are self-executed independently of the parties’ will, and they comport with corporate law.

The DAO governance should remain independent from central control.

Dyme has no CEO. The ultimate beneficial owner of BVI-based Dyme, Ltd. is the Cayman Islands-based DYME Foundation, a memberless foundation. As a board of directors governs all legal entities, the Dyme DAO appointed a sole director.

The Dyme Foundation organization documents provide one path for a proposal to reach the board for action: the DAO proposal process. The board of directors is structurally prohibited from acting outside the Dyme DAO proposal process. The directors cannot and should not authorize any illegal activity and thus serve as a final backstop against bad actors in the Dyme community.

Thus, Dyme is independent of central control and comports with the requirements of legal propriety.

DAOs inherit some properties from the blockchain.

This evaluation point feels a bit like guaranteed extra credit. Dyme’s native cryptocurrency provides no ownership rights in Dyme. It does offer governance rights, and from that, the Dyme DAO inherits the properties of the Dyme blockchain.

As Dyme’s cryptocurrency is the Dyme governance token, there is a strong alignment of interest among Dyme holders to increase the value of Dyme.

Closing

Dyme is a DAO.

To amplify a few key points from this article: Dyme’s governance is not run by a small group of actors. It is managed by software code placed on a public blockchain. The legal structure of the organization is aligned with the DAO’s smart contracts. Dyme’s “one wallet, one vote” voting structure is strongly democratic.

Dyme is laying the social and financial groundwork for Web 3.0. As an evolution of the more centralized Web 2.0, Web 3.0 projects hold sway over massive existing and emerging growth industries. This unusual combination of industry size and growth gives rise to an opportunity for foundational elements of the emerging Web 3.0 space to avoid a zero-sum game scenario. By building these foundational elements of the decentralized internet through community development and self-determined governance, Dyme is positioned to serve as the common economic structure across Web 3.0.

This is where Dyme is positioned. Dyme avoids this zero-sum game scenario, the Dyme cryptocurrency can evolve into an egalitarian, decentralized entity with persistent, growing value. Further, the projects which adopt Dyme early will realize the most significant economic incentives without diminishing the positive economic potential for later entrants.

To achieve this, Dyme focuses on three main areas. We believe these are necessary for a decentralized but standardized economic structure. They ar: democratic governance, decentralized management, and transparent economic structures and goals. These align with the aspirations of Web 3.0. Web3, the decentralized internet, is where users control their data, influence, and destiny.

Cosmos and Ignite: the right decentralized protocols for Dyme

Choosing the right blockchain to realize the Dyme thesis

Dyme is built using Ignite CLI (formerly Tendermint BFT) and the Cosmos SDK framework. By transforming a decentralized blockchain network structure into a generalized consensus engine, Ignite provides a platform for interoperable, sovereign decentralized networks that resembles the early days of the world wide web and the very first e-commerce transactions. When combined with the Cosmos SDK, Dyme has a platform to create the natural next step for the future of Web 3.0: a cross-network cryptocurrency, a decentralized but standardized economic engine for the decentralized internet.

As a sovereign public blockchain in the Cosmos ecosystem, Dyme aims to provide a robust toolset, use cases, and community support for deploying Dyme as a reserve cryptocurrency for Web 3.0 business models. At launch, Dyme will be a decentralized network serving as a censorship-resistant, decentralized, and permissionless means for creators and companies to manage their own native tokens with the benefit of democratic governance, decentralized management, and transparent economic structures and goals.

Responsibly shaping a new economic paradigm

Dyme joins many platforms using Cosmos to make the next generation of the world wide web a reality. From interchain smart contracts at Juno to a decentralized network to store data and create communities at Kira, from video streaming at Theta to equal access NFT crypto wallets at Monet, Cosmos and the Interchain Foundation have shepherded a range of decentralized autonomous organizations toward the future decentralized web.

Dyme views the work of the Interchain Foundation as similar to the IETF during the early days of NSFNet and the start of VoIP and the world wide web: as an enabler of technologies that support various services. From a decentralized storage network to distributed computing power to process transactions between two or more parties and share data across chains, Cosmos and the Interchain Foundation are elemental to a successful Web 3.0 ecosystem.

❓ What is Web 3.0?

Web 3.0: Semantic web meets world wide web

Web 3.0 is a term used to describe the evolution of the internet from an information-sharing platform to a platform for communication, collaboration, and commerce. The new advancements that have made this development possible include distributed ledger technology, cryptography, peer-to-peer networks, decentralized computing, smart contracts, and digital assets trading and management systems.

Cloud providers restrict access no more!

Web 3.0 represents a shift in power away from large, centralized organizations to more distributed ownership models by individuals and small groups. This gives users more data privacy and control over their information instead of relying on third parties. Web3 also allows users to transact faster and more securely than ever before. Additionally, users can access applications tailored to their specific needs rather than relying on general-purpose ones from large corporations. Web 3.0 is revolutionizing how we interact with the world around us through its decentralized infrastructure that promotes open access to information and global collaboration between individuals.

Users create content, companies create next-generation technologies

Web 3.0 stands in marked contrast to the highly centralized, powerfully oligarchic structure of Web 2.0, which has a range of large technology companies controlling the economy of the internet for their benefit. Web3 represents a return to the roots of the internet, where wealth was created through shared infrastructure, and common structures worked to elevate a wide range of companies and projects.

This return to the roots of the internet is seen in overlaps between the early world wide web and the more recent development of digital assets, smart contracts, decentralized apps, and other blockchain projects.

The read only generation gives way to the read write own generation

The business model of Web 3.0 is also different from Web 2.0, in that user content is owned by the user and not the property of cloud providers, current web services, or companies making up the current social web. The business models then provide more control to internet users but still make money by providing services and a new wave of useful technologies. Concisely, they move beyond the “read only” web from the 90s into a “read write execute” or a “read write own” model for the future.

Dyme’s thesis is this new wave of services will benefit from a decentralized but standardized economic engine for the decentralized internet.

🚀 Why does Web 3.0 need Dyme?

Data and transactions interwoven

There is a strong benefit for a common economic structure across Web 3.0. This is as true today as it was true during the creation of Web 2.0 when in 1999, the founder of X.com said on CBS MarketWatch that people were ready to use the Internet as their main financial repository.

The economic structure seen in Web 2.0 treats users like merchandise. In no area is this seen more clearly than with targeted ads. The entire computing power of Web 2.0 social networks is directed at monetizing user and user-generated content without adding to users’ bank accounts. This speaks to the need for a native token to put control back in the hands of users. Dyme addresses this need.

Controlled by users, managed by smart contracts

Users benefit as control shifts back from central authorities (specifically large technology companies) toward equal access. They further benefit when corporate censorship shifts toward censorship resistance. This benefit comes from freeing user-generated content from the highly centralized, powerfully oligarchic structure of Web 2.0, which has a range of massive corporations controlling the financial benefit of that content for their own gain.

As the semantic web supplants the Web 2.0 oligarchy, revisiting Musk’s “third stage” helps shift financial access and services. This shift from centralized control supports users gaining financial benefit from their own content. Whether it makes money for users or provides various services in exchange for access to content, control puts the outcome of financial transactions in the hands of users.

Dyme as the enabling technology for community digital assets

Rather than a zero-sum game of winners and losers seen in Web 2.0, public blockchains and integrated blockchain networks can blend both the size of the existing Web 2.0 economy and the growth of the emerging Web 3.0 economy. This is where Dyme is positioned. By avoiding this zero-sum game scenario, the Dyme cryptocurrency can evolve into an egalitarian, decentralized entity with persistent, growing value.

To achieve this, Dyme focuses on three main areas. We believe they are necessary for a decentralized but standardized economic structure. They are democratic governance, decentralized management, and transparent economic structures and goals. Dyme builds these foundational elements of decentralized services through community development and self-determined governance. Thus, Dyme is positioned to serve as the common economic structure across Web 3.0.

Further, the projects which adopt Dyme early will realize the most significant economic incentives. But they will do so without diminishing the positive economic potential for later entrants.

We will further address these topics in the near future.

👉 Social media platforms for Dyme

Developers, validators, and delegators, we want your active involvement in shaping the future of Dyme! Please join the official channels on Medium, Telegram, and Twitter. All ecosystem efforts are directed by community contributors.

• Web: https://www.dyme.network
• Medium: https://www.medium.com/dyme-network/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/DymeNetwork
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DymeNetwork
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/dyme/
• Telegram: https://t.me/dymenetwork
• Github: https://github.com/Dyme-Foundation
• Discord: https://discord.gg/dymenetwork

Cosmos is not a blockchain. Cosmos is not a cryptocurrency. Cosmos is a “novel blockchain network architecture,” according to its 2016 whitepaper.

Cosmos does have a native crypto, ATOM. As Dyme is part of the Cosmos network of blockchains, this Dyme Piece addresses a simple question: What is Cosmos?

As we answer that question, we will also examine why Cosmos is such a good choice for Dyme and how we see Dyme and Dyme’s native cryptocurrency, DYME, interacting with the Cosmos community of blockchains.

Why does blockchain need a network architecture like Cosmos?

At a very simple level, an interoperable network architecture is needed so that blockchains can communicate with one another. The siloed nature of most blockchain networks limits both adoption by consumers and innovation by creators. And since most blockchains have a fintech core, this slows crypto adoption.

Why don’t blockchains talk to one another?

Most blockchains don’t talk with one another. Interoperability has always been a challenge for blockchain. The first major blockchain innovation was Bitcoin; the second major innovation was blockchain. Essentially, once Bitcoin showed how blockchain could work, the community decoupled blockchain from Bitcoin.

