The Format #035
Payment pipes, Wonderwalls, streaming scams, internet infrastructure and Telegram turmoil
Happy friday everyone!! 👋
A couple of quick OPENFORMAT updates before we dive in…
We’re having a brand refresh which includes a new website, tagline and even a new colour palette. The website will be going live on Tuesday with our new tagline being ‘The Open Format for digital economies’. We’d love to get your thoughts.
Sarah and Bruce will be heading to Token2049 in Singapore next week, if anyone is heading there and would like to meet up we’d love to know!
Anyway, here are some of the things we’ve found most interesting over the past fortnight…
‘I'd like my computer to auto-pay 5 cents to the article that I just read but I can't, and I think we're worse for it.’
Andrej Karpathy, previously co-founder of OpenAI and director at Tesla, shared a Tweet (sorry, I mean Xeet?), that stirred up a healthy Twitter debate. It discussed the huge amount of GDP that is currently locked up because the economic pipes that currently support businesses do not allow for frictionless payments of small values.
We completely agree, but rather than 5 cents, we expect it will be multiple scales of magnitude smaller.
Telegram Creator’s Arrest Makes the Supreme Court’s Murthy Ruling Look Even Worse
The CEO of Telegram, Pavel Durov, was recently arrested, causing “fierce global debates about the limits of digital freedom of speech, and how much responsibility social media companies should bear over the content on their platforms.”
The charges seem to focus on how the platform could be exploited by its users for illegal actions and their lack of guardrails or willingness to cooperate with centralised entities. This seems to suggest that the only way a platform can enable free speech and remain censorship-free is by being decentralised… 👀
Beyond DeFi: Six Decentralized Projects With Real Promise
This article dives into some of the most valuable and interesting blockchain infrastructure projects, ‘the plumbing for a new digital world’.
These projects and many others like it are providing the building blocks for a freer future. A future which is not dominated by a handful of incredibly wealthy big tech companies and instead a future where the wealth is distributed.
Oasis ticketing chaos prompts probe into dynamic pricing
Oasis recently announced their reunion tour, something many expected would never come. This return has caused an insane amount of demand for the tickets, something TicketMaster have arguably exploited with their ‘dynamic pricing’ model. Tickets were initially £135 and as their queuing systems filled, they employed a ‘surge pricing’ system to push prices up to £350+…
Our take is that dynamic pricing isn’t inherently bad, in fact it can be very user-centric and benefit all parties, take for example the model used by Moviepass. The problem comes when there is a lack of transparency around the system and the company is seeking to exploit the desperation of their customers. (Tut tut!)
Music Producer Accused of Using AI Songs to Scam Streaming Platforms Out of $10 Million in Royalties
Whilst on the surface this seems like quite simple → scammer does bad thing and gets in trouble, it’s actually quite an interesting case.
Due to the way music platforms work, he didn’t actually scam the ‘streaming platforms’ out of any money. Almost all of these platforms work on a fixed royalty pot model, meaning this sort of ‘artificial streaming’ takes money from honest, hardworking artists, a hard pill to swallow when the fault lies with the platform and their inability to catch these AI songs.
This case raises a lot of questions around how companies are dealing with streaming fraud in the music industry and fundamentally the frailties of their royalty model. A model which punishes artists for the platform’s problems.
That’s all for this week.
Have a great weekend, Dan and the OPENFORMAT team 👋🏽
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Image sourced from: https://coinpedia.org/news/telegram-founder-durov-breaks-silence-on-his-arrest-in-france/