The Format #040
A Minecraft fever dream, fighting hamsters, the AI-first internet and the end of polling?
Happy Friday!! 👋
This week marks the Format’s 40th issue. 🎉🎉🎉
That’s 80 weeks (for context that was a month after GPT 3.5 was released…) and it’s safe to say that the tech landscape has changed A LOT in that time.
On that topic, this week we’ll be looking at:
Whether we should stop building the internet for humans 👀
Why I was thrilled to have my worst Minecraft experience ever
How to give an AI agent a budget to do your bidding
If we’re entering the new era of API’s
Anyway, let’s dive in…
How Polymarket beat the polls to correctly predict Trump's win
A blockchain prediction market called Polymarket managed to accurately predict the election results when almost all the pollsters failed. How? The theory is that when real money is on the line and there is a real sense of anonymity and transparency (thanks blockchain!!!), people are far more likely to be truthful.
The general premise of how Polymarket works: you can bet on the outcome of almost any event, anything from whether GPT-5 will be released in 2025, to whether Mike Tyson will knock Jake Paul out. When you bet the money is sent to a smart contract, after the event, if you guessed right, you get the payout.
If you want to dive a bit deeper into how Polymarket works check this out.
To add to all the Polymarket/pollster drama, the CEO of Polymarket was raided by the FBI earlier this week, but that’s a story for another day.
The Internet Has No Shape
AI Agents have been one of the trendy tech buzzwords for a while now, they are essentially a ‘bot’ that is able to interact with the web and is powered by AI. To bring this to life, imagine you can ask an ‘AI’ to go and test your business idea in 3 different markets, or to take the notes from your meeting and organise all the follow up calls.
As these agents are able to do more and more tasks on the internet it’s incredibly likely that they will interact with the web far more than we humans do.
If/when that becomes the case it begs the question why we would be creating/prioritising an internet that values form over pure utility, when it’s main user does not. 🤔
The truth is that at some point we may just be visitors to an agentic internet.
The Dark Knight of Consumer Crypto
API’s are a fundamental building block for the web. They allow companies to utilise a slice of expert functionality, they’re often ‘plug-and-play’ and we rely on thousands everyday, think Paypal, Google Maps, social logins etc.
The growing problem around API’s though, they are usually controlled by a single party, and if that party has a technical problem or decides to change costs/access requirements, it can cause chaos.
Web3 is trying to address this problem with a tech called zkTLS, with the goal of allowing web2 data to be used to in a web3 context e.g to build a user’s reputation or on-chain digital foorprint in a decentralised way. 😍
AI Learned Minecraft
When people say ‘AI model’ these days they are typically talking about one of the large language models, ChatGPT, Claude etc. But AI models come in many different shapes and forms, the latest: a playable Minecraft AI model where the world is generated in realtime based on your interactions.
Is it perfect? Absolutely not, in fact it’s quite disorientating to play… if you look away for just a couple of seconds, everything will have changed and it has pixelation reminiscent of the mid 2000’s. But that actually has a charm of it’s own, and when you extrapolate this release by a few years… we may have AAA 4k open-world gaming experiences generated for us based on our personal preferences in realtime. 🤯
You can give it a try and enter the Minecraft dream state here.
Farcaster's Growing Agentic Economy
So we’ve already mentioned AI agents, however these agents become increasingly more powerful when blockchain is involved, allowing them to transparently spend money. Even now, there are a number of things you could do with these agents on web3 social platforms like Farcaster.
You could:
Give an agent a budget and then for any money it earns, stream 50% to your bank account and 50% back to the agent to continue it’s experiments
Create an agent that can set bounties for certain tasks, evaluate the submissions and pay the human (or agent…) who completed it
Create an agent that learns from your content and interactions and then starts ‘developing its own personality’ based on the content it consumes
Other articles we’ve found interesting this week…
Netflix and Amazon: A Tale of Two Ad Tiers → Netflix and Amazon have both introduced ad-supported price tiers, advertising in streaming platforms is evolving as the audience expectations are changing, expect more changes.
Hamster Kombat Loses 259 Million Players Amid 86% Drop and Blockchain Gaming Developments → An important lesson. If people only play your game in the hope of making money, they will leave, its just a matter of time.🐹
Protocol Pump Player: The Evolution of PPP → Despite the rather ridiculous article title, this hits some really important points. Far too many crypto projects have focused on quick short-term gains where the last people ‘in’ lose all their money, the alternative is to create sustainable value within communities…
The Reddit Paradox: How AI is Driving Users Back to the Internet’s Most Un-AI Misfit → As social media platforms increasingly rely on AI based moderation and in the process ‘vanilla-fy’ their content feeds, Reddit is offering a space for real, unfiltered and minimally curated content. People need that right now.
Donald Trump Returns to the White House — What It Means for Bitcoin → So the election happened… it seems like it could be a very good thing for blockchain.
That’s all for this week.
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Have a great weekend, Dan and the OPENFORMAT team 👋🏽
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Image generated by Dall-E 2 using the prompt: “A futuristic version of the web depicted in true Minecraft style, where AI agents are the native inhabitants. The AI characters are rendered in blocky, pixelated forms with simple yet distinct glowing features, like cube-shaped heads and pixelated bodies. They interact in a Minecraft-inspired virtual city, with digital skyscrapers and landscapes made of blocks and bright pixel textures. In the foreground, pixel-art fighting hamsters with mini weapons engage in animated, comical battles, fitting the Minecraft aesthetic. The scene has a lively, game-like atmosphere with vibrant colors and a sense of a digital world thriving with AI life.”