While this sounds a bit like a joke about a chicken and an egg, the resulting trustless inter-organizational cooperation mechanism of blockchain gave rise to some terrific growth. But much like the early days of the Internet, interoperability was not a core construct in the blockchain.

Interoperability is what enables communication between two or more systems. Email interoperability is what lets your Gmail account exchange email with your Office 365 account. Short messaging service (SMS) interoperability is what lets your iPhone text message be received by an Android phone. And Internet interoperability is what lets computers talk to one another across various networks.

The Internet interoperability problem was largely solved in 1981 with the release of RFC 791, titled “Internet Protocol.” The Internet Protocol’s routing function enables internetworking and essentially establishes the Internet. RFC 791 was built on work started in 1974 by Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf.

Summing up interoperability: it takes time and experimentation to get interoperability right, but once you do, it’s a rocket ship ride!

A brief history of Cosmos

College graduate student Jae Kwon first wrote about Tendermint in 2014 as an energy-efficient alternative to Bitcoin. Kwon reasoned that a novel consensus protocol could avoid the high cost, high energy use, and long confirmation times endemic to Bitcoin’s proof-of-work-based consensus protocol. Where Bitcoin solved the problem of trustless currency exchange and spawned the crypto industry, Tendermint solved problems Bitcoin raised in crypto mining.

Two years later, Kwon and Ethan Buchman used Kwon’s writing about Tendermint (which they called Tendermint BFT in their white paper) as the foundation for Cosmos. Where Tendermint in 2014 solved inefficiencies in mining, Cosmos in 2016 addressed problems in blockchain interoperability.

The Swiss-based Interchain Foundation (ICF) was established in 2017 to shepherd the Cosmos ecosystem. That year, the Foundation ran a two-week initial coin offering (ICO) of the ATOM cryptocurrency, accumulating over $17 million.

On the corporate side, Tendermint, Inc. raised a $9 million Series A venture investment in 2019. Cosmos Hub launched in what Cosmos enthusiasts call “the big bang” on March 13, 2019.

Cosmos graduated from a white paper to software in 2019 with a software development kit (SDK) for blockchain developers and with the launch of the first Tendermint blockchains. The Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol was launched in 2021.

On March 1, 2022, Tendermint transitioned “Cosmos marketing and community initiatives and channels” to the ICF. This added to confusion about the long-term prospects of Cosmos, which were further impacted by the collapse of the Cosmos project Terra. However, with over $70 billion in digital assets under management, Cosmos remains a powerful player in the Layer One blockchain space.

Today, what was Tendermint (or Tendermint BFT or Tendermint Core at various times) is now Ignite CLI. It is the corporate entity (or corporate successor) to Tendermint, Inc. The Interchain Foundation continues its mission of being “stewards of the interchain internet.” Perhaps most importantly, the need for an interoperable blockchain network architecture remains very high.

What does a blockchain network architecture do?

A blockchain network architecture is the Internet Protocol for blockchains. Cosmos is a means for blockchains to interoperate in the same way that IP is a way for data networks to internetwork. Why didn’t the authors coin the term “interblockchain?” The world may never know.

The Cosmos authors understood this comparison between blockchain and the Internet, writing that independent blockchains “of the Cosmos network communicate with each other via an inter-blockchain communication (IBC) protocol, a kind of virtual UDP or TCP for blockchains.”

The Cosmos network architecture draws resiliency from this structure. The IBC protocol allows participants to freely exchange assets, services, and data across sovereign, decentralized blockchains.

How does Dyme use Cosmos and the IBC protocol?

Without shifting the conversation too much, Dyme has built an economic structure supporting the diverse needs of Web3 and metaverse projects. As blockchain is fundamentally a means for non-sovereign currency and trustless settlement between parties, Dyme identified a need for not just a blockchain but also the economic structures to support a financial infrastructure across Web3 and the metaverse.

Cosmos is an optimal environment for Dyme’s work. Using the same hub and zone structure as Cosmos, Dyme serves as the economic hub and the various Dyme projects serve as zones. Dyme can allow interoperability between different economies without forcing a particular governance or economic regime on the projects.

Dyme’s first project is Lifetoken. Lifetoken is a Web3 social network that adds the means to reward participation on a social platform. The resulting audience activation has exciting potential to both provide a democratized way for brands and creators to pay for meaningful results and an egalitarian way for audiences to participate in the economic benefit of using the platform.

The Lifetoken team built Dyme, and in mid-2022, realized the broader need for Dyme as a reserve cryptocurrency for Web3 and the metaverse.

How does Cosmos work?

Cosmos is an ever-expanding network of apps, data, and services interconnected with one another. Cosmos connects blockchains using what they call the Cosmos Hub and by promoting the use of the Cosmos SDK (software development kit) and Ignite blockchain.

Described differently, Cosmos uses its native ATOM cryptocurrency, the Ignite consensus algorithm, hubs, and the Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) Protocol to permit blockchains to communicate securely.

The blockchain: Ignite CLI (or what used to be called Tendermint BFT)

At the core of Cosmos is Ignite. In the Cosmos community, Ignite is called a Tendermint Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) engine consensus protocol. It’s a blockchain. It’s more correctly called a Layer One blockchain since it is a foundational blockchain on which blocks are produced, transactions are finalized, and a native cryptocurrency coin is used to pay transaction fees and reward those who secure the network.

The difference is Ignite allows developers to build their projects using a blockchain without building the blockchain from scratch. It does require developers to establish and nurture a group of validators, so it’s not an entirely hands-off project. And project developers do need to host an instance of Ignite on their own.

Notionally, Cosmos will work with any BFT engine consensus protocol. This gives some context for why the Interchain Foundation bears that name: it should be able to work with a second, albeit compliant, blockchain.

The Tendermint BFT algorithm validates transactions and executes blocks to the blockchain. It uses a protocol called the application blockchain interface to connect to applications. The protocol functions through a proof-of-stake (PoS) validation and governance mechanism.

The Cosmos Hub is the central hub of the Cosmos ecosystem.

The Cosmos Hub

Remembering that a “Cosmos zone” means an “Ignite blockchain”, each zone connects to another zone through hubs. Cosmos Hub is the main one, but other hubs are also available. 

Each zone is expected to function autonomously. This means the zone will authenticate accounts and transactions, will create and distribute new tokens, and will execute blockchain changes. Any zone or hub does not necessarily have to work with another, but each new zone is linked to the Cosmos Hub. The Cosmos Hub records each zone’s state. In this way, the Cosmos Hub behaves a bit like a DNS root server – it provides canonical information about every blockchain in the Cosmos universe.

Cosmos Hub facilitates interoperability between all Cosmos zones within the network by keeping track of their states. The Cosmos Hub also allows interoperability with proof-of-work (PoW) blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum through bridges. The best-known Cosmos bridge is Gravity Bridge, developed by Blockscape. Gravity Bridge connects Cosmos and Ethereum blockchains and Blockscape is incredibly well-regarded in the Cosmos community.

Aside from bridges, Cosmos hubs and zones communicate through the Inter-Blockchain Communication protocol, which serves as the base for “the Internet of Blockchains.”

Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) Protocol

The IBC Protocol serves two complementary purposes. First, it powers the Cosmos Hub by allowing the transmission of secure messages between disparate blockchains. This process enables project teams to build a sovereign, decentralized blockchain with their own governance and rules and lets users freely and securely exchange assets and data across those blockchains.

Second, the IBC Protocol allows other Cosmos projects to behave like the Cosmos Hub. This lets Cosmos projects build projects beneficial to a subset of the Cosmos ecosystem or to the entire Cosmos ecosystem without requiring either path.

The Cosmos Hub is aptly named. By serving as the hub (which was previously compared to a DNS root server) of the Cosmos “Internet of Blockchains,” Cosmos Hub is essentially a service provider. And much like a DNS root server, the Cosmos Hub both delivers information and serves as a clearing house for disparate networks.

Cosmos blockchains are not limited to fintech projects. They can do practically anything, from crypto issuance to nonfungible token (NFT) transfers to social networks to consumer marketplaces..

So Cosmos hosting is a thing?

Well, sort of. Project developers do have to host an instance of their blockchain. This is an unusual step if you’re used to developing on most other blockchains.

The benefit is that your project owns your instance of the blockchain and is not dependent on someone else’s chain to operate. As different chains and different coins have shown, depending on a blockchain you don’t control is sometimes a dangerous proposition.

What problems does Cosmos solve?

Cosmos fixes three major problems with blockchains: scalability, usability, and interoperability.

Scalability: Growth without crippling the power grid

If Mel Brooks taught us anything, it’s that “it’s good to be the king.” The Cosmos SDK allows project developers to build sovereign blockchain apps without substantial time commitment in building a unique Layer One protocol and without expensive ongoing costs.

These blockchains can easily interconnect without relying on smart contracts to exist on a different blockchain. This avoids both high transaction fees and mitigates an attack vector exploited by dozens of major crypto attacks. It also avoids network congestion of the big smart contract chains like Ethereum while developing better scaling features.  

It’s also worth mentioning that the Ignite blockchain has a 99% smaller carbon footprint than an equivalently sized Bitcoin blockchain.

Usability: Built for developers

The scalability benefits of Cosmos come with usability benefits, as well. The Cosmos SDK continues to mature through the support of an active developer community, and new exemplar projects are regularly started, which give rise to new ideas and new opportunities for ecosystem integration.

This will boost innovative in areas as diverse as decentralized finance (DeFi), NFTs, gaming, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), social networks, and consumer marketplaces. Fundamentally, developers can use Cosmos when the project economy relies on the internet. This is particularly true in the ownership economy where everyone has a stake. 

