2023 was a year when we can look back in wonder at how much change happens, in markets, technology, societies, and culture, while we stay enchanted by our keyboards and screens.
A global economic reshuffle is clearly accelerating now, as nearly everyone has shaken off, throughout the year, beyond the first tentative steps after the pandemic and its effects.
Web3 has shaken out the most blatant LARPers, and seems in better measures to be swapping the bear for a long missing return to cypherpunk.
AI is suddenly everywhere in public, far beyond the earliest adopters. With generative models and chat based assistants making such massive leaps in performance every few months, weeks, and even days, it seems like this timeline’s most watched dramas play out in hypertime, with entire seasons delivering what before ’23 we would have thought to be impossible twists that are now almost common.
Blinked and missed it? It’s not just you.
There’s something so wrong with how we get and share information now, that extending solutions for the byzantine general’s problem to every layer we interact with has never felt more relevant, yet is still talked about (if at all) in ways too hypertechnical and esoteric for consumer markets to really get it.
And the old social media is dead and gone. What’s taken its place is a mess at best, while we’re in the gap between the peak 2.0 years and the fully decentralized social web still being developed.
In this backdrop, 2023 for the DIGITALAX ecosystem can be summed up in one word: build.
Built in 2023:
Length of code isn’t everything, but it can be a good measure with the right context. We have committed and deployed hundreds of thousands of lines of code this year, connecting decentralized social media with on-chain encrypted checkouts, generative AI, and local manufactory print fulfillment.
Development has stayed focused on integrating useful tools, platforms and embedded mechanisms throughout the ecosystem to simplify how creators can gain transparent and secure communication channels, grow community relationships, convert p2p customer funnels, and sell creative goods more easily while living in increasingly seamless hybrids of the hyper-online and IRL.
The connective thread and key principle remains unbundling creative commerce through fashion first, as the most viable means to tangible acceleration of human autonomy comes from storytelling so relatable it can be lived in + the growth and distribution of economic leverage through the skilled use of machines in code.
Continuing to steward these principles into practice has meant deep integration with web3 social through Lens Protocol, with Stable Diffusion for generative visual AI, Lit Protocol for decentralized encryption, and Livepeer for video infrastructure.
Because navigating these industries is hard enough (even when tuning out the chaos of global macro realignment), you can now find your own way through the maze of knowing exactly what you’re looking for with Cypher, a simple ecosystem-wide text, filter, and visual discovery lookup.
And, as always, it’s all in the public domain — code, art, fashion, and prints included.
Public domain works reduce FUD, cut down on worry that your efforts will go to waste, encourage more creative innovation, accelerate autonomy, and are free for all to use at little cost to us beyond transaction fees for persistent decentralized publishing, dissemination, and storage. They also have a tremendous deterrent effect against anyone who tries to chokepoint our access to information and markets.
Live Portals:
Cypher
- Instant ecosystem-wide search, checkout and fulfillment.
- All in one Creator dashboard for mint, order, sale and fulfillment ops.
- Connected to Lens V2 open actions, all content is a publication, for seamless shares, likes, follows.
Coin Op
- Instant Gen AI editor canvas and preroll checkout for synthing custom streetwear to IRL fulfillment (hoodies, shirts, stickers, posters).
- Connected to Lens V2 open actions, every preroll is a publication, for seamless shares, likes, follows.
Chromadin
- 24/7 Channel Surfing and collection marketplace on Lens Protocol.
- Creator Dispatch for mint and token-gated post ops.
- Two seasons of The Dial Pirate Radio — standalone and interview style radio episodes covering AI, web3, encryption and autonomy.
- Portable Chromadin player & channel feed live in Cypher Search, Coin Op and DIGITALAX flagship.
The Manufactory
- Local hardware, machine and virtual factory network for running custom LLMs, Loras, and base Stable Diffusion models, as well as print manufacture and fulfillment for IRL goods.
- Live in Cypher Search, Coin Op and Chromadin.
Lit Listener
- Typescript SDK for Peer 2 Peer Encryption triggered by on-chain events and webhooks, integrating Lit Protocol Programmable Key Pairs.
- Connected step-by-step user friendly experimental interface
- Docs
The Dial Pirate Radio
Two seasons of TDPR have been produced and released live on Chromadin.
Weekly episodes have covered fresh perspectives on decentralized social networks, data privacy, encryption, web3 commerce strategies, and creative freedom across platforms, with the occasional 1–1 interview with artists and creators building in the industry.
Microbrands
The ecosystem has expanded by welcoming in new microbrands. They’re now a crucial part of the street crew that designs, synthesizes, and mints CC0 web3 fashion, print and virtual NFTs.
They lead the way in using the Manufactory network, producing and managing work via dedicated virtual machine interfaces.
