The Format #024

Most weeks we’ve included healthy amounts of gaming, AI and web3 content. These are a big part of what we’re building and how we see the future of the internet, so it’s important that we talk about them.

We're on a mission to rebalance control and ownership for builders and their communities, and we’re building a model that uses micro-transactions and rewards to make this possible. We’ve talked about this a lot internally… less so out in the wild.

We’ll be diving deep into this in a separate post (coming very soon 👀), but in the meantime I wanted to share some news related to why this is a mission worth pursuing, and the problems that currently exist within the open source software space.

How Stability AI’s Founder Tanked His Billion-Dollar Startup

On the surface this seems like a simple story of poor management. A CEO riding a hype wave hard and then struggling to actually deliver. But actually, Stability were (and still are) trying to do something very cool, to open source the technology they built and in doing so ‘transform the world’.

The fatal flaw → their ‘open source business model’ consisted of “just giving shit away”…

Online Games Act Like Unregulated Banks, And The US Gov’t Has Noticed

Bruce (our CTO) had this take on the article:

“The underlying message here should be about moving to a decentralised alternative, rather than attempting to layer more regulation over traditional gaming models. Even with regulation, banks are often guilty of many of the behaviours attributed to gaming companies. Being de-banked is real. Not sure the article really gets this.”

Redis Vs The Trillion Dollar Cabals

Redis (a popular open source project that is used as a database and cache) has joined the growing list of open source projects that have changed their license and moved away from complete open source.

The reasons for this and the implications are complex, but the people who have been effected most by the shift are monolithic tech giants like AWS. These companies rely on open source projects like Redis to feed their income, yet contribute almost nothing to them either directly through code or through sponsorship and support.

An anonymous coder nearly hacked a big chunk of the internet. How worried should we be?

An open source tool called XZ Utils was almost used to get access to critical information on computers all around the world, fortunately the hack was spotted before anything went live. The problem was both solved and caused by the open source nature of the tool.

The take away? The risk/reward equation doesn’t stack up when it comes to open source technology. The more successful something becomes, the higher the risk and burden on its creator without any counterbalance of reward on the other side. This in turn leaves open source infrastructure vulnerable, impacting creators and users alike.

The case for lowercasing ‘web3’

We don’t like jargon. It acts as a barrier to understanding and stops people getting to the cool stuff that’s hidden behind a wall of complexity. Sometimes though, jargon sticks. And when it does you have to make do with it, that’s what ‘web3’ is right now, a term that has stuck and that many people understand (although to varying degrees).

This article from Edge & Node makes the case for why it should be ‘web3’ rather that any variation of the word (Web3, web3.0 etc). And we wholeheartedly agree…

OPENFORMAT News

API Beta going live

We’ve been working on our API for the past 6 weeks with the aim of improving accessibility and overall user experience for builders. We spent last week testing it and next week we’ll be making it public for developers to test! Since we don’t ship on a Friday as a principle, it will be going live on Monday.

You can view the latest docs here from Monday.

Our Telegram News Channel

For quite a while we’ve had a news channel where we share and discuss all the news, tech updates and big problems we find interesting. It started out as a place just for the team, but we’ve slowly been adding some really cool people, and now we’d love to open it up a bit more. If you’re interested in joining the conversation the link is here.

Polygon Mumbai

We’ve been using Polygon’s Mumbai testnet for some time now as the default chain within our launchpad. We found out last week that this testnet is being deprecated. We’re in the process of moving the launchpad over to the new Polygon testnet ‘Amoy’ (and giving it a nice UI overhaul too), but in doing this users will have to redeploy what they have built. We’ve personally reached out to anyone who this might effect with the following message.

And that’s all for this week.

Have a great weekend, Dan and the OPENFORMAT team 👋🏽

Prompt (generated by Sarah): “Just smile and wave boys… smile and wave”