Product Management Confabulation
What Product Managers are talking about.
As AI proliferates and things on the internet are easier to manipulate, there’s a need more than ever to make sure data and brands are verifiable, said Scott Dykstra, CTO and co-founder of Space and Time, on TechCrunch’s Chain Reaction podcast. “Not to get too cryptographically religious here, but we saw that during the FTX […]
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There’s no reputation system in the decentralized world of web3, so it’s hard to figure out which entities and individuals to trust and depend on.
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
An organization called Newsmast is introducing a new approach to decentralized social media with the launch of an updated version of its Mastodon mobile app that now integrates content from two servers into one interface — a different approach compared with how Mastodon, the open source Twitter/X alternative, typically works. The idea is to offer […]
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While platforms like Reddit and Twitter are changing rules and making life difficult for developers of third-party clients, the ecosystem of Mastodon apps is still growing. Today, indie developer Jake Nelson released a simple iOS app called Radiant, which focuses on simple and functional design.
Other clients, such as Ivory, Mammoth, and Woolly are made by developers who had popular Twitter clients before the Elon Musk platform ostracized them. However, Nelson had no social media app in his development portfolio. He has released various apps like a cookie blocker for Safari, a barcode scanner app to store them in a digital wallet, and a word game under a company called Small Colossus.
Nelson said that he started making Radiant because he had moved to Mastodon and didn’t find any suitable app for the decentralized social network.
“I found that with the rollout of Twitter Blue and the algorithm changes my feed became noticeably worse. A lot of the iOS community on Twitter started talking about moving to Mastodon, and then did, so I took the plunge and did the same. I started to thoroughly enjoy the platform very quickly, but there wasn’t an iOS app that suited me perfectly. Apollo by Christian Selig was previously my most used social media app, by far, and is probably my favorite iOS app ever, and nothing I tried had a similar feel to it,” he told TechCrunch over email.
Image Credits: Radiant.social
Radiant lets you sign in to your existing Mastodon account or create an account on a suggested server. There are plenty of options for posting content including polls, high-quality media, multi-language support and a thread creator tool.
The app has some neat features that are nice to have. For instance, you can filter out duplicate boosts or boosts that you have already seen, show/hide counts for boosts and favorites, display a ring around profile picture of an account which follows you back, and enable advanced post-filtering options.
Image Credits: Radiant.social
One of the biggest challenges with Mastodon is to discover people to follow. Radiant provides recommendations based on people you follow and have interacted with. Nelson said that recommendation features including people, trending hashtags, and popular articles are dependent on the instance where your account has been hosted. He said that he is trying to tap into bigger instances to include some trends from those servers.
Nelson admitted that some parts of the feature set might look like it is overlapping with other popular Mastodon clients, but its unique design and the ability to personalize the interface are the biggest differences. He said that, at this moment, Radiant might cater more to people who are already on Mastodon — but down the line, he wants the app to contribute towards people discovering and joining Mastodon and potentially the broader decentralized social media ecosystem.
Image Credits: Radiant.social
Radiant is free to use app with most features available without any cost. For $1.99 per month, users can get a Premium account and features like custom themes and icons, push notifications, and support for multiple accounts.
Earlier this year, Twitter booted out third-party clients by changing its API rules. Currently, Reddit is taking similar steps to limit commercial alternative clients. Nelson said that he has faith in Mastodon in maintaining the open-sourced nature of the network.
“I view Mastodon as truly open, in that it is open source and its foundations center around interoperability and API access, compared to Reddit and Twitter where the API access can be taken away. While Mastodon the software is technically built and run by a company, that company is a non-profit organization. Mastodon gGmbH also runs the largest Mastodon instances mastodon.social, but I don’t think there is any risk of the API going away or becoming paid which would threaten the future of Radiant, as the non-profit’s goals are broadly toward openness and greater access to the decentralized social web,” he said.
