Once you start living the Web3 life it’s easy to take for granted all the amazing things that are happening in the space. And at the same time, the rest of the world has a hard time understanding the things Web3 makes possible. Think of “Web3 stories” as a way to look in the window and see how people use Web3. I will just describe my experience of living in Web3.

One of my favourite things is finding ways to explain complex concepts in simple ways and make the accessible to a larger audience.

Recently, I’ve been fascinated with von Neumann’s set-theoretic construction of natural numbers. (I know, I know, even the title is intimidating, but that’s the point, right?)

For me, it’s an elegant and simple construction there’s no reason it shouldn’t be common knowledge. It’s a great example of what theoretical mathematics look like and how they can be closer to philosophy than accounting, contrary to what most people think. One that any high school student that knows what an empty set is can understand.

So I created an artwork, called “Number9”. I think of it as a blueprint of “9”, based on von Neumann’s construction. It looks somehow unusual, if you look at it you will realise that patterns repeat in a fractal way which may not be very clear, but it’s definitely there. And if you are intrigued to read the description, you will probably get what von Neumann proposed. Or at least plant a seed in your mind.

Then, I went to zora.co and created an “open edition” NFT. An open edition means that there is no limit on the number of people who can mint this NFT. Remember: the idea is to make it accessible to wide audience.

On the other hand, some kind of scarcity has an its appeal, so I set a time limit (the mint is open for only 3 days) and a limit per wallet (two = one for you and one for a friend). And I set a price of 0.003 ETH ( about $5) to discourage abuse by bots who create wallets and mint a huge amount of tokens.

I shared Number9 on Farcaster (you can think of it as “web3 twitter”).

One of the cool things about Farcaster is that every user has an Ethereum wallet. So, I used Fardrop (a service developed because Farcaster is an open protocol, so anyone can build any service they like on top of it) to get a list of the wallet addresses of the people that follow me.

I went back to Zora and imported this list as an “Allow List” that allows each one of these wallets to mint one copy of Number9 for free: A simple promo and a nice gesture for my followers. It worked! The Farcaster post about the free mint got a good number of likes, and generated a number of additional free mints.

Something I had not considered (I’m not into giveaways, attention farming and things like that) is I also got a few additional followers, probably due to a combination of the interactions with my post and the free mint.