Kinora & Legend
We’re in the final stages of preparing Kinora and Legend for their release in early 2024. Despite some hiccups with external infrastructure, we’re now nearing full resolution.
Kinora
Incorporates on-chain Livepeer video metrics with decentralized social quests on Lens Protocol. An open-source TypeScript SDK for managing quests, players, and video metrics and an app interface that streamlines quest creation and player reward management. Kinora’s SDK will be part of both Chromadin and Cypher, expanding Quest interactions throughout the ecosystem.
Legend
Provides peer-to-peer web3 social grants for public goods, powered by Lens Protocol V2 Open Actions. It features a self-funding mechanism through Lens publications and unique apparel collectibles.
What’s Next In 2024
For the first half of this new year, AI agents are taking over as the main focus in the ecosystem for their development, design, training, and use.
NPC character teams, assigned roles based on their specific skills, are active in group chats. They interact through API calls to either paid proprietary systems like OpenAI or accessible open-source LLMs (sometimes a mix of both), enhanced by multimodal function calling toolchains, all within virtual environments.
NOTE: “virtual” here currently means conda, venv, docker, etc, (as it’s mostly pytorch + cuda + python for LLM dev all the way down), expansion to the other kind of virtual through VR/AR/XR immersive interface games and tools is obvious, as the metaverse hype cycle likely starts to recover towards the second half of ’24 or first half of ‘25.
These NPC teams assist creators who are actively building microbrands, projects, and even entire startups, as we are each enabled to compete head to head vs much larger brands with their legacy costs and technical/org culture debt. Embracing this open market approach helps tackle the sudden change that’s taken place where what’s AI and what’s human are increasingly inseparable.
The way it works, through repeat play, iterative work, and sustained contextual memory — combined teams of NPCs (AI agent characters) and players (creators) can keep refining towards production ready results until each quest, sprint, or goal is complete.
Incentives matter here too. NPCs teams are evaluated, “hired”, assigned roles, assembled into groups, let loose to do their best, and “rewarded” for their success within scenarios ranging from starting your own successful software dev studio, to producing content marketing for your streetwear storefront, and possibly most exciting for the DIGITALAX ecosystem: learning to git gud managing and growing virtual factories for creative goods.
This introduces an interactive, agent-based groupware layer to the whole creative commerce cycle, from concept to design, and “sim to earn” microfactory production for decentralized fulfillment.
$MONA & DIGITALAX NFTs
This has been said many times across previous announcements, in our discord server, and in countless other mediums. To clarify once again, and to deter anyone that might have missed it from forming the wrong expectations about what DIGITALAX, and the ecosystem of apps, tools, and tokens around it are:
$MONA is not an investment and holding $MONA does not make you an investor.
We are here to build what is necessary to maintain and grow autonomy through decentralized technology and creative commerce, not to speculate about finance. “Investor” and “Investment” are terms / instruments with very specific meanings and uses, and they don’t match what we do here. Don’t know how to make it more clear: this isn’t wordplay. If you want to be an investor, go study and speculate, within your means, somewhere else.
To be extra clear: the team opted for zero allocation of the token at launch, ensuring full transparency of treasury activities directly on-chain. Market dynamics drive activity within the market, showing a commitment to openness and market-led operations that is rare, even in web3.
You can use $MONA for its purpose within the ecosystem, if that utility is interesting to you. Or don’t, if it isn’t.
It is usable and integrated throughout all live applications, reducing friction in the marketplaces we’ve built for virtual goods and facilitating the production + fulfillment of IRL goods.
In 2024, this usage will expand to be the key token for the virtual NPC factory-market interface & groupware layer within the emerging machine to machine creative economy, operating at first through The Manufactory network.
When inserted, it supplies the “current” needed to coordinate, run, allocate, delegate or bundle active and idle units within the NPC microeconomy.
Further, in this system, DIGITALAX ecosystem NFTs and ERC20 tokens, in unison with $MONA, can be used to trigger + operate code designated for targeted AI agent tasks, and enable advanced scenarios and strategies unlocked via threshold encryption event listeners.
The Autograph Quarterly
Extending on the early origins of DIGIFIZZY, The Autograph Quarterly catalog is slated for an early 2024 release.
Over the past few months, we’ve collaborated with a group of over 20 Lens Creators, including ecosystem microbrands, to feature digital artworks and apparel designs in a print catalog.
The catalog will include both IRL and virtual drops for auction and instant collection, integrating Lens V2 Open Action.
Here’s a sneak peak:
Heading into 2024, our focus is as clear as it’s ever been.
Keep building to unbundle creative commerce, through fashion first. Keep simplifying the complexities of AI + web3, and make them work better for real people and real projects.