Radiant is a no-frills iOS client for Mastodon by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch
This deep into the crypto winter big venture fund debuts are few and far between, a far cry compared to previous years. But the freeze is not stopping some venture capitalists from launching new funds targeting the decentralized technology market.
Dispersion Capital has compiled a $40 million first fund to invest in decentralized infrastructure, the firm exclusively told TechCrunch. The venture vehicle is backed by Web 2.0 and web3 entities including WeNade, Circle Ventures, Ripple, Alchemy Ventures, NGC and individual general partners. It will focus on deploying capital into pre-seed and seed rounds, and has already deployed 10% of the fund.
The evolution of blockchain infrastructure technology has been slow, Patrick Chang, founder and managing partner of Dispersion Capital, said. “We believe there’s so much more that needs to be built.”
Blockchains and decentralized computing are still very new, Chang added, arguing that they still have a “lot of missing pieces.” In his view, existing blockchain infrastructure technology was built bit by bit, something that new development work which is bringing Web2.0 “know-how” to web3 could help harmonize.
During the 2021 crypto bull market, lots of startups were founded to build NFT projects, decentralized finance protocols and more, but few of the upstart technology companies focused on the underlying infrastructure itself, Chang said. “What was frustrating for users and people coming into web3 was onboarding, scalability and hacks. The infrastructure was incredibly immature and people weren’t thinking about it.”
Fast-forward to today and there are a plethora of startups and developers working to improve web3 infrastructure.
Dispersion plans to deploy its fund into startups that want to help onboard new crypto users with technology like refreshed data infrastructure, cybersecurity and smart contracts.
While it’s mainly looking at U.S.-based companies, Dispersion actively invests in other regions, too, Chang shared. About a quarter of its active investments are based in Israel, but the firm is also looking into Asia-based builders, given the proliferation of developments for ZK, or zero-knowledge technology, in that region, Chang noted.
“The mission for us is how can we get web3 to a level similar to cloud computing that it’s invisible technology that everyone doesn’t realize they’re using, but are,” Chang said. “In the long term, the focus is on how we bring web3 to the masses and bring it [to] a billion users.”
Dispersion Capital launches $40M fund focused on decentralized infrastructure by Jacquelyn Melinek originally published on TechCrunch
Decentralized social network Mastodon announced that it is making it easier to create an account on the fediverse — or at least its own server. Now, when you try to sign up on Mastodon, it will give an easy option to create an account on mastodon.social instead of choosing a server.
One of the prime complaints of joining the Mastodon network has been the complicated flow sign-ups of for different servers. This process can be overwhelming as compared to a centralized social network such as Twitter or Instagram.
Mastodon founder and CEO Eugene Rochko said in a blog post that this new feature is not taking away users’ choice of picking a server or moving to a different one after signing up. They can select “Pick my own server” if they want to join a different instance.
Rochko also mentioned that the upgraded onboarding makes it easier for people to get started and understand the advantages of decentralization later.
“You may be asking, how a default server option furthers decentralization. We believe it’s important for Mastodon to be good as a product on its own merits, and not just because of its ideology. If we only attract people who already care about decentralization, our ability to make decentralization mainstream becomes that much harder,” he said.
“This gives us a far better chance of showcasing what decentralized social networks have to offer instead of having that person bounce and never hearing from them again.”
Last year, after Elon Musk took over Twitter, several users started to register on Mastodon to find an alternative network. At one point Rochko’s team had to stop sign-ups to mastodon.social to ensure good quality of service.
With the latest update, the social network is upgrading its infrastructure and moderation tools to ensure smooth and safe experience for users.
Additionally, Mastodon is soon rolling out improvements like quoted replies and better content and profile search along with ability to create groups. This will make it more competent social networks for people trying to build followings and communities.
Hopefully, these features will make to third-party Mastodon clients like Ivory, Mammoth, and Woolly.
