The Era of Apps has begun L2s are changing how they approach ecosystem development. Giving away free money (grants) is quickly being replaced by investment and structured incubation programs. It's too costly to give 20-100k for a builder just to pick one ecosystem and then migrate somewhere else or fail. The hope of future transaction fees is not enough to justify such generous incentives. As ecosystems evolve from being purely infra to also operating as funds of funds, a bigger transformation will take place. Growing an equities portfolio is a powerful business model, which also means that ecosystems are no longer reliable on everything being onchain to accrue value. Projects with small onchain components but otherwise able to generate significant revenue will become increasingly interesting for ecosystems to incubate. This is not apparent now, but the incentives point this way, and it will be obvious in 1-2 years that this is the way. Ecos that realise this early will have a first mover advantage developing incubation capabilities and developing projects that capture valuable niches. Pure onchain protocols ruled 2021-2024. But the era of Apps has now begun.

Meanwhile, in web2 the traditional VC model is under attack. Poor ROI after the excessive valurations of 2022-23 and reduced exits due to drier IPO markets are putting a lot of pressure on funds to evolve or die. Funds are moving earlier (with venture studios) to originate ventures and get founder-level valuation. Or are moving later and starting to operate as PE houses. L2 ecosystems can either create VC funds in the style of 2010s or leapfrog.

Depends how you measure that. Some that have a live product: Team/community comms (discord replacement) with the ability to integrate into the UI any app (game, dao tool, forum, etc etc): @CommonGround_cg Surveys (using AI for deeper insights and optional cross pollination e.g. retrospectives, priorities, etc) @harmonica_chat Automatic Q&A based on community knowledge (e.g. customer support, activity summaries for delegates, etc) @together_crew Automatically ranking priorities @SimScoreteam Attributing rewards from collaborating in a project @collabberry

I'm bullish on tokenised venture studios. (Enough that have spent 3 years building one!) The studio does a lot of the early work, researching, assembling teams, validating, etc etc. And acts as a high-context, hands-on, highly diligent investor. The studio team invests their own time (getting paid less than they could in a job but getting ownership in the studio as a tradeoff) so everyone is highly aligned with using their time wisely to build valuable projects. The studio should have its own fund for the super early phases and ideally also fund to keep investing in subsequent rounds and not get diluted. The studio itself could be traded, providing a more stable and less risky bet than speculating on single companies. Compared to tokenised VCs, studios actually compound value. Because you learn with every project how to make the next one more successful. Studios are a startup factory, not just a capital allocator. So, compared to VCs, the value of a studio goes way beyond the current portfolio. It's the value of the factory, not just the inventory. (sure VCs have processes and brands too, but those have 10x less leverage than in a studio, and Studios can also systematise more, making them less reliant on any single individual) The (big) cherry on top of the cake is doing cross-ownership between the projects and the studio, so all the ventures are incentivised to help each other win. More and more projects in the portfolio multiplies network effects as projects support each other to grow. We call this *upgraded* studios Swarms. The above model only works with specialisation 🎯 (so the core team learns more and more and the projects have a lot of area for p2p collaboration). That's why we do CollabTech exclusively (B2B is particularly suited for compounding as sales cycles are low unless you already have a relationship!). But there could also be Swarms focused on DeFi, Gaming, etc. We can't change retail investor expectations overnight. But we can provide models that do make sense for the level of due diligence and networks they have available. Tokenised Swarms are a partnership between professional operators and (retail) investors 🤝 The studio can compound massively over the years, and retail can also participate with expertise, amplification, etc. happy to share more if it's of interest

We're discussing with them about using @harmonica_chat and @SimScoreteam to do the sense making