What Does Onchain Curation Mean?

Onchain curation is an enormous topic that I think may end up underpinning how all information + content is distributed across the internet. Without getting too technical, here is a brief explanation of what it is and the types of ecosystems it can help flourish.

Let’s start with a question: how do you decide what content is displayed on your website? Are you uploading specific files, pulling in data from a private content management system, or following an IPFS gateway -- discoverable through the hardcoded address of a specific NFT? 

Each of these methods rely on some entity deciding what information should be present. This decision represents the act of curation, and each of the aforementioned strategies involve a hard-coded input (not programmatic) or a private database that cannot be discovered by other entities.

Onchain curation provides a different approach to accomplishing the same goal, while also publicly storing the decisions on what information to host on the site – leading to intriguing possibilities related to distribution access + platform composability. 

A Few Use Cases

Imagine storing an array of addresses onchain, something like this: 

If all of these addresses happened to be representing the same type of content with the same metadata standard (ex: ZORA edition collections), you could pull them into an app and programmatically provide an interface for the content without needing to know the specifics of the content ahead of time. This is what most NFT marketplaces currently do, but because they need to work for any type of NFT, they can only provide very basic rendering + functionality rather than more custom experiences.

Curation Passes

Now imagine that the ability to update that array of addresses is dependent on you owning a “curation pass” – which could be represented by some combination of ERC20, ERC721, and ERC1155 tokens (or any other logic you want to provide) . Effectively this allows a person or community to provide a shared content distribution portal where members are given the ability to curate the content provided on a given platform. You could imagine things like magazines handing out publication passes to different writers, music platforms giving out playlist passes to respected curators, or online clothing stores giving seasonal inventory passes to various brands. These passes could be distributed freely as a perk, or swapped in exchange for the “market value” of the ability to decide what content shows up on a given platform. Think of this as a distributed publication mechanism.

Platform Souls + Aggregation

In addition to distributed publication, you onchain curation also creates the idea of “platform souls.” This concept is a bit of a hybrid, merging the discourse around soulbound tokens with Artiva’s recent presentation on the future of platform composability. In essence, onchain assemblages of content rendered in a specific way on a given website represent the “soul” of that platform – with the user interface “merely” acting as a front end to access the underlying content being curated by the holders of the curation pass for a particular onchain curation contract.

If enough people build upon a shared curation standard and list enough content onchain for others to find, platform level aggregation can occur where multiple microplatforms are indexed for their specific curation and then presented by an aggregator. Think microplatforms hosting specific albums or playlists, and aggregator platforms hosting specific microplatforms. Composable content indexing + tagging enabling the ability to link to + aggregate content recursively.

Present Material

Present Material is a platform built on top of an initial implementation of such a standard (still in beta!!!). Here is a short description of the platform, pulled directly from the site:

“Songcamp is a web3 laboratory experimenting at the edges of music and the new internet. ‘Songcamp: Present Material’ is a web3 record store, conceived and constructed in collaboration with ZORA. We’ve worked together to provide a platform for Songcamp’s diverse array of artists to showcase their finished works, demos, ideas and works in progress. We hope to use the tools of web3 to zoom out from finished products and provide fans with a view on the process behind the songs”

Present Material provides a central location to access the decentralized Songcamp community. Anyone who owns the $PRESENT token (initially passed out to Songcamp members) have the ability to update the list of collections that are shown on the Present Material site. Most interestingly, that list can be pulled into other platforms (like web3 music players such as Future Tape + Spinamp) because it is discoverable onchain.

Why Is This Interesting

I urge you to stop where you are in this article and go watch this presentation given by Astrosuka + Sofja during the Metabolism hackathon. If you don’t have the time right now, here is a snippet of the presentation I tweeted out (but seriously go watch the talk!):

In the presentation, the founders of unun talked about their vision of a budding ecosystem of millions of microplatforms, each catered towards a hyperlocal scene (ex: underground experimental multimedia art community of Buenos Aires) and freed from the constraints of the monolithic platforms most art lives on today. Aggregation platforms could then curate directly from these community-originated microplatforms, thereby passing off the role of curation from themselves -- who most likely lack the direct context formed from belonging to such a specific community, to the people actually building it. Not only does this improve the curation of at the aggregation level, it also empowers communities to step up to this role, and potentially creating a new creative scene along with it

What Is Coming

I believe onchain curation is the missing link that can tie all of the existing web3 creative infrastructure together at the social level. What do you get when you combine presentmaterial.xyz, unun.link, door.link, and future tape with an open-source ethos and a vision for the next creative era? We are in the Internet Renaissance, create what is missing . . .