In the last few weeks, Jack Dorsey-backed decentralized Bluesky has seen a lot of activity. While the network is still in invite-only mode, the organization recently launched an Android app, rolled out new moderation tools, shipped new developer tools, and crossed the 50,000-user mark. The network has a similar design to Twitter when it comes to interacting with posts, and that makes it attractive to users who might want to go to an alternative network.
Mastodon now has a simpler sign up process by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch
After launching a pair of well-loved but ultimately star-crossed social apps, Ben Rubin is going all-in on decentralization.
Rubin previously founded Meerkat and Houseparty — apps that pioneered mobile livestreaming and group video chat, respectively — shaping massive social trends in their earliest stages. After working on Slashtalk, an “anti-meeting tool” for the workplace, Rubin is now back to working on consumer apps, albeit in a roundabout way.
These days, Rubin’s vision for social media bears little resemblance with the colorful, user-friendly apps he’s known for popularizing. He’s clearly internalized the lessons of Meerkat’s unfortunate demise and Houseparty’s premature pre-pandemic death-by-acquisition via Epic Games. Rubin is something of a Web3 true believer now, happy to weather the frenzied speculative investment cycles and Sam Bankman-Frieds while holding out hope that the underlying technologies can still unlock a better future for some aspects of the web.
Rubin is currently running Here Not There Labs — “a team of web3 creators dropping projects as we go.” Brian Meek, a longtime former Microsoft employee who worked on Skype’s mobile app, serves as the company’s co-founder and CTO.
Their new project is Towns, a protocol and a web-based chat app designed to facilitate self-owned, self-governed online communities. Because web3, there’s also a crypto component, so Towns will likely initially appeal much more to enthusiasts in that community than the average app store-goer like his past projects.
Out of the gate, Here Not There Labs has picked up a $25.5 million Series A round from A16z Crypto, which joins its existing backers Benchmark and Framework Ventures. It’s also picked up the Towns.com domain (for the low, low price of a couple hundred thousand dollars), a point of pride for Rubin and a mark of his plans for a long game.
“This is this is not just a crypto project — this is a new way of thinking about social networking as a network that is owned and operated by its constituents,” Rubin told TechCrunch. “And I think that’s very exciting to me, especially coming from the experience I had with Meerkat and then Houseparty, where a lot of us didn’t want to sell… But we didn’t govern our own product at [that] point and that’s a product that got to 150 million users.”
The Towns protocol will offer users an Ethereum-based smart contracts system (think miniature programs that live on and are executed through the blockchain) and end-to-end encrypted chat. Here Not There Labs says Towns’ smart contracts that are “extensible, composable, and upgradeable” and will ultimately empower communities to draft their own rules for who gets to participate, what is allowed and how and if they’ll monetize. The Towns backend will run on a relatively centralized proof-of-authority algorithm initially while the team builds out the protocol and will then move to a proof-of-stake system à la Ethereum 2.0 in time.
If the interface looks familiar, it’s not just you.
For users less interested in the wonkier crypto aspects but still intrigued by the promise of decentralization, Towns will also manifest as a set of apps, starting with an invite-only alpha web app that’s live today. As the company explains it, “The Towns app takes all the technical things the protocol implements and makes them available in an open-source, end-to-end encrypted delightful chat experience” — an experience more appealing for users whose eyes glaze over at the mention of NFTs and DAOs.
A broader beta launch that will let anyone create their own community with the protocol is slated for September with a mobile web app on the way in the coming months and native apps thereafter. Down the road, Rubin expects there to be many user-created Towns apps built using the project’s protocol.
For now, the earliest users will have to log in to town with their crypto wallet — a landing page that your average non-crypto person is likely to find confusing at best — but Towns plans to add support for Passkeys, Apple’s next-generation login technology.
