ConsenSys Mesh, the blockchain incubator, announced on Friday that the next Ethereal event will take place in Jackson, Wyoming, from March 9 to March 11. 

This year’s event is called Camp Ethereal and is a boutique edition of the Ethereal Summit, the signature event on the international blockchain calendar since it debuted in 2017. Like last year’s Ethereal Virtual Summit, it is again powered by Decrypt.

Last year’s two-day virtual summit presented an all-star lineup of speakers, including Vitalik Buterin, Mark Cuban, Edward Snowden, Mike Novogratz, Joe Lubin, Caitlin Long, Sam Bankman-Fried, Sergey Nazarov, Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, pplpleasr, Olaf Carlson-Wee, Aaron Wright, and Mayor Francis Suarez.

This year, Ethereal returns to an in-person format, with more great speakers and a focus on intimate social gatherings. We’ll talk Ethereum, DeFi, DAOs, NFTs, regulation, and much more. The event will follow all local state guidelines for COVID-19 safety procedures.

The Ethereal Summit is the nexus between technology and the people at the front lines of it, bringing together technologists, enterprises, startups, entrepreneurs, investors, and artists to engage with the latest developments in decentralization. The summit features conversations on the blockchain industry, and events that highlight new technologies and practices. 

This will be the first edition of Camp Ethereal and the eighth Ethereal gathering, following successful events in NYC, San Francisco, and Tel Aviv. 

Follow Ethereal Summit on Twitter for the latest updates as we add speakers.

For media interested in attending Camp Ethereal, please reach out to Laura Goldberg at laura@lbgpr.com to request press credentials. For information on event sponsorships, please contact Eric Chen at partner@decryptmedia.com.

Source

Today, Decrypt did something we’ve never done before: published an original news story that also ran simultaneously on multiple other sites. 

The story, which hits on multiple hot-button issues in the crypto world—NFTs, DAOs, and crypto lobbying efforts in D.C.—marks the launch of PubDAO, a new media DAO we’ve been building out behind the scenes on Discord. DAOs are decentralized autonomous organizations, and we see huge potential for their role in journalism. 

PubDAO is separate from Decrypt editorial and is far more than a Decrypt effort; we merely helped hatch it. Early PubDAO contributors from other DAOs like Friends with Benefits, Gitcoin, Collab.Land, Digitalax, API3, and more, plus some of our journalist peers from The Defiant and ACJR, helped build the framework.

Think of PubDAO as akin to a decentralized Associated Press.

PubDAO story ideas get brainstormed openly in the PubDAO Discord channel, a truly collaborative process that favors coordination over competition.

The decentralized wire service is merely the first part of a broader plan for PubDAO that will ultimately produce guilds made up of writers, editors, photographers, illustrators, advertisers, and marketers. If all goes according to plan, those guilds—and an evolving set of protocols—will reduce the cost and friction in publishing. We hope that results in new, far better ways of monetizing, and a healthier ecosystem.

The economic tool powering all of this will be a token, which is coming soon. Eventually, PubDAO members can contribute to the story pipeline by staking and earning governance tokens. Stay tuned for an in-depth announcement to follow with full token details. For now, at the outset, PubDAO is an open experiment in rethinking broken digital media models. 

Since its inception, Decrypt has aimed not just to cover news about Web 3, but also to use Web 3 tech to find a better path for online content. 

Last March, we launched our reader token, which allowed readers to earn tokens for reading stories on our mobile app: simple and fun. Then we commissioned unique NFT artworks that token-holders could buy with their tokens. Next, we started doing Snapshot polls that allow Decrypt NFT-holders to vote on what Learn content we publish next. 

The experimentation has led us to PubDAO, and now we want to invite more contributors in. As we build, we hope to show that decentralized working groups and token incentives can create a better way for projects to get their stories told, and for the value of content creation to go to the storytellers—rather than the platforms. In other words, maybe media DAOs will prove to be the long-awaited “killer app.” 

For now, PubDAO is an open community experiment in rethinking broken digital media models. If you share our vision for a more equitable and collaborative future where creators and their audience own the value they create, consider joining us as an early contributor.

Source

Season 2 of Decrypt’s decentralized media journey is here.

When we launched Decrypt in 2018, we aimed to do more than create the best cryptocurrency news site: we wanted to become the first true Web 3.0 publication. 

We all know the traditional media model is broken. Content creators get shorted, while large corporations squeeze what little revenue they can out of news brands by using intrusive banner ads or auto-play video ads that create a terrible experience for readers. Trust is mostly eroded. 

As cryptoland likes to say: “Does crypto solve this?” We believe it can. For many on our team, what attracted us to crypto in the first place was the promise of finding a better way to fund content online and deepen the connection between readers and publishers.

In March, we kicked off Season 1 of this effort with a reader rewards token. Now, with the launch of Season 2, we have begun to construct a decentralized media organization in earnest. 