Interoperability: Knocking down silos, embracing the Internet model

Cosmos interoperability is what guarantees the functioning of a scalable system. By integrating to Cosmos interoperability model of shared communication standards, any sovereign blockchain can communicate with another. This provides a larger ecosystem for business growth and a technical environment that contributes to advanced protocol design.  

Cosmos interoperability scalability is obtained by splitting a dApp into multiple application-specific blockchains, or by optimizing the structure of a particular blockchain architecture. Interchain token transfers allow these multiple Cosmos chains to continue in one cohesive ecosystem. 

Why does Dyme use Cosmos?

Cosmos is an optimal environment for Dyme’s work. Using the same hub and zone structure as Cosmos, Dyme serves as the economic hub and the various Dyme projects become zones that benefit from the economic behavior of Dyme’s eponymous native cryptocurrency. Dyme can thus allow interoperability between different economies without forcing a particular governance or economic regime on the projects.

Dyme believes it has built an economic structure that supports the diverse needs of Web3 and metaverse projects. As blockchain is fundamentally a means for non-sovereign currency and trustless settlement between parties, Dyme identified a need for not just a blockchain but also the economic structures to support a financial infrastructure across Web3 and the metaverse.

Dyme’s first project is Lifetoken. Lifetoken is a Web3 social network that adds the means to reward participation on a social platform. The resulting audience activation has exciting potential to both provide a democratized way for brands and creators to pay for meaningful results and an egalitarian way for audiences to participate in the economic benefit of using the platform.

The Lifetoken team built Dyme, and in mid-2022, realized the broader need for Dyme as a reserve cryptocurrency for Web3 and the metaverse.

Comparisons with other blockchains and Cosmos

Ethereum vs Cosmos

As Ethereum recently made good on a years-long effort to switch to PoS, the platform still suffers from scalability challenges. It may take minutes to even hours to execute an Ethereum transaction, and when the network gets congested, the cost of executing a smart contract grows.

Instead of the high gas cost and risk of slow settlement, Cosmos and Ignite handle just the project’s transactions. Similar to “not your keys, not your crypto” is the phrase “not your blockchain, not your schedule.” Ethereum operates on Ethereum’s schedule.

Make no mistake: Ethereum is not going to collapse. Ethereum is blessed with extreme popularity as a blockchain. Its network effect still makes it the favorite platform for DeFi, NFTs, and the metaverse. And Ethereum has an active Foundation working on its behalf and a robust developer community.

There is also a contrast between the on-chain smart contract structure of Ethereum and the “in-chain” module structure of Ignite. Ethereum is perhaps the most mature blockchain extant, and without diving too deeply into Ethereum sidechains and ETH-centric Layer Two alternative chains, every smart contract on Ethereum runs on the same chain.

This makes Ethereum a challenging platform to scale a project since the project immediately bears gas costs from its smart contracts. It also puts the economy of the project outside the control of the project.

Cosmos and Ethereum are similar in one way: the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) structure allows for an alternative Ethereum chain to be built and for an EVM-compatible smart contract to run on it. This isn’t as robust as the IBC Protocol, but it’s an interesting comparison.

Closing

Hopefully, this helped explain what Cosmos is and how Cosmos works.

The choice of blockchain is a big one for a project and developers. Choosing poorly can mean either uncontrolled transaction expense, limited functionality, or sketchy availability. With Cosmos, Dyme has avoided all those problems.

And if you’re looking for a Web3 or metaverse currency, consider the Cosmos project Dyme!

DeFi is an emerging financial system that provides new forms of value and utility not present in conventional financial systems. A subcategory within the broader crypto space, DeFi offers many of the services of traditional financial institutions in a fashion controlled by the masses instead of a central entity or entities. 

The “broader crypto space” is Web3. In 2014, Ethereum’s Gavin Wood wrote a foundational blog post in which he sketched out his view of the new era. Wood called Web3 a “reimagination of the sorts of things we already use the web for, but with a fundamentally different model for the interactions between parties.”

Wood continued: “Information that we assume to be public, we publish. Information that we assume to be agreed, we place on a consensus-ledger. Information that we assume to be private, we keep secret and never reveal.” In this vision, all communication is encrypted, and identities are hidden. “In short, we engineer the system to mathematically enforce our prior assumptions, since no government or organization can reasonably be trusted.”

In this Dyme Piece, we’ll look at the world of decentralized finance, the decentralized crypto exchanges that support DeFi platforms, some examples of DeFi applications, and the smart contracts at the base of all decentralized finance, all to answer the question “what is DeFi?”

Centralized Finance vs. Decentralized Finance (DeFi)

Oligarchy versus democracy

Finance is easy to understand, but what is decentralization? In short, decentralization means that no chief body controls something. Decentralization proponents will couch the difference as “oligarchy versus democracy.” To an extent, that’s true. While centralized financial institutions are, well, centralized, more than a few companies claiming to be decentralized were (or are) run by a small group of insiders.

That’s the very definition of an oligarchy. This means the difference might be guaranteed oligarchy in the case of centralized financial institutions versus the potential for democratic rule with decentralized finance.

One simple rule: the more smart contract language you can see and the more complete the smart contracts are, the greater the chance you’ve found a truly decentralized finance organization.

Corporate versus, well, corporate

Banks and other financial institutions have power over your funds. These entities can freeze your assets, and you are at the mercy of their hours of operation and cash reserves. In some countries, central authorities work to protect consumer banking; in others, there’s much less concern about protection and access to banking.

With apologies to blockchain purists, decentralized finance does not transcend the reach of central authorities. Smart contracts do not transcend the reach of courts, and they are certainly bound to the rule of law.

Similarly, defi applications likely have some corporate structure to connect them to jurisdiction in the real world. This allows defi protocols to manage financial transactions associated with traditional finance and the peer-to-peer transactions expected on a defi platform.

There is certainly some bleed-over from the rapaciously profit-driven nature of traditional financial institutions to the defi platforms and defi protocols. An examination of the failings which led to the Crypto Winter of 2022 might find a strong alignment between a lack of decentralization and the risk of fraud. Or, at the least, poor outcomes.

This gives rise to a third term: CeFi. While it stands for centralized finance, it focuses on crypto assets and centralized exchanges. Both CeFi and Defi applications use smart contracts and distributed ledger technology as their core financial technology, which separates them from centralized financial institutions.

How did DeFi platforms start?

The early pioneers: Maker, Radpay, and EtherDelta

DeFi’s earliest pioneers were Maker and EtherDelta in 2017, Radpay in 2018, and the Multi Collateral DAI in Maker in 2019. Of those first projects, Maker remains an important project in DeFi. In each case, the project created a programmatic means to escrow one cryptocurrency and access a different cryptocurrency. This makes Radpay, Maker, and EtherDelta all lending platforms.

While lending launched the DeFi movement, decentralized finance applications now have many use cases. DeFi participants have access to savings accounts, credit cards, and yield farming accounts and can lend money to earn interest, borrow money, provision flash loans, and more. Decentralized finance’s ultimate goal is to challenge and eventually replace both the local bank and the global financial institution you use for your current financial products.

Traditional financial services providers build closed systems with limited access to third parties. DeFi projects often harness open-source code, allowing anyone the opportunity to build on pre-existing applications in a permissionless, composable manner. 

Wen Moon?

The ICO boom in 2017 and 2018 saw market participants flood the community, eager to acquire digital currency. The “wen moon” phrase took form as seemingly everyone with an internet connection waited for their crypto holdings to skyrocket in value. During this time, DeFi products comingled with centralized systems, and more than one centralized exchange was born.

This was the birth of the poor outcomes mentioned earlier. The combination of a frothy market and an intrinsic connection to digital money made DeFi networks both a great place for innovation and a place where bad actors could act badly.

Decentralized finance DeFi applications were born in an environment of good intent. Many decentralized applications are today the building blocks of a decentralized future. Some are not.

The decentralized nature of the future of banking

So decentralized finance (defi) is an emerging financial system within Web3 that provides new forms of value and utility that aren’t present in conventional financial systems. The main difference between Web3 and DeFi is that DeFi is built on top of existing smart contract platforms, such as Ethereum, while Web3 uses smart contracts but is built on the internet itself.

Both DeFi and Web3 involve creating a future more decentralized and more secure than their centralized counterparts. Both rely on smart contract language to manage decentralization. Both require users to have an internet connection. Both use blockchain technology.

Why is decentralized finance (DeFi) important?

Decentralized applications solve market problems today

Web3 is a new paradigm for the internet. It’s based on using blockchain technology to make the internet fairer and more decentralized by giving users control of their own data, identity, and money. And since DeFi is a part of Web 3.0, the concepts, access, and technologies are very similar.

Through a peer-to-peer (P2P) network, a DeFi application eliminates intermediaries and permits decentralized banking, which wasn’t possible before due to the need to get transactions approved through third parties. The global financial crisis of 2008–09 showed that middlemen cannot be trusted as customers are frequently unaware of the underlying regulations governing financial products and services.

The goal of DeFi is to create an open, trustless, and permissionless financial market. Much of the technology in the DeFi space aims to improve the current financial system, potentially improving the user experience (for both businesses and their clients).

DeFi enables risk dispersal

The decentralization aspect of DeFi is not only a dispersal of power but can also be a dispersal of risk. For example, if a company holds all of its customer data in one spot, a hacker needs only to access that particular site for a vast amount of data. In contrast, storing that data across several locations or removing that single point of failure could improve security.

The methods of building an app using a blockchain network presume public access and thus presume cryptographic security. This makes DeFi different than traditional financial services companies, who may trust a firewall or other security methods and build an application less secure than it should be.