Towns wants communities to “truly own their town squares,” though notably the project plans to take a cut of the crypto that gets traded around in those communities to sustain itself. Those specifics will be ironed out as the governance structure gets set up, according to Rubin. Here Not There Labs says it will only run the show in the beginning and decentralize over time, handing the reins over to a Towns-specific DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) that will oversee its governance and make decisions.
“It’s kind of funny, there’s one person who’s controlling one platform that everybody uses, which is Facebook, and then now there’s another person who’s controlling the other platform that everybody uses, which is Twitter,” Rubin said, noting his unease with consolidation in other industries, like Nestlé’s big bottled water play in North America.
The user experience of the Towns web app bears a striking resemblance to Discord and it seems obvious that the project plans to lure disenchanted members of that more traditional chat app’s crypto community. Towns might be inspired by Discord’s design and utility, but if you ask Rubin, Discord isn’t a community model that should inspire its users. “They rent — they have a landlord called Discord and they rent from them,” he said.
What’s less clear is if Towns could have more mainstream appeal to the kind of people who’ve grown uncomfortable with Twitter’s Elon Musk era and are willing to decamp for decentralized but still pretty user-friendly social spaces like Mastodon. Mastodon takes more after Twitter — Towns is very much a chat tool — but the ethos is similar, even if the emphasis on crypto isn’t shared.
Since the project is still in its early days and does have a heavy crypto tie-in, Towns seems designed to appeal strongly to Rubin’s fellow web3 true believers for now. If that will change in time remains to be seen but there’s certainly a growing appetite for online social experiences that aren’t subject to the whims of the mercurial billionaire du jour.
“I think there’s something really exciting about securing that the ability of humans to coordinate and collaborate,” Rubin said. “The idea that it’s censorship-resistant, that it’s encrypted and is owned and operated by the users.”
Houseparty’s founder launches Towns, an open source group chat app that comes with a blueprint by Taylor Hatmaker originally published on TechCrunch
Tres, a financial “data lake” for web3 companies, has raised $7.6 million in a seed round led by boldstart ventures, its founder and CEO Tal Zackon, exclusively shared with TechCrunch.
Investors include F2, The Chainsmokers’ venture fund Mantis, New Form Capital, Kenetic Capital, Blockdaemon Ventures and Alchemy. As well as angel investors like Fireblocks CEO Michael Shaulov and Chainalysis CEO Michael Gronager, among others.
The Tel Aviv-based firm aggregates crypto data across different wallets, accounts and platforms, so crypto entities’ financial teams can better understand what’s happening internally at their business without needing the crypto-native knowledge and experience to gather the information, Zackon said.
Its platform can onboard any on-chain or centralized finance data sources and enable financial workflows like balance calculations or auditing and reporting so businesses can monitor and manage their web3 assets both on-ramp and off-ramp, Zackon added. “The thing about having all the data related to your business in a data lake in a format that you need with raw data and financial data, there’s no need to manually gather the data, move it around, edit it and do calculations.”
“CFOs are really struggling to understand what is happening within their financial parameters because they didn’t grow up in this space, it’s different from traditional finance with new protocols and products coming up all the time,” Zackon said. “They don’t know how to handle it.”
The capital will be used to hire as well as build out its product, Zackon said. “I think today we’re really working on onboarding customers and developing the product for their needs and pains. The more we add, the deeper these use cases become and more use cases will open up.”
As it stands, there’s little technology or platforms out there to help web3 companies manage their finances, Zackon said. “They’re mainly using excel spreadsheets and block explorers like etherscan to manage thousands of their wallets, with hundreds to billions of dollars – manually — which is madness. That’s why we created this.”
“We’re able to go cross-chain, cross-protocol, cross wallet, on-chain and off-chain,” Zackon said. “Adding data whether it’s on Coinbase, Solana or somewhere else – all we need is your wallet address and we can pull all the transactions from all the wallets into one data lake. Something like that doesn’t exist today, you have to look at Ethereum data or Solana data one at a time. But on our platform you can look at it altogether and slice it how you want.”