Decrypt is building out a media DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) that we hope will help drive the next era in online content. DAOs—in which a community of passionate stakeholders collectively steer a project and share the rewards of their work—are cropping up across the web, from startup investing to digital art creation to media. Many see DAOs as the future of companies. We see them as a potentially better way to operate content sites.

We’re now recruiting engaged community members who share our vision and want to help build it. We’re collaborating with representatives from other DAOs to report on the groundbreaking developments in this space, and we’re migrating our reader token to an ERC-20 governance token. That token will give our DAO community on-chain governance rights which will help guide us as we begin to progressively decentralize.

The reader rewards token we launched in March enabled our audience to earn simply from engaging with stories on our mobile app; readers could spend their tokens on original NFT artworks we commissioned. Those 75,000+ holders of the reader token will be the first eligible to claim the new governance token, as part of a to-be-announced token allocation plan. 

In June, we experimented with a way for Decrypt NFT holders to vote on what explainers they’d like to see next in our renowned Learn section. This was the first of many steps on our path to build a DAO that encompasses writers, thinkers, developers, and creators from across the crypto space as we progressively decentralize the content production and distribution process.

In the case of both the token and the DAO, we started small, and now we’re going big. 

We’ve already tapped a trusted circle of initial advisors who will help steer the project, including: Cooper Turley of Fire Eyes DAO; Trevor McFedries of Friends with Benefits; Scott Moore of Gitcoin; Lauren Garcia, a crypto developer and node operator since 2015; Steve McKeon of Collab+Currency; Cami Russo of The Defiant; and Joon Ian Wong of ACJR. 

These advisors are working closely with Decrypt editorial to help establish guidelines for how DAO members can submit content ideas to Decrypt. Soon, we’ll open applications for “stewards,” which is what we’re calling our most engaged DAO community members. 

Our aim is to forge a better path for content creation (not just for us but for all publishers as well), strengthen the connection between writers and the projects they cover, and compensate community members for their time and insights. We think those are pretty important goals—and they’ve become urgent for the broken digital media business.

Stick with us in the months to come, as we’ll be sharing updates on our progress. And if you’re a crypto native and original thinker who wants to get involved, you can soon apply to be a steward. 

Source

In March, Decrypt launched our DCPT reader token, and the first “season” was sponsored by Filecoin. Now that the end of our first season is in sight, we’re ready to talk a bit about how it went, what we learned, and what’s in store for the token beyond Season 1.

In just over three months since the start of our first season, we saw over 74,000 new wallet activations, with a broad and relatively even distribution of 21 million DCPT tokens. We wanted to minimize the emergence of whales and token farming with a daily issuance cap, verified account registration, and a one-wallet-per-device policy, and generally succeeded to that end, with the top wallet holder having just shy of 0.03% of the total DCPT supply.

For our first reward drop, we offered 150 custom NFTs to our token holders. We have since granted these NFTs—and by extension the owners of the 120 wallet addresses that hold them—unique content voting rights on our Snapshot page, where members can vote on what educational content they’d like to see next on Decrypt.

We learned a lot during Season 1, along with a few humbling lessons. 

First, it was challenging for our small team to build new token functionality and at the same time create and release on-chain rewards. While rewards were a good place to start, sidechain capabilities and the ecosystem of Solidity smart contract functionality continued to grow. The DeFi “Cambrian explosion” has resulted in proven on-chain governance and coordination tools that we want to provide to the Decrypt community.

In the next iteration of our token protocol, we plan to completely rethink our token so that it doesn’t just serve as an in-app engagement tool, but instead becomes the platform for an industry-leading, community-governed Web 3.0 publication. As a first step, we will be graduating our reader reward token from the OST platform to Ethereum mainnet.

We are immensely grateful for the assistance of the OST team and supporters along our path. The OST platform offers a unique way for us to deploy in-app token functionality that satisfied the requirements of regulated mobile app stores. It also is one of the few solutions that can handle the scale of our rapidly growing reader base.

After Season 1, we plan to launch a broader protocol in the coming months with better interoperability and a more powerful feature set. Most importantly, this protocol will build on top of the initial distribution of DCPT tokens provided by Season 1. We plan to offer a 1:1 swap or distribution of our OST-chain DCPT token for this new ERC-20 token, which will have no economic or ownership value but exciting new audience and community features which we can’t wait to share. The mobile app will continue to show DCPT balances for users that signed up before the end of Season 1, at least until we complete the migration, but new app users will not see a reference to DCPT and no users will be able to earn more DCPT after Season 1 ends.

This new protocol effort is our top priority, and we want to focus on it 100%. As such, we are pausing new reward drops, at least until we’re ready to share more details about the initial protocol work. We do not plan to mint more DCPT on the OST chain at this time. Once all 21 million DCPT are distributed, we will pause new token issuance and re-assess in light of the new protocol’s goals.

