The Format #030
Regret, Holy Books, Habits, and Ambition.
This past month has been incredibly exciting, it’s been jam-packed full of helping no-coders to learn and build things.
So with our no-code competition very nearly at an end, it’s almost time to take a step back, reflect on everything we’ve learnt and then prepare for what’s coming next. (Spoiler alert it’s even more exciting…)
On the topic of reflecting, a lot of the news we found most interesting this week relates to our principles. Now, more than ever, reflecting on these feels important to us.
Web3 Just Found a Side Door Into web2
Accessibility is something we really care about and without moving towards ‘accessible web3’, the tech will never reach it’s full potential (🚀…).
Solana just made a BIG move in the right direction though, their Blinks (Blockchain Links…) allow you to use web3 apps, games or features natively in social apps like Telegram and Twitter, without ever having to leave the platform.
"I’ve Done A Lot Of Damage" — 16 Inventors Who Regretted Their Inventions
It may be slightly rogue for a Buzzfeed article to find it’s way into our tech digest, but it captures one of our principles perfectly. Just because you can create something doesn’t mean you should, and as an innovator there is a responsibility to assess the societal impact of what you create before releasing it into the world. We try to balance this tension of short term action despite long term unknowns. You can read a bit more about our principles here.
Streaks… 👀
A big part of our rewards toolkit focuses on web3-based gamification. So when Farcaster, a blockchain protocol for social apps, added ‘streaks’ it caught our eye. The goal: to get users to become more active in specific channels, and the fact that you can only have a streak for one channel at a time is a very interesting move!
Implementing streaks well can be a VERY powerful way to build longstanding habits and get users coming back. This and the concept of loss aversion is something Dom has been diving deep into over the past few weeks. (On the topic of streaks, this is my 30 streak for The Format 🎉)
Holy Tokens? The Vatican Library Is Giving Donors Soulbound NFTs
The trendy misconception is that NFT’s are just a way to make money from animal pictures, but at their core they are so much more: a technology that enables digital ownership. The interesting part is what this ownership enables, and the new forms of value exchange that can be unlocked. In the case of the Vatican Library it allows them to open access to culturally significant manuscripts.
OPENFORMAT News
Live build sessions, hackathons, competitions, more partnerships, builders building. Things have been busy…
Going Live with Ambitious Labs
Last Friday I ran a live build session with Alim for Ambitious Labs as part of our competition (you can check it out here). We discussed why and when you’d use web3 and then I ran a quick demo on how you can introduce web3 to an app using no-code and the OPENFORMAT toolkit.
It was a lot of fun and the response from the Ambitious Labs community has been amazing. I’ve had so many conversations this week from people building awesome projects who wanted to use web3 but thought it was impossible without code. Now they’re able to build what they imagined and that is very cool.
Slack, Stripe, Tally and a tonne of other ways to use OPENFORMAT
Over the past couple of weeks we’ve been running quite a few different sessions looking at integrating OPENFORMAT in different contexts with a variety of tools.
We built (in just an hour):
After some really positive and useful feedback, we’ll be locking in a regular time to continue running these weekly live build sessions after the competition closes.
Discover NoCode
Over the past week we’ve partnered with Discover NoCode to help run their week-long hackathon. It’s been a LOT of fun to work alongside no-code builders and help them to think through a project, choose the right tools, and then build.
As part of the hack, me and Dom have been creating a no-code app that we are going to use as our ‘sandbox’ to do all sorts of crazy onchain gamification experiments.
After taking inspiration from Rich and James’ project at our last hack we decided to build a to do list app, but for families so that parents can set up chores and reward their kids for completing them. Needless to say, it integrates OPENFORMAT in quite a few interesting ways.
We’ve been working alongside each other in Gather, and the energy has been electric. We might need to create an OPENFORMAT open build space soon… 👀
That’s all for this week.
Have a great weekend, Dan and the OPENFORMAT team 👋🏽
Join our community
Join our Telegram group, The Format, for relevant news and conversations.
Check out our latest website
Join our Discord for product updates
Subscribe to our YouTube for tutorials and demos
Prompt (Generated by DALLE-2): A whimsical and abstract scene inspired by the concept of 'Holy Tokens? The Vatican Library Is Giving Donors Soulbound NFTs.' Picture an ornate Vatican library with towering, surreal bookshelves and glowing, ethereal manuscripts. In the centre, a mystical glowing NFT token with angel wings floats, surrounded by beams of divine light. The token features intricate, stained glass-like designs. Surrounding elements include floating, semi-transparent books, cherubs with digital halos, and magical light particles, creating an abstract and otherworldly atmosphere without literal text or figures.