👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week's most remarkable stories at the intersection of ecosystem innovation and platform organization.
The more beautiful internet our hearts know is possible
The beautiful thing about the internet is that it's still a wild frontier. The physical frontiers of our world are largely mapped and tamed. But the digital frontier is endless, and it's always open to settlers seeking better ways forward. We are all free to venture forth, follow our curiosity and aliveness, direct our attention in new ways, and find the others. We are free to trust our intuition when it says "things can be so much better than this. " And we are free, in every moment, to open up the nesting doll, and be the change we wish to see.
🌫️ The fog of the non-existing digital frontiers - by Rob Hardy
It's Lonely in the Metaverse: Decentraland’s 38 Daily Active Users in a $1.3B Ecosystem
Despite low user metrics, Decentraland and The Sandbox have high valuations. According to data from Messari, Decentraland and The Sandbox both have market caps of around $1.3 billion each. While the play-to-earn game Axie Infinity has a $1.16 billion market cap, its nearly 22,000 daily users reported on DappRadar suggest that open-ended metaverses that don't provide incentives to stay, such as gaming or trading, may not see regular returning users at this point. Although the metaverse may be enough of a buzzword for companies to rebrand their names around its concept, mass adoption will likely still take a while.
💥 What comes after a hype? - by Cameron Thompson
Growing platforms take rates via distribution
[Distribution] is important for a platform to bring in customers for its suppliers. Without that, a platform is effectively just an infrastructure provider, which tends to limit what value of the transactions flowing through its platform it can charge. If a platform doesn’t help those on it get more customers, a fair take rate it can get away with is usually only in the 3-5% range. However, in cases where the platform is responsible for generating a lot of customers for its suppliers, it can usually charge 15%+ take rates on the total volume going through the platform.
👐 The pull is real, and some use-cases - by Tanay Jaipuria
🎧 Is Remote Work Here to Stay? With Derek Thompson
The office is a technology, that has existed for about 150 years in white collar work, or knowledge work. And for a 150 years, there was really no choice. If you were a podcasting company you were a retail corporate office, you were a media marketing company, then you had no choice, you were going into the office 5 days a week. But because it was a default we didn’t have very sophisticated answers to an important question: What does the office do? If the office is a technology, what is its job? What does the office accomplish? And today, workers and companies and bosses who have a choice have to actually answer this question.
🤔 So what's the job of an office? - in Offline with Jon Favreau
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