The evolution of trust favors DeFi apps

Consumer trust is a complex topic and when it comes to financial decisions and financial services, the complexity is at or near its height. It is well-established that financial brands suffer from mistrust and outright distrust, and yet consumers still use financial services firms.

Why?

One argument is the myth of the qualified professional. When a consumer wants to transfer capital, they trust a qualified banker. Conversely, when a tree hits a home, the homeowner is likelier to trust a qualified insurance agent over a decentralized insurance program.

But the bias toward individuals is decaying. A study from the University of Georgia showed a shift in trust toward computers and away from people. This implies that defi works for more people in more areas.

It also means that defi won’t be relegated to defi trading, liquidity mining, or defi projects only but that defi apps will grow to support most or all financial product needs in the future.

Prediction markets: decentralized finance meets fortune telling

Putting your money where your prediction is

A prediction market is a type of market where participants can buy and sell contracts that represent the outcome of future events. These markets are based on the idea that the collective wisdom of a large group of people is more accurate than the prediction of any individual expert.

Participants in a prediction market can buy and sell contracts that pay out a fixed amount if a specific event occurs, such as the outcome of an election or the price of a commodity at a certain date in the future. The price of these contracts reflects the collective belief of the market participants about the likelihood of the event occurring.

Prediction markets can be used for various purposes, such as predicting the outcome of political elections, the success of a new product launch, or the likelihood of a disease outbreak. They are also used in industries such as finance and insurance to help assess risk and make informed decisions.

One of the advantages of prediction markets is that they can provide accurate and timely information about the likelihood of future events, often faster and more accurately than traditional polling or expert analysis.

They didn’t predict that outcome, did they?

One prediction market in the crypto space, PredictIt, has been ordered to shut down by the Commodity Futures Trading Board (CFTC.) PredictIt, several of its traders and academic users, and technology provider Aristotle International have filed a lawsuit seeking to block the CFTC from shutting down the popular election betting site.

“The CFTC action taken on Aug. 4, 2022, threatens to harm not only the value of modest investments of more than 80,000 PredictIt traders, but the quality of the anonymized data used by more than 200 academic researchers and university educators,” Aristotle wrote in an email to PredictIt traders. Aristotle is the contract service provider for PredictIt.

Decentralized exchanges (DEXs)

A decentralized crypto exchange (DEX) is a type of cryptocurrency exchange that operates in a decentralized manner, meaning that it is not controlled by any central organization. In a DEX, traders can exchange cryptocurrencies directly with each other without the need for an intermediary or a central order book.

In a decentralized crypto exchange, all transactions are recorded on a blockchain, which is a distributed ledger that is maintained by a network of computers. This means that the exchange is transparent, secure, and resistant to censorship and hacking attempts.

One of the main benefits of using a decentralized crypto exchange is that it offers greater privacy and security to traders since they are not required to disclose personal information or store their funds on a centralized platform. Additionally, since there is no central authority controlling the exchange, there is no risk of the controlling authority shutting down the exchange.

However, decentralized exchanges are generally less liquid than their centralized cousins, meaning that there may be fewer buyers and sellers for certain assets, which can result in wider bid-ask spreads and higher transaction fees. Additionally, DeXs are typically more complex to use than centralized exchanges, which may limit their appeal to less experienced traders.

How Does DeFi Work?

Decentralized finance runs independently of a central authority, such as a bank, and enables users to conduct financial transactions directly with one another. This includes peer-to-peer (P2P) transactions like lending, loans, and liquidity pools that are governed by smart contracts.

DeFi is an effort to combat centralized institutions, such as the government or banks, that are thought to have too much control over our data and assets. DeFi is meant to be permissionless in that it allows all users the ability to participate in the system, and transactions do not need to be authorized by an institution. 

DeFi has one more inherent characteristic: transparency; it allows all transactions to be in the purview of everyone in the system.

DeFi’s ecosystem consists of the following:

A blockchain layer with smart contract capability

Layer 1 is the base network or blockchain on which DeFi tokens, protocols, apps and smart contracts are built. Examples of layer-1 networks include Ethereum, Bitcoin, Ignite (Cosmos), and Polkadot.

The smart contracts may live inside the blockchain (which is the Ignite model of modularization) or on the blockchain (which is the Ethereum model) itself.

Decentralized exchanges

A decentralized exchange (DEX) is a platform where users can buy, sell and trade digital assets without the involvement of a centralized system or authorized third parties. Rather than centralized organizations, smart contracts — self-executing contracts expressed in computer code — take their place.

Aggregators and wallets

Aggregators are decentralized interfaces that let users manage assets across various yield-farming platforms to maximize profits. For instance, RocketX and 1inch are aggregators that offer access to liquidity. On RocketX, one can swap from one wallet and receive tokens on a different wallet with a single click, allowing users to navigate through both centralized and decentralized platforms.

Decentralized marketplaces

Instead of an exchange, decentralized marketplaces allow users to undertake peer-to-peer transactions with one another without the need for an intermediary.

Is Bitcoin Decentralized Finance?

Sort of.

Bitcoin is certainly decentralized and it certainly deals with finance but Bitcoin is to DeFi what gold is to banks. Bitcoin lacks the smart contract structure to power exchanges, and it’s daunting to build a defi project with just Bitcoin. Various defi projects have been built on top of Bitcoin to provide smart contract structures; some have smart contracts published and working on them.

Closing

We end very much where we began: DeFi is a subcategory within Web 3.0 that offers many of the services of traditional financial institutions in a fashion controlled by the masses instead of a central entity or entities. DeFi provides new forms of value and utility not present in conventional financial systems.

Web3 is broader. It’s a re-imagination of today’s Internet with a fundamentally more empowering model for interaction between parties.

The phrase decentralized autonomous organization is commonly abbreviated as DAO. A DAO is a collectively-owned, blockchain-governed organization working towards a shared mission.

Before moving on, it’s important to distinguish a DAO from The DAO, one of the first such organizations ever created. The DAO was a project founded in 2016 that ultimately failed and led to a dramatic schism in the Ethereum blockchain.

DAOs allow us to work with other DAO members around the globe without trusting centralized leadership to manage the funds or operations. There should be no CEO who can spend funds on a whim or CFO who can manipulate the books. Typically, blockchain-based rules memorialized as smart contracts in the code define how the DAO works and how funds are spent.

Dyme is a DAO. Dyme moves past just memorializing the DAO rules in smart contracts and goes further by aligning the legal formation and the legal documents memorializing oversight and management with the DAO’s code. We believe that this alignment of smart contract and traditional central authority legal status is novel in the community.

What does DAO mean?

You won’t find the terms “decentralized autonomous organization” or “DAO” in securities law. This means that any definition of DAO as a legal structure needs to combine blockchain governance proposals with the legal structures of a traditional organization.

One exception to this is Wyoming, which on July 1, 2021 became the first U.S. state to recognize decentralized autonomous organizations as legal entities. Wyoming is known to be a friendly jurisdiction for digital assets and blockchain technology.

Smart contracts meet traditional organizations

In general terms, DAOs are member-managed communities without centralized leadership. A DAO is typically run in a decentralized manner. Community members are usually token holders in the DAO native token. DAO members can freely submit proposals regarding governance. They also participate in the outcome of the proposals, using their voting power to effectively participate in oversight and management.

This meaning explicitly avoids the topic of ownership and the term member-owned communities. Dyme believes a DAO can be fully decentralized, fully autonomous, and conform with securities laws by using a properly implemented legal structure aligned with well-written smart contracts and engaged community members. However, this does not convey ownership in the context of DAO tokens or other collective ownership models.

DAO as algocracy

The code held in a smart contract or set of smart contracts can provide algorithmic management of a DAO. This is the basis for the belief that a DAO exemplifies an algocracy.

The terms “algorithmic governance” and “government by algorithm” have been used in academic literature since 2013, predating the work of the Ethereum community, which nurtured – for a short time – the first Ethereum blockchain DAO.

First DAO: Part venture capital fund, part decentralized exchange, all Ethereum network disaster

The first of the decentralized autonomous organizations was part of the Ethereum community. The DAO was launched in April 2016 via a token sale and represented one of the world’s largest crowdfunding campaigns. It was defunct within six months.

In those six months, five major things happened:

1. The DAO launched in April 2016 and sold securities to token holders using the Ethereum blockchain in the crowdfunding effort mentioned earlier. Among the stated goals was a goal was to raise funds for a new type of venture fund.
2. Days after the token sale for The DAO ended, community members identified flaws in the publicly viewable smart contract language.
3. Within a month, flaws in their code and flaws in their ability to update their code exposed The DAO to a hack that saw 1/3 of their value wiped out.
4. There was quite a brouhaha. Some community members argued for effectively unwinding the smart contract results and returning the native token ETH to the original crypto wallets. Others argued that The DAO had to live with the outcome to remain ethically valid.
5. A hard fork of the Ethereum blockchain took place. The forked blockchain is Ethereum; the unforked blockchain is Ethereum Classic.

A year later, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission published a report about The DAO. The United States Securities and Exchange Commission report concluded that The DAO sold securities and possibly violated U.S. federal securities laws.

So many other DAOs since then

Globally, many countries have become friendly to forming a decentralized autonomous organization or supporting companies using blockchain technology. Switzerland, Malta, Singapore, Bermuda, Cayman Islands, British Virgin Islands, and Dubai have all advanced different forms of legislation to help a DAO work more effectively.

Similarly, a diverse set of DAOs have been established since The DAO incident of 2016. The crypto community and government agencies globally have worked to enable a working DAO structure and organization. We look at some recent projects later in this article.

How DAOs operate: Location, DAO tokens, governance tokens, and a splash of central authority

Location

Dyme believes a DAO can be completely decentralized, fully autonomous, and conform with securities laws by using a properly implemented legal structure aligned with well-written smart contracts and engaged community members. A key part of that proper implementation is location.

Dyme Foundation was formed in September 2022 as an Exempted Foundation Company under the laws of the Cayman Islands. The Foundation subsequently formed an operating company and instituted corporate documents to conform to the smart contract logic built into Dyme’s governance module.

DAO tokens

Cryptocurrencies have become increasingly popular, but many people don’t understand the details of how they work. With so much hype around cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology, it can be difficult to know what a DAO token is and how it works.

A DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) token is a type of crypto asset that gives holders rights within the organization’s decision-making structure. DAO tokens are used to incentivize users to participate in decision-making processes related to developing and maintaining dApps or other projects on a blockchain network. The tokens also allow users to access certain features or services within dApps and receive rewards for participating in activities such as staking or mining. By owning these tokens, individuals can influence decisions made by dApp developers or project teams or can fully manage the activities and direction of the DAO as part of a decentralized, democratic community.

Governance tokens: Voting power to the community, sometimes

DAOs are complex systems that involve various stakeholders and decision-making processes, making it difficult to know what a governance token is and how it works. And as you’ve read, sometimes the actions of a DAO don’t match the stated goals of the DAO.

A DAO token is used as a means to participate in an organization’s decision-making structure. Often this participation is oligarchic, where each token has a vote. Rarely it is democratic, where each wallet has a vote. By owning these tokens, individuals can determine the organization’s direction.

This is the decentralized part of a DAO. Obviously, a DAO with a CEO makes no sense since the organization’s control is in the community’s hands. Overly centralized ownership can also adversely impact governance proposals, particularly if votes are tabulated according to ownership. This inherently oligarchic approach to oversight and management is one reason Dyme exists: Dyme is democratic.

The reality of central authority in a DAO

Every DAO stands for transparent, decentralized management. So why do so many fall down? Central authority.

It isn’t the only reason, but it’s a big reason that DAOs fail.

Money always wants control. A single entity often seeks absolute control. This is the central problem with most DAOs, in that the organization’s best interest may not align with the financial interest of the organization with a wallet full of DAO tokens.

And in each case where it happens, the DAO is structured to let it happen. It’s sort of a hard fork in the design of the DAO, violating portions of the central tenets of DAOs.

The benefit of thoughtful legal structure for the DAO model

A DAO works best by working inside existing legal frameworks and adding transparent, democratic, trustless community governance. It should neither avoid regulation nor empower central control.

A thoughtful structure allows this to happen. I believe Dyme has a DAO structure that is fully decentralized, autonomous, and conforms with securities laws by using a properly implemented legal status aligned with well-written smart contracts and engaged members.

Disadvantages of DAOs

In theory, a DAO has few disadvantages. In practice, it’s a complex thing to get right. As a working entity, a DAO requires active, involved voices and a way to project those voices both inside and outside the DAO membership.

It’s also a challenge to let go of control. As I wrote earlier, money wants control…but it’s not the only group that wants control. Trusting in the community to find a successful path for a developing organization means aligning incentives to reward positive behavior.

Examples of Crypto DAO Projects

Compound (COMP) – Popular Crypto Lending DAO Trading at a Discount

Compound is a decentralized, blockchain-based protocol that allows you to lend and borrow crypto directly. That makes it sort of a decentralized Celsius. This has been good for Compound since the transparent nature of the smart contracts means token holders see how their company is using their staked crypto to generate returns.

DeFi Coin (DEFC) – New DAO Project with Passive Income Potential

Are algorithmic tokens still a thing? DeFi Coin believes they are. This project is built on the Binance smart chain. The DeFi Coin DAO management seems centered around a management team, based on a reading of their June 2022 white paper.

Calvaria – P2E and F2P GameFi Project with DAO Governance

The GameFi project Calvaria blends financial transactions with open-source code. That makes their native token a play-to-earn token. The voting mechanism and governance are not well defined currently, but they’re an early project which intends to evolve into a DAO.

ApeCoin (APE) – Best ‘Meme Coin’ DAO

The first thing to know about ApeCoin is it doesn’t seem connected to the Bored Ape Yacht Club. Or anything to do with Yuga Labs. At all. This is sad for many reasons, but one reason is the lack of tiki themes in APE.

Still, APE does have an interesting governance model, and the way they say they’ll manage treasury funds is good. Their model for voting rights is to round down fractional ownership, which still seems a very oligarchical way to manage voting power for a DAO.

Illuvium (ILV) – Upcoming NFT Gaming Project with DAO Governance

Link to their DAO site: https://illuvium.io/

A cool thing to note is that the Illuvium DAO uses quadratic voting, which is intended to “reduce plutocracy.” The math behind this voting mechanism is not defined, however.

Note that the links to the remaining three projects are provided without comment on their DAO structure or any assessment of whether their DAO held tokens at the time of writing.

Dash (DASH) – Innovative ‘Privacy Coin’ Set for a Rebound

Curve (CRV) – Ethereum-based DeFi Protocol for Stablecoins

Tamadoge – Upcoming Meme Token DAO project

Closing: Understanding Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs)

“All DAOs are not created equal. Some wallets are more equal than others.”

With apologies for hacking up an elegant quote, the key to understanding a DAO is having confidence in the alignment between what it says it’ll do and how it operates. Look for a DAO that solves a problem you understand. And look for a group, even a small group, of people dedicated to helping one another.

---

About Dana:
Dr. Dana Love is currently the CTO of Lifetoken Software. Love is a 32-year technology veteran who has been active in bitcoin and blockchain since 2011. From 2018–22 Dr. Love founded and led the blockchain payment platform Radpay, where he was recognized as a fintech innovator by both 500 Startups and the Arizona Commerce Authority. From 2012–18 Dana spearheaded four different blockchain ICOs and led different enterprise leadership roles. From 2007–12, as CEO of military contractor Bright Dawn, Dana led the development of complex real-time data systems, big data and data fusion projects, and a variety of digital and kinetic work for the IC, Defense, and civilian agencies. From 1995–2007, Love founded or served in leadership for various firms, including Cisco Investments-backed Metacloud and Warburg Pincus-backed Radnet, and led divisions of public companies, including GTE (now Verizon), Prosodie (now Cap Gemini), and ADC. Dana’s career began in civilian service to the U.S. government. Dana Love holds a doctorate in public policy economics from the University of Glasgow, is a Harvard Business School Baker Scholar, and graduated from the University of Richmond.

If Web 3.0 is the next growth phase for the world wide web, then Web 3.0 cryptos are the next growth phase for digital assets run on a decentralized blockchain network. Since the decentralized web needs a decentralized network, it follows that a currency and payment system native to that network is a natural fit.

But finding an interoperable web 3.0 reserve cryptocurrency is not a simple task. While there are hundreds and hundreds of crypto coins worldwide, few are suitable for Web 3.0 projects. It’s good news that Web 3.0 projects are growing, and most are future homes for the right Web 3.0 crypto coin.

What are the biggest Web 3.0 projects in 2023?

Social media platforms

Social media companies are ripe for disruption by decentralized protocols. The user-generated content on Web 2.0 social platforms is better served and more fairly monetized on a peer-to-peer network.

How the social network functions will be modified by Web 3.0 to favor creators and to support the semantic web. Blockchain technology will make it virtually impossible for social media networks to be restricted. Network users will participate no matter where they are in the world. The semantic web, one facet of Web 3.0, holds real potential to further advance the social web.

Web 3.0 social network platforms include Chingari, Steemit, Sola, Indorse, onG.Social, PROPS Project, Lifetoken, and Yours. Each makes use of blockchain and are working toward a Web 3.0 future. Here is an outline of notable projects:

• Steemit: An excellent example of a Web 3.0 website is Steemit. Steemit utilizes its own Steem blockchain exclusively. It is best characterized as a decentralized blogging and self-publication platform that aids content creators in generating revenue from their work. It serves as a substitute for Reddit.
• Lifetoken: An outstanding Web 3.0 example of the new social network is the participative social web company Lifetoken. Lifetoken utilizes Cosmos to connect to the Dyme blockchain. One of Lifetoken’s key features is how they reward participation, which advances the pay-per-click and pay-per-impression metrics of Facebook and TikTok. Lifetoken aids content creators in adding to and retaining their audiences. It serves as a substitute for Facebook and TikTok.
• Indorse: Blending Web 3.0 with metaverse, Indorse network users anonymously share endorsements. When viewed from the standpoint of social endorsements, it is a developing substitute for Yelp.

Storage provider

Data storage in the cloud is complex; in a distributed environment, it takes ingenuity. Nonetheless, Web 3.0 technologies like blockchain can use an exclusively decentralized infrastructure to replace the traditional data center. This gives everyday users an alternative to Google Drive and other cloud storage services.

Methods to store data and transmit data securely over a peer-to-peer connection are foundational challenges. Smart contracts and decentralized protocols are natural fits to address these market needs. Notably, data encryption plays a big role in blockchain, so Web 3.0 decentralized storage offers excellent security.

A decentralized network built to manage data can make hosting feasible. Some samples of decentralized storage using Web 3.0 are:

• Sia: An aspirational decentralized network powered by its own blockchain, Sia takes its mission seriously. Sia uses blockchain to enable file sharing using virtual private network capabilities that rival cloud providers’ storage buckets.
• Storj: Perhaps the original decentralized storage provider, Storj operates on Ethereum, currently the world’s biggest distributed network. Storj provides a decentralized alternative to enterprise cloud storage space. It supports file sharing and secure streaming, enabling massive amounts of data transfers between users.
• Filecoin: Filecoin is a Protocol Labs project that employs a dual method and two different kinds of network nodes. Filecoin network users’ data is treated like “humanity’s most important information,” according to the company. It has a strong security footing, letting users restrict access to data from search engines.