We’re very excited about this new direction, and will be sharing more details soon. Consider this a pre-announcement, and stay tuned!

Source

As part of Decrypt’s mission to help bring Web3 to a global audience, we continue to test out the decentralized technologies we cover, and have been actively looking for ways to implement user-friendly versions of this complex (and sometimes confusing) crypto world. 

In March, we launched our DCPT reader token, which our readers could earn simply from browsing and sharing our content. Token holders could then redeem their tokens for special NFT (non-fungible token) artworks. Now, in our latest experiment, Decrypt is looking to reward our NFT holders by giving them a bigger say in the educational content our editorial team produces next. 

The crypto world has been experimenting with DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations) as a way to involve their communities in the decision-making process.

For the crypto-curious, participating in DAOs often involves a complex array of steps: finding active DAOs, navigating the rules for participation, and then buying and staking the relevant token. We want to simplify that process. 

We decided to use Snapshot, a free platform where projects can let community members vote on proposals. In the industry, this process is called “vote signaling.” Voting using cryptocurrency typically incurs fees to process the movement of currency from one wallet to another; on Snapshot that doesn’t happen, thanks to the clever use of the decentralized storage network IPFS. Because Snapshot doesn’t use “on-chain” verification, any votes are fee-less. 

While Decrypt has its own DCPT token, its functionality doesn’t allow for tokens to be staked on Snapshot. However, the NFTs that we offered to token holders do, as they live on Ethereum’s mainnet. So in our first iteration of a DecryptDAO (we’ve been referring to it in-house as “DAOcrypt”), we invited our NFT holders to vote with their NFTs. And for the first vote, we offered up a list of Learn guides (our excellent educational section) we’ve been thinking about doing.

We used Decrypt’s Discord channel to invite readers to participate in the Snapshot poll, giving these potential Learn articles to choose from:

• What are rug pulls? 
• How to stake tokens?
• How does DeFi insurance work?
• What are flash loans? 
• What are liquidity pools? 

The campaign ran for two weeks and we invited all NFT holders to participate. Just over 10% of NFT holders voted in the campaign. You can read the first DAO-selected article here. 

As a first step, the experiment mostly matched our expectations. Decrypt will be running further experiments to help bring Web3 technologies to our millions of readers.

Source

Last week, Decrypt announced its revolutionary new token that gives our readers the chance to earn as they learn.

The Decrypt Token can be earned simply by reading Decrypt, and it lives inside the Decrypt mobile app, which is available on iOS and Android. 

Since launch, we’ve seen over 30,000 readers download the app, create a wallet, and start earning tokens. But this was only the first step in Decrypt’s goal of building interactive ways to read and learn about crypto. The next step is Decrypt Drops. 

Drops are batches of reader rewards. These are released on a weekly basis, giving readers the opportunity to earn different rewards at different times. The rewards are limited, so once they’ve all been earned, they’re gone! 

We’re partnering with innovative companies who are sponsoring specific Drops during time-limited “seasons.” Drops will appear throughout each season. 

In our first Drop, we’re focusing on NFTs (non-fungible tokens), the digital collectibles that have taken the internet by storm. In March, $240 million worth of NFTs have already been bought and sold, dwarfing the $200 million that were sold in all of 2020.

Our first NFT series is called “Connecting the Dots.” For this series, Decrypt has commissioned a group of talented artists to explore the decentralized world, connecting the dots between people, networks, and the technologies that will power the internet’s next chapter.

So, why NFTs?

Non-fungible tokens are everywhere right now and the market is white-hot. The NFT craze might soon cool, but the concept of digital scarcity is here to stay. We want our readers to learn about it firsthand—and the best way to do that is to get your hands on an NFT. Holding a first-series NFT is like carrying a membership card for Decrypt. It shows you’re an O.G. reader and you’ve been with us from the start. 

NFTs are our first form of rewards, but later on, the rewards could be just about any digital or physical item. Think about limited edition Decrypt swag, tickets to live events, special product features to customize your experience on Decrypt—we’re on the lookout for the coolest new ideas, toys, and technologies in crypto. Drops are a way for us to thank our loyal readers and introduce them to cool new concepts and products in the crypto space.

We also see Drops as a form of creative curation for our readers.

As of March 2021, there are 8,900 active cryptocurrencies and 36,739 markets where billions of dollars worth of currencies are bought and sold—not to mention the thousands of artists, musicians, creators, and companies pouring into this space. 

That’s a lot of new stuff to try and digest. This is why Decrypt is going to do the hard work for you. With our Drops platform, our commercial studio aims to help tastemakers discover the newest trends shaping the decentralized world.

To get your hands on our Drops, download the Decrypt app and create your own wallet. Once you’ve done that, you earn tokens by reading, sharing, and reacting to articles in the app. Then, redeem your tokens for rewards.

You can read more about the Decrypt Token and Drops in our Token FAQ and the Drops announcement page.

Source