Finding Web3's Third Place
In Vitalik's paper Decentralized Society: Finding Web3's Soul¹, the authors propose a Decentralized Society built on top of a network of Soul Bound Tokens (SBT's). SBT's focus to the social aspect of blockchain networks that can foster a myriad of use cases such as airdrops, DAOs, and public/private goods. These use cases are everyday uses of web3 which benefit directly from the advancement of social tokens. Taking this concept into the physical world, parallels can be made referencing two other notable works, The Great Good Place² (Ray Oldenburg) and Missing Middle America³ (Daniel Parolek).
Sociologist Ray Oldenburg coined the term "third place" refers to a place where people can gather outside of home and work. The first place is home, the second place is work, and the third place is where people gather to socialize and relax. Examples of third places include cafes, bars, parks, and other public spaces. Daniel Parolek explains how a diverse set of housing options can solve housing shortages and revitalize neighborhoods.
Both Ray and Daniel explore the concept of the missing third place in the physical world while Vitalik describes how web3's third place can be enhanced via SBTs. What becomes glaringly obvious is that so many people have found web3 to be a vibrant third place, one where ideas can flourish, social experiments attempted and art can thrive. The disconnect between the physical world and web3 world needs mending. With the advancement of a few key innovations, namely, account abