The Format #046
The curious case of the 'stolen' data, idea defense squad's, red flag, green flag and the future of the Nation.
Happy Friday! 🌞
Yesterday we shared a (not so) little company update, if you read that you probably get a sense of just how busy things have been in the Open Format world. Very busy. Very exciting.
And outside the Open Format world there’s a similar story, LOTS going on.
Here’s what we’ll be exploring today:
How AI agents may spread ideas at scale (and how terrifying that is). 🤯
Why Karate kids are the future of the sports industry. 🥋
Why VC’s want our AI agent ‘Steve’ to be everywhere. 🐵
The data stealers who are complaining about their data been stolen. 😂
Let’s dive in…
The Future of Fan Engagement: Sport Clubs Are Sitting On A Goldmine
I won’t even try and capture all the valuable insights from Marc Baumann’s epic report on The New Fan Economy, but the general narrative is:
The current business models in sports are outdated and therefore failing. Why? Gen Z don’t care about the same things or interact in the same way, live sports are expensive and social media is becoming the main fan touchpoint for sports (a touchpoint which sports teams haven’t effectively been able to monetise yet).
There are a lot of potential solutions to this, but the key throughline… these solutions must be digitally native and address what the Gen Z, Gen X and millenial sports fans actually want.
If they can do this they will turn passive fans who simply don’t spend money on sports into active participants, fans who engage, spend and love doing so. 😍
And if they can’t evolve? - well have a read and see what this article has to say… in a nutshell… they will slowly and painfully die as the current business models continue to become less and less compatible with the world of today. RIP. 💀
Given the fact that we are supporting the fan economy in the sports industry by powering Matchain and PSG and in music with our Amplify World partnership this piece really resonated with us!!
🏆 The Evolution of Farcaster Communities: Leaderboards, Tokens, and Collaboration
Farcaster is an onchain social platform (well actually it’s a protocol, but we’ll save that for another day) that you’d probably find quite similar to Twitter, except for the fact it’s built on web3 infrastructure and therefore has decentralised principles at it’s core.
It’s currently quite an experimental platform, and people are still finding out the best ways to build communities of like-minded individuals where they can have high-quality conversations.
In an attempt to build just that, several of the Farcaster communities have been introducing mechanics like leaderboards which automatically reward meaningful contributions and help to surface the hidden contributors who may otherwise have gone unnoticed.
There have also been a tonne of super interesting experiments with community specific tokens. These have opened the possibility for cross-community engagement, co-hosted challenges and other new ways to think about collaboration.
The fun thing about this article is that we’ve built almost exactly what they are describing (and more), but instead of just sitting on Farcaster, our automated community rewards are cross-platform: Github, Discord, Telegram and soon X and Farcaster…
It feels like these are the first steps towards true decentralised social coordination. 🤯
DAO 2.0 Product Ideas
“I believe the emergence of AI agents onchain could lead to DAOs 2.0, where agents have the potential to put the "A" back in DAO.”
The concept of giving communities autonomous tools, or AI agents which help improve their coordination and take away a lot of the monotonous tasks that no one wants to do is something we’ve discussed quite a lot internally.
That made it very interesting to read the list of tools and products suggested by the Variant Fund in this article since we’ve discussed about half of them internally and have already built prototypes for at least a couple.
We actually even debated calling ourselves a DAO toolkit, but decided that it was too jargonny and and we instead wanted to target the real problems that existing communities (and specifically web3 ones) face today.
We’re talking about exactly the same thing, giving communities the tools and economic rails to become more… → “Turning connections into communities, and communities into economies”
Other articles + videos we’ve found interesting this week…
It's not a geopolitical red flag but an open source green flag → A couple of weeks ago DeepSeek, a Chinese AI startup, launched a cutting edge LLM, it’s open-source and ‘only’ cost $6m to train. This sent American tech stocks crashing and caused panic in the Valley.
Should we be worried? This article argues (and we completely agree) that this is actually a major win for open source and by reducing the compute cost it actually paves the way for broader adoption.
Praxis' $525M Crypto-Native City: A Test for the Network State Model and the Future of Nations → With the very ambitious goal of creating a new type of nation with ‘permissionless innovation zones’, ‘reverse brain draining’ and a decentralised, onchain governance structure, Praxis is challenging the status quo of what it means to be a nation.
Will it work? That’s anyone’s guess… but I hope so. 👀
Getting Up the Guts to Type into Tiny Text Boxes on the Internet → Posting on Twitter, asking a question in a Discord channel, or even writing a blog. These things are harder than ever thanks to the pressures of the 2025 internet. We think AI could help with this, nudging you in the direction of where you could add or receive the most value within communities.
OpenAI Furious DeepSeek Might Have Stolen All the Data OpenAI Stole From Us → After a Chinese Hedge Fund released a highly competitive AI model far more open-source, and many orders of magnitude cheaper than OpenAI’s, there have been a lot of questions about data and whether the model unfairly ‘distilled’ the knowledge from OpenAI’s models. But where did OpenAI’s data come from? 🤔
The 30-Year-Old Entrepreneur Behind Virtual, a Multi-Million Dollar AI Agent Society → In previous weeks we’ve talked A LOT about Eliza/ai16z, it’s the AI agent framework we use most, but another one of the ‘big dogs’ in the web3 AI agent space is Virtuals. This is an interview with their founder which explores…
Paying an AI agent to propagate ideologies
AI agent’s that work 24/7 to pay money and then pay their token holders
How agents and humans are both citizens within the Virtuals world
Creating the Shopify for agents 🛒
Leaving you with a question…
The concept of AI agents being optimised to spread ideologies TERRIFIES me, and giving them a financial incentive to do so… no thanks, it’s hard enough with just social media algorithms and humans.
With that in mind:
How would you decide what you actually believe in a world where you are being strategically bombarded with ideas? What ‘idea filter’ would you apply? Do we need to start building an AI agent idea defense squad?
Please leave your thoughts in the comments, or in our Discord.
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, hyperrealistic city representing a crypto-native network state. The cityscape features towering skyscrapers with holographic blockchain symbols, decentralised governance hubs, and an open-source green flag waving in the wind. The society includes both AI agents and humans as equal citizens, engaging in discussions about governance and innovation. A highly detailed, hyperrealistic monkey named Steve, wearing a red cape and a futuristic gadget, is proudly part of this futuristic nation. The environment has a utopian, cyberpunk feel with greenery and renewable energy sources integrated into the architecture.”