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GM and welcome to Future @ Work. We put this together to highlight the amazing, ongoing intersection between the future of work and web3.
What is “the future of work” and what does it have to do with web3?
Technology and culture has shifted the global workplace to look less like this:
And more like this:
But the marriage between the future of work and web3 isn’t about less water cooler talk and more discord gm’s, it's about using new technologies to manifest more efficient coordination of human capital. We believe that the intersection between the future of work and web3 translates to happier employees and more productive companies. This future won’t be possible without tools and services like Sprinter.io opening up new opportunities for project owners, business owners, agencies, technologists, and corporations.
With that being said, let’s get into the Sprinter Newsletter.
Today we’ll be covering:
You probably played The Sims if you grew up in the ’90s or ‘00s. The franchise sold 200 million copies throughout its heyday. In The Sims, your virtual avatar does different things and interacts with other virtual avatars in a large, somewhat open virtual environment.
As more and more companies incorporate virtual offices into their practices, will life begin to imitate this popular 2000s video game?
Things that are the same between virtual offices and The Sims:
With virtual offices, companies strive to emulate a sense of belonging and increase productivity akin to a traditional IRL office environment.
“We know that Brett is in Nashville and Nancy is in Raliegh but thanks to our sleek virtual office we can still come together and hang out!”
You can look at virtual offices from two perspectives: Bear or Bull.
Bear case:
Virtual offices like Gather, Teemyco and Wonder are all just another tool similar to Zoom, Slack, or Teams. And just like any tool, there is an onboarding process and employees will need to remember to use it. Employees don’t need to remember to use traditional offices. One of the key benefits of virtual offices is that they emulate a sense of belonging - but if enough people forget to use them, the benefit is gone. Changing habits is complex and requires effort and buy-in.
Bull case:
Making your office online lowers the barrier to conversations between people. One of the biggest things that companies need to solve in an era of remote work is a sense of belonging. Virtual offices are not the entire solution but establishing a space that facilitates person-to-person contact, albeit virtually, will lower the risk of people leaving.
“Web3” has quickly replaced “crypto” as the catch-all term for a secure, decentralized, user-owned internet.
This is a good thing because in the minds of most, web3 = progress and innovation whereas crypto = complexity and speculation.
Even though the rebranding from crypto to web3 can be seen as a net positive, most people won’t even know that web3 even exists.
Why? Because where web2 is a frontend revolution, web3 is a backend revolution.
Web2 changed how people interact with the internet whereas web3 is shifting what's going on behind the scenes. Web3 will be an equally important movement as web2 - transforming every industry and reshaping outdated power structures. The companies and individuals that succeed in web3 will do so because they abstract away all of its complexity.
Just as most people don’t understand how HTTP works they won’t understand how blockchains, stablecoins, or fungible vs. non-fungible works either. People shouldn’t need to understand the inner workings of the technologies they use.
Web3 has still yet to “cross the chasm” and still sits in the “early adopters” phase of the technology adoption lifecycle. To go mainstream Web3 will need to become accessible to everyday people.
Metaphors go a long way in communicating the technology to the early and late majority. People understand these concepts intuitively.
A few examples:
Decentralization is a core tenet to web3 but a very intimidating word. But the idea of “removing the middleman” resonates with everyone.
Individuals and companies that communicate web3 with intuitive concepts like “scarcity”, “community”, and “access” instead of confusing words like “Ethereum”, “blockchain”, and “fungibility” will win the hearts and minds of the next phase of adopters.
In the 90s, the internet was a similarly complex and confusing place. Everyday people had little idea how to use it while many wrote it off as a passing fad. Then AOL came along and abstracted away all of the complexity of the internet and transformed it into a user-friendly interface.
So who will be the AOL of web3? (*not the part about selling for 1% of its ATH market cap)
NBA Top Shot made some leaps towards this. Some 50% reported not knowing that they owned an NFT.
Winning companies will have both:
One day, most people won’t even know web3 exists, but they’ll use it every day.
Senators Cynthia Lummis and Kirsten Gillibrand introduced legislation to create a regulatory framework for the crypto markets. Regulatory guidance is desperately needed, so this comes at a great time. Here are the important takeaways:
This is a big win for crypto. It would mean that the CFTC (Commodity Futures Trading Commission) would oversee regulation. More importantly, it means that the extremely anti-crypto SEC will, for the most part, not.
It means that all stablecoins must have enough liquid assets in their reserves to back the stablecoins. The project must also disclose what type of assets and how many of them sit in its reserves.
Many already do this anyway but it's important to have it spelled out in legislation. Many commodities like Gold are required to be stored in banks.
This is important if Bitcoin hopes to achieve its initial use case as a digital currency (aka using it to buy coffee.)
Proof-of-work miners are currently taxed the second a cryptocurrency is mined. This means that they pay income tax (when they mine it) and when they sell it (capital gains tax.)
Now they will now only be taxed after they sell it.
Some additional reading