Insurance and banking

Perhaps the central feature of blockchain is decentralized banking. Blockchain technology was designed to alter the relationship between banks, people, governments, and currency. When founders create decentralized projects, they often look to banking.

Insurance has many of the same markers of the need for disruption: monolithic companies, negative user interaction, and stale innovation. Some samples of insurance and banking web 3.0 projects are outlined below:

• Everledger: Built on Hyperledger, the Everledger insurance solution is a blockchain platform for more effective underwriting. One of Everledger’s key features is the ability to leverage provenance data, combining real-world data about ownership with the technological innovation of blockchain.
• SafeShare: Based in London, SafeShare markets itself as “insurance for the sharing economy.” Built on the obscure distributed ledger MetroGnomo, SafeShare provides a range of insurance products.
• Cashaa: Bank accounts met web technologies met blockchain data? It’s tough to describe Cashaa, which bills itself as the next-generation banking platform. Their crypto token is built on two blockchain networks: Binance and Polygon.

Exchange services

You can’t build a Web 3.0 project list without an exchange for digital assets. After the fallout from FTX, BlockFi, Terra, and others, decentralized exchanges are progressively gaining favor. Decentralized autonomous organizations imply that there is no central authority and no owner-side conflict of interest. To automate their services, defi exchange services primarily utilize various decentralized finance tools. Web 3.0 is related to decentralized exchange since it depends on trust. An outline of a few of the decentralized exchanges available is given below:

• EOSFinex: On top of the EOS.IO operating system, EOSFinex is a decentralized exchange. The EOS landscape contains a large number of additional dApps.
• IDEX: For trading ERC-20 tokens, a well-known decentralized exchange is IDEX. Anybody with an Ethereum wallet can begin trading on the network because of its user-friendly design. You must utilize MetaMask to get the most out of IDEX or any decentralized Ethereum-based exchange.

Video streaming and music streaming

Cloud-based media streaming is the bee’s knees. Internet users have flocked to streaming, and internet access is dominated by video and music streaming. Twitch and YouTube have been pilloried for their low compensation to content producers. Both platforms make it difficult for fresh streamers to start, and no Web 2 media platform has a fix for this issue.

Web 3.0 examines the music and video streaming issue so that creators can share their content’s financial benefit. In addition to Lifetoken (above), some samples of web 3.0 video and music websites are highlighted below:

• UjoMusic: UjoMusic is a music website where musicians may post and share their work without worrying about copyright or royalties. Cryptocurrencies and smart contracts drive it.
• Livepeer: Livepeer is a blockchain-based decentralized platform. It uses Ethereum to create a Web 3.0 smart contracts-based streaming stack.
• LBRY: LBRY bills itself as “the people’s marketplace.” It combines a proprietary blockchain with torrent client software to store digital assets. In the case of LBRY, the assets are publications.

❓ What Web 3.0 crypto coins are in use today?

While many crypto tokens exist, few of them are workable cryptocurrencies. Even smaller is the list of cryptocurrencies that can serve as Web 3.0 crypto coins.

While many crypto tokens exist, few of them are workable cryptocurrencies. Even smaller is the list of cryptocurrencies that can serve as Web 3.0 crypto coins.

You’ll note that some websites list mostly gaming coins and Ethereum. Others list niche crypto projects…and Ethereum. Still others list crypto coins by market capitalization.

While they’re good lists of crypto coins, there’s not much writing about the needs of a Web 3.0 crypto coin. Hence, that’s the purpose of this article and others like it!

Is one blockchain better than another?

Simply put, yes. The question then becomes, “which is the right blockchain for a Web 3.0 crypto coin?”

Interoperability

While this could be conflated with the following section, interoperability is different. In the case of Web 3.0 digital currencies, it means more than simple asset transfers. It means cross-chain data availability proofs and can mean fully shared security.

Cosmos deals with the non-uniformity of security assumptions across chains (referred to as Zones in Cosmos) by treating interoperability as an opt-in process. This also connects to the sovereignty argument below since each chain chooses its own level of exposure.

Avoid competing networks

Seemingly every Web 3.0 project has its own blockchain. That makes it challenging to organize blockchain data across projects, but when the Web 3.0 economy is as fragmented as the Web 2.0 economy, the risk of forming new silos to replace the old centralized silos is very high.

Transaction fees

More transaction fees are never a good choice, and yet many existing Web 3.0 projects are built on blockchains with high fees. This isn’t an entirely bad idea, but it results in less-than-optimal outcomes.

Each new blockchain requires new enterprise validator nodes. This intentionally abandons the term “miner” since most blockchains are switching to proof of stake validation on a consensus algorithm. Validators look for projects which are sustainable and grow.

Speed and sovereignty

Decentralized networks are not fast. The benefits of decentralization come with some drawbacks, and speed is one of them. A Web 3.0 crypto coin needs a sovereign blockchain so that it doesn’t rely on another party for stability and management.

As a corollary, a blockchain for Web 3.0 crypto then becomes faster because it is purpose-designed for those objectives.

👉 Is every cryptocurrency a Web 3.0 crypto coin?

Far from it. If anything, many cryptocurrencies and crypto tokens are supremely wrong for use as Web 3.0 crypto coins.

The challenge comes in design. Most crypto projects use blockchains and smart contracts built for a specific purpose. It follows logically then that a Web 3.0 crypto would need to be purpose-built to address the needs of the Web 3.0 community.

Does a Web 3.0 crypto coin need to be managed by a DAO?

Yes. Seriously, yes. Just yes.

Controlled by users, managed by smart contracts

Users benefit as control shifts back from central authorities (specifically large technology companies) toward equal access and corporate censorship shifts toward censorship resistance. This benefit comes from freeing user-generated content from the highly centralized, powerfully oligarchic structure of Web 2.0, which has a range of massive corporations controlling the financial benefit of that content for their own gain.

Governance aligned with legal structure aligned with code

It’s not as catchy as “not your keys, not your crypto”, but the alignment of legal structure and foundational legal documents with the software written to power governance is extremely important.

Most of the crypto winter of 2022 was caused by fraud (or suspected fraud) which was enabled by a governance process that was easily avoided by the fraudsters, founders, and executives.

Is a peer-to-peer network the right choice for payment coins in Web 3.0?

Maybe.

If the peer-to-peer network is a blockchain, subject to the various and sundry topics above, maybe. The paucity of Web 3.0 crypto coins in use today speaks to the fragmentation of the market. With market trends showing strongly favorable for Web 3.0 growth, payment processing will be a vital function for Web 3.0 crypto.

🚀 Closing Comments

Because intermediaries are no longer involved in Web 3.0, centralized authorities will no longer control user data. This minimizes the likelihood of government or corporate censorship and the effectiveness of denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. The offers protection for personally identifiable information and personal finance that do not exist today.

More extensive datasets supply algorithms with more information to evaluate as more products connect to the internet. This will allow them to deliver more accurate information that is tailored to the individual user’s demands.

In that environment, a Web 3.0 crypto coin becomes integral to every Web 3.0 project. It will become the core currency of the digital world.

---

About Dana:
Dr. Dana Love is currently the CTO of Lifetoken Software. Love is a 32-year technology veteran who has been active in bitcoin and blockchain since 2011. From 2018–22 Dr. Love founded and led the blockchain payment platform Radpay, where he was recognized as a fintech innovator by both 500 Startups and the Arizona Commerce Authority. From 2012–18 Dana spearheaded four different blockchain ICOs and led different enterprise leadership roles. From 2007–12, as CEO of military contractor Bright Dawn, Dana led the development of complex real-time data systems, big data and data fusion projects, and a variety of digital and kinetic work for the IC, Defense, and civilian agencies. From 1995–2007, Love founded or served in leadership for various firms, including Cisco Investments-backed Metacloud and Warburg Pincus-backed Radnet, and led divisions of public companies, including GTE (now Verizon), Prosodie (now Cap Gemini), and ADC. Dana’s career began in civilian service to the U.S. government. Dana Love holds a doctorate in public policy economics from the University of Glasgow, is a Harvard Business School Baker Scholar, and graduated from the University of Richmond.

Dyme is laying the social and financial groundwork for Web 3.0. As an evolution of the more centralized Web 2.0, Web 3.0 projects hold sway over massive existing and emerging growth industries. This unusual combination of industry size and growth gives rise to an opportunity for foundational elements of the emerging Web 3.0 space to avoid a zero-sum game scenario. By building these foundational elements of the decentralized internet through community development and self-determined governance, Dyme is positioned to serve as the common economic structure across Web 3.0.

This is where Dyme is positioned: by avoiding this zero-sum game scenario, the Dyme cryptocurrency can evolve into an egalitarian, decentralized entity with persistent, growing value. Further, the projects which adopt Dyme early will realize the most significant economic incentives without diminishing the positive economic potential for later entrants.

To achieve this, Dyme focuses on the three main areas necessary for a decentralized but standardized economic structure: democratic governance, decentralized management, and transparent economic structures and goals. These align with the aspirations of Web 3.0. Web3, the decentralized internet, is where users control their data, influence, and destiny.

Cosmos and Ignite: the right decentralized protocols for Dyme

Choosing the right blockchain to realize the Dyme thesis

Dyme is built using Ignite CLI (formerly Tendermint BFT) and the Cosmos SDK framework. By transforming a decentralized blockchain network structure into a generalized consensus engine, Ignite provides a platform for interoperable, sovereign decentralized networks that resembles the early days of the world wide web and the very first e-commerce transactions. When combined with the Cosmos SDK, Dyme has a platform to create the natural next step for the future of Web 3.0: a cross-network cryptocurrency, a decentralized but standardized economic engine for the decentralized internet.

As a sovereign public blockchain in the Cosmos ecosystem, Dyme aims to provide a robust toolset, use cases, and community support for deploying Dyme as a reserve cryptocurrency for Web 3.0 business models. At launch, Dyme will be a decentralized network serving as a censorship-resistant, decentralized, and permissionless means for creators and companies to manage their own native tokens with the benefit of democratic governance, decentralized management, and transparent economic structures and goals.

Responsibly shaping a new economic paradigm

Dyme joins many platforms using Cosmos to make the next generation of the world wide web a reality. From interchain smart contracts at Juno to a decentralized network to store data and create communities at Kira, from video streaming at Theta to equal access NFT crypto wallets at Monet, Cosmos and the Interchain Foundation have shepherded a range of decentralized autonomous organizations toward the future decentralized web.

Dyme views the work of the Interchain Foundation as similar to the IETF during the early days of NSFNet and the start of VoIP and the world wide web: as an enabler of technologies that support various services. From a decentralized storage network to distributed computing power to process transactions between two or more parties and share data across chains, Cosmos and the Interchain Foundation are elemental to a successful Web 3.0 ecosystem.

❓ What is Web 3.0?

Web 3.0: Semantic web meets world wide web

Web 3.0 is a term used to describe the evolution of the internet from an information-sharing platform to a platform for communication, collaboration, and commerce. The new advancements that have made this development possible include distributed ledger technology, cryptography, peer-to-peer networks, decentralized computing, smart contracts, and digital assets trading and management systems.

Cloud providers restrict access no more!

Web 3.0 represents a shift in power away from large, centralized organizations to more distributed ownership models by individuals and small groups. This gives users more data privacy and control over their information instead of relying on third parties. Web3 also allows users to transact faster and more securely than ever before. Additionally, users can access applications tailored to their specific needs rather than relying on general-purpose ones from large corporations. Web 3.0 is revolutionizing how we interact with the world around us through its decentralized infrastructure that promotes open access to information and global collaboration between individuals.

Users create content, companies create next-generation technologies

Web 3.0 stands in marked contrast to the highly centralized, powerfully oligarchic structure of Web 2.0, which has a range of large technology companies controlling the economy of the internet for their benefit. Web3 represents a return to the roots of the internet, where wealth was created through shared infrastructure, and common structures worked to elevate a wide range of companies and projects.

This return to the roots of the internet is seen in overlaps between the early world wide web and the more recent development of digital assets, smart contracts, decentralized apps, and other blockchain projects.

The read only generation gives way to the read write own generation

The business model of Web 3.0 is also different from Web 2.0, in that user content is owned by the user and not the property of cloud providers, current web services, or companies making up the current social web. The business models then provide more control to internet users but still make money by providing services and a new wave of useful technologies. Concisely, they move beyond the “read only” web from the 90s into a “read write execute” or a “read write own” model for the future.

Dyme’s thesis is this new wave of services will benefit from a decentralized but standardized economic engine for the decentralized internet.

🚀 Why does Web 3.0 need Dyme?

Data and transactions interwoven

There is a strong benefit for a common economic structure across Web 3.0. This is as true today as it was true during the creation of Web 2.0 when in 1999, the founder of X.com said on CBS MarketWatch that people were ready to use the Internet as their main financial repository.

The economic structure seen in Web 2.0 treats users like merchandise. In no area is this seen more clearly than with targeted ads. The entire computing power of Web 2.0 social networks is directed at monetizing user and user-generated content without adding to users’ bank accounts. This speaks to the need for a native token to put control back in the hands of users. Dyme addresses this need.

Controlled by users, managed by smart contracts

Users benefit as control shifts back from central authorities (specifically large technology companies) toward equal access and corporate censorship shifts toward censorship resistance. This benefit comes from freeing user-generated content from the highly centralized, powerfully oligarchic structure of Web 2.0, which has a range of massive corporations controlling the financial benefit of that content for their own gain.

As the semantic web supplants the Web 2.0 oligarchy, revisiting Musk’s “third stage” helps shift financial access and services from centralized control and supports users gaining financial benefit from their own content. Whether it makes money for users or provides various services in exchange for access to content, control puts the outcome of financial transactions in the hands of users.

Dyme as the enabling technology for community digital assets

Rather than a zero-sum game of winners and losers seen in Web 2.0, public blockchains and integrated blockchain networks can blend both the size of the existing Web 2.0 economy and the growth of the emerging Web 3.0 economy. This is where Dyme is positioned: by avoiding this zero-sum game scenario, the Dyme cryptocurrency can evolve into an egalitarian, decentralized entity with persistent, growing value.

To achieve this, Dyme focuses on the three main areas we believe are necessary for a decentralized but standardized economic structure: democratic governance, decentralized management, and transparent economic structures and goals. By building these foundational elements of decentralized services through community development and self-determined governance, Dyme is positioned to serve as the common economic structure across Web 3.0.

Further, the projects which adopt Dyme early will realize the most significant economic incentives without diminishing the positive economic potential for later entrants.

We will further address these topics in the near future.

👉 Social media platforms for Dyme

Developers, validators, and delegators, we want your active involvement in shaping the future of Dyme! Please join the official channels on Medium, Telegram, and Twitter. All ecosystem efforts are directed by community contributors.

• Web: https://dyme.336.thegrove.co
• Medium: https://www.medium.com/dyme-network/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/DymeNetwork
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DymeNetwork
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/dyme/
• Telegram: https://t.me/dymenetwork
• Github: https://github.com/Dyme-Foundation
• Discord: TBD

---

About Dana:
Dr. Dana Love is currently the CTO of Lifetoken Software. Love is a 32-year technology veteran who has been active in bitcoin and blockchain since 2011. From 2018–22 Dr. Love founded and led the blockchain payment platform Radpay, where he was recognized as a fintech innovator by both 500 Startups and the Arizona Commerce Authority. From 2012–18 Dana spearheaded four different blockchain ICOs and led different enterprise leadership roles. From 2007–12, as CEO of military contractor Bright Dawn, Dana led the development of complex real-time data systems, big data and data fusion projects, and a variety of digital and kinetic work for the IC, Defense, and civilian agencies. From 1995–2007, Love founded or served in leadership for various firms, including Cisco Investments-backed Metacloud and Warburg Pincus-backed Radnet, and led divisions of public companies, including GTE (now Verizon), Prosodie (now Cap Gemini), and ADC. Dana’s career began in civilian service to the U.S. government. Dana Love holds a doctorate in public policy economics from the University of Glasgow, is a Harvard Business School Baker Scholar, and graduated from the University of Richmond.

In recent years, the line between what is real and what is digital has become increasingly blurred. With the rise of virtual reality, we can now interact with digital environments as if they were physical spaces. Even more, augmented reality lets us blend the physical world with virtual worlds and interact with both at the same time. This fascinating new frontier is called the metaverse.

Similar to the physical world, the virtual world of the metaverse has an economy to facilitate ownership and exchange of value. The developing digital economy around these activities is present in the immersive virtual worlds created by metaverse technologies like augmented reality and virtual reality.

What is the Metaverse? A quick primer

The metaverse is a persistent, online world where users interact with each other and with digital content. Built by tech giants and smaller tech companies, multiple technologies and multiple platforms make up the fabric of the metaverse.

They may use a virtual reality headset to interact in virtual reality or blend the physical world with digital space using augmented reality glasses. While the term metaverse is singular, many virtual worlds make up the metaverse, and many technology companies are engaged in rapid metaverse development. This means that the virtual experiences of tomorrow are almost certainly going to be different than those from yesterday.

The metaverse may be the next iteration of the internet. Metaverse technology is unlikely to replace the internet, and the real world doesn’t bear any risk of being abandoned. The idea of extended reality is a likely outcome, which blends virtual objects with real-world physical space.

Virtual reality and the metaverse

Today, virtual reality (VR) consists of 3D virtual environments accessed through simulations or virtual reality headsets such as Oculus Rift. These virtual worlds are populated by digital avatars that represent users from around the world.

Avatars may be digital twins of the user in real life or be unique digital humans, depending on the designer’s intent for the virtual environment. Neal Stephenson’s 1992 cyberpunk novel Snow Crash popularized avatars as online virtual bodies. (Spoiler alert: that’s the same book that first used the term metaverse in the way we use it today.)

Digital avatars were first seen in the 1979 PLATO role-playing video game Avatar. Virtual avatars have been part of game developers’ work on computer games, on game consoles, and to a lesser extent, in mobile gaming.

So while using a VR headset is the most common example of virtual reality, game developers have used personalized avatars for years to create a bond between an in-game character and the real-world user controlling them.

Augmented reality: the blending of digital spaces and the real world to create an extended reality

Augmented reality is another space where tech giants have spent vast R&D budgets. Where the VR headset built by Meta was the example above, Google’s Google Glass is an example of augmented reality developed by the tech industry.

Augmented reality experiences go well beyond wearables. If you buy a Yeti cooler, you can use your iPhone to place a 3d virtual cooler on the car seat where you want it to see if it fits. You can place virtual furniture in a room and see it using your tablet. The business models for augmented reality are already being tested and are flourishing in unexpected areas of the economy. (Honestly, did you imagine Ethan Allen was going to be mentioned in a metaverse article?)

Spatial computing and advanced camera technology enabled Ethan Allen and Yeti to benefit from AR. It made significant advances in augmented reality and crafting a higher fidelity virtual reality experience. In many ways, early mainstream success is seen in these uses, and the metaverse presents an exciting area of growth for the future.