To date, Tres has monitored and analyzed over $40 billion of crypto assets for customers like Hivemind Capital, non-custodial staking platform Stakely and blockchain infrastructure firm Blockdaemon across the US, Israel and Europe, its press release stated.
Although the current crypto market is wavering, the downturn and bearish sentiment is “actually a positive” for Tres, Zackon said.
“When everything is going up and everyone is making money, no one cares about finance,” Zackon said. “But when things start going sideways, you have to think about what you’re actually worth, how much runway you have, where the money is.”
At the end of the day, Tres hopes to become the “financial backbone” to crypto organizations, Zackon said.
Tres raises $7.6M to help web3 teams manage their financials and crypto data by Jacquelyn Melinek originally published on TechCrunch
Four days ago, just a few minutes before 3 am ET, a long-anticipated upgrade to Ethereum was executed. Since then, the second most valuable blockchain’s cryptocurrency, ETH, has tumbled — and some are saying its price hasn’t bottomed out yet.
When the upgrade, generally referred to as “the Merge,” transpired, ETH was priced at about $1,600. At the time of publication, ETH is worth about $1,327 down just over 17% from the landmark system change.
“The FOMO and speculation around the Merge are done, and it’s back to business as usual for most in the space.” Flux co-founder Daniel Keller
Over the past several months, speculation has centered around whether ETH would be accepted post-Merge, Daniel Keller, co-founder of a decentralized cloud infrastructure Flux, said to TechCrunch. Since Ethereum moved from proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-stake (PoS), it left its crypto miners “behind” in the transition, he added.
“Did they alienate a core demographic and remove one of the best parts of decentralization? I think we see the direct impact of that speculation to the downside,” Keller said.
Ethereum drops more than 17% after ‘way over-hyped’ Merge by Jacquelyn Melinek originally published on TechCrunch
Open Web Collective, a blockchain and web3 accelerator, has launched a new division called OWC Ventures to invest in early-stage crypto startups, the team exclusively told TechCrunch.
The division is backed by Barry Silbert’s Digital Currency Group and the blockchain protocol NEAR (which OWC previously spun out from), Jeff Lavoie, head of investments at OWC Ventures, said to TechCrunch.
There will also be a fund behind OWC Ventures, which has not closed yet, but the team said it anticipates “raising a $20 million vehicle for pre-seed to Series A deals with co-investment opportunities.”
“If you look at NEAR’s ethos and DNA, we’re capturing a lot of that [with OWC Ventures]. NEAR’s focus is on user experience, the end developer, Lavoie said. They’ve tried to make their lives as easy as possible, to create the next leaders in web3.”
NEAR protocol’s focus has been on improving developer language, documentation, the technology, and other things they’ve created, Lavoie said. “They’ve enabled and empowered the developer. That’s a theme that’s incredibly powerful to us and we’re going to focus on that. Without that none of this is possible.”
OWC’s two-year-old accelerator program is made up of 26 alumni founders who have raised over $360 million in capital collectively, its website states.
“We’re evolving the way in which we’re going to play in the web3 space and move forward web3 adoption,” Mildred Idada, founder and general partner of OWC, told TechCrunch. “We’ve been spending time on the earliest stages pre-seed and seed, but with this new roll out we’re excited to move into Series A and other focus areas.”
Aside from investing in developers, OWC Ventures will also deploy capital in other sectors like DeFi, SocialFi and gaming, Lavoie said. “Our strategy is to play at the early stage, we want to stay small enough to participate in the highest value opportunities.”
“We expect a lot of activity to pick up in the next few months and as we enter into Q1,” Idada said. “But we’re actively deploying and raising, we’re excited about the time we’re in right now. There’s never been a better time to deploy”.
NEAR protocol spin-off Open Web Collective launches venture arm to invest in early-stage web3 by Jacquelyn Melinek originally published on TechCrunch