Other realities: Video games, game consoles, mobile phones

The Meta Platforms video game Horizon Worlds exemplifies social interaction in virtual reality. Players move and interact with each other in various worlds that host events, games, and social activities. Digital worlds — such as aspects of Fortnite that can be accessed through PCs, consoles, and even phones — have started referring to themselves as “the metaverse.”

Video games, in general, have become more open-world and more immersive — two core elements of any virtual world. The social connection in the game persists outside the game, blending the worlds. What is more metaverse than that?

Where does the word Metaverse come from?

The metaverse term originated in Snow Crash, a 1992 science fiction novel by the American writer Neal Stephenson. The 2003 virtual world platform (and video game) Second Life is often described as the first metaverse, as it incorporated many aspects of social media into a persistent virtual world with the user represented as an avatar.

Virtual reality was first used in a 1938 essay by French poet and playwright Antonin Artaud, long before computers or the internet. Similarly, cyberspace was first used in the late 1960s by Danish artist Susanne Ussing. Both terms have come to align with a computer-generated shared virtual space, and thus the three terms, metaverse, virtual reality, and cyberspace, are often used interchangeably.

The word metaverse refers more to the use of an evolving series of technologies than it does to one specific technology. VR headsets are a technology; having virtual meetings in a VR space is using the metaverse.

The need for virtual currency in the metaverse economy

The metaverse has more than one economy. The metaverse has a sea of disconnected, often closed, economies. Most of the metaverse economies are even more fragmented than the economies in the real world.

From NFTs to decorate virtual workspaces to branded virtual clothing for digital twins, from digital spaces owned by users as digital real estate to in-game purchases to support the development of your favorite avatar, digital assets, and a (somewhat) functional economy have grown from zero to a lot. The Pew Research Center produced a survey that predicts over a half billion people will use the metaverse daily by 2040.

That’s up from effectively zero in 2020.

It becomes evident that these virtual worlds’ economies will need to merge or interoperate to make the metaverse work.

Traditional currencies versus digital currencies

Currency serves as a medium of exchange. (In case there’s a quiz, the other two core functions of money are as a store of value and a unit of account.) One limitation to government-issued currency is that acceptance is often bounded by the land the government controls. Another limitation is that the politics of governments often influence the value and acceptance of government-issued currency.

If one of the metaverse visions is universal adoption, tying the economy of the metaverse to a government-issued currency is suboptimal. In this treatment, fiat currency and the newer central bank digital currency (CBDC) encompass “government-issued currency.”

This need for a virtual currency doesn’t imply independence from the banking system of the real world. Nor does it claim freedom from regulation or laws. The interoperation between real and virtual worlds becomes even more complex in the mixed-reality environment of AR, where the two worlds blend.

---

While VR headsets provide access to virtual spaces, mixed reality blends real life with an augmented environment built by metaverse tech companies. While the land boundary argument above is weakened in mixed reality, it isn’t eliminated, but the issue isn’t as straightforward.

Traditional payment systems versus new payment systems

As a corollary to the currency topic, payment systems in the metaverse have many of the same complications. The primary difficulty is the currency for settlement, but if a payment network began to treat a digital currency as a currency for settlement, the limitation would be mitigated.

This is a fascinating thing to contemplate: an interoperable network for payment that users access regardless of location. It’d be a challenge for traditional payment systems, which operate in a complex world of retail banking, consumer protection, money transfers, and business banking services, but the business opportunity has great potential. The business model of traditional payment systems may also need to adapt since the metaverse differs in structure, reach, and layout from real life. The credit card of your digital twin may not be your credit card.

Beyond the currency complication and business model shifts, the complexity of metaverse technologies create challenges for payment systems. Traditional payment networks may not provide sufficient security, transparency, reach, simplicity, or speed when handling financial transactions.

This is where digital tokens come into play. They offer an immutable record of who owns what asset within the metaverse and provide a secure platform for executing payments between two parties in near-real time. Blockchain technology can create these types of digital tokens, as it offers some unique advantages such as decentralization, immutability, and reach.

And that aligns the metaverse with web3, at least in some ways.

Traditional real estate versus digital real estate

It’s hard to ignore digital “land ownership” when discussing the digital world and immersive virtual worlds. While the real and virtual worlds are distinct in VR, in AR, they overlap. Can a metaverse technology company put a virtual billboard on your lawn? Can I own your home in an AR world built by one of the tech giants, or are technology companies obliged to protect actual land ownership when carried into their virtual space?

This is an area where science fiction and the digital economy may collide with physical spaces and the laws which protect them.

Cryptocurrency in the metaverse

The metaverse promises to be a revolutionary platform for cryptocurrency, allowing users to trade and store digital currencies in a secure yet accessible manner. Cryptocurrency transactions are typically fast and cheap, making it an attractive alternative to traditional banking. Cryptocurrency transactions occur without worrying about foreign exchange rates or costly intermediary fees. Additionally, blockchain technology employed by cryptocurrencies can provide transparent and traceable transactions, making them increasingly more secure than their traditional counterparts.

The benefit of cryptocurrency transaction speed

One of the primary benefits of cryptocurrency in the metaverse is that it enables users to conduct transactions with low costs and high speed. Unlike bank transfers which can take days or weeks, cryptocurrency allows users to transfer funds anywhere in the world almost instantaneously. This increased speed means that metaverse businesses have the potential to reach new markets faster and with greater ease than ever before. On top of this, cryptocurrencies have no physical limitations; they can be used globally without any geographical boundaries or restrictions.

The benefit of cryptocurrency data collection

With the decentralized nature of many cryptocurrencies, metaverse users can benefit from increased privacy when making payments. Transactions are typically designed so that only those involved in the exchange need access to any sensitive data associated with it, making it harder for hackers or other malicious actors to compromise people’s personal information. Moreover, blockchain-based tokens allow two parties within a transaction to remain anonymous (behind their avatars, in this case) while still verifying each other’s account balances — something not feasible with traditional payment methods like credit cards or cash transfers.

The benefit of an evolving tax treatment

In addition to these advantages, metaverse entrepreneurs may also benefit from the lack of regulatory oversight surrounding cryptocurrency use compared to fiat currencies like US dollars or Euros. This is similar to the decades-long sales tax issue for e-commerce companies like Amazon and Walmart, which benefited from unresolved sales tax collection regulations while developing a global and dominant footprint.

This means potentially fewer taxes or fees paid when trading between different virtual currencies — creating an attractive economic opportunity for start-ups looking to reduce their overhead costs while expanding their customer base across borders.

Crypto volatility and the metaverse

However, there are drawbacks when dealing with cryptocurrency in the metaverse that must not be overlooked. Despite their numerous benefits, cryptocurrencies come with a degree of risk due to their volatile nature. Changes in market prices can occur rapidly and without warning, meaning investors could quickly lose large sums if they fail to manage their investments correctly. Additionally, because all cryptocurrency transactions are irreversible once confirmed on the blockchain, no mechanism will guarantee recovery if mistakes are made during payment processes or fraudulent activity occurs online.

Security of older blockchains

Furthermore, metaverse users should also be aware of potential security threats posed by malicious actors within a virtual world who may attempt to exploit loopholes within blockchain projects for monetary gains, such as 51% attacks on networks like Ethereum Classic (ETC.) Likewise, scammers looking out for unsuspecting victims could use gullible metaverse participants as pawns in fraudulent schemes.

Schemes involving unexpected payments and non-refundable deposits, amongst other things, highlight how important it is for project developers to familiarize themselves with blockchain technology and understand its associated risks before engaging in crypto activities inside the virtual world.

Regulatory frameworks for crypto are immature and poorly defined

Finally, governments worldwide have yet to define clear regulations guiding cryptocurrency usage inside and outside of virtual environments. This means metaverse companies may sometimes operate outside legally accepted frameworks, exposing them and their customers to liability issues related to tax compliance, laws, etc.

Charting the right course

There is a need for a cryptocurrency that can address the risks and limitations of existing crypto tokens to let the metaverse gain the benefit of cryptocurrency. The optimal token would interact with the banking system and global banking regulation, would provide an economic model supportive of a diverse and growing sea of projects, would provide an underpinning for those projects that leave behind the cross-border problems of the physical banking world while building for the metaverse, and provides resources to address potential volatility of the currency inside the metaverse.

Closing

The developing economy of the metaverse presents both opportunities and challenges. One significant challenge in the metaverse’s virtual reality is aligning economies to interoperate or manage toward a shared economy.

Digital currencies are essentially financial tools that require secure and transparent protocols to prevent fraud and ensure their efficient use in the metaverse. Using a digital currency within this digital world begins the process of alignment and interoperation. Beyond a digital currency is the need for shared, well-articulated economic structures allowing growth and stability. A stable economic engine will likely support a growing metaverse; a faulty economic engine will undoubtedly sour the metaverse’s chance to flourish.

Digital tokens can provide users with access to a reliable means of exchange while also protecting their assets from theft or malicious activities by third-party actors. Additionally, they could serve as incentives for users who contribute content or services to the platform or participate in other activities that benefit the community. Therefore, digital currencies must become integral components of the metaverse to allow seamless operation within this virtual world.

Furthermore, digital currencies can empower users by enabling them to make money without relying on traditional banking systems or other intermediaries. This could open up new avenues for entrepreneurs looking for new ways to generate income outside the established corporate framework — thereby making these platforms more accessible than ever. Ultimately, digital tokens are expected to become indispensable elements within the metaverse — allowing users to engage in practical applications such as shopping and entertainment and providing them with powerful economic tools that can enable socio-economic development on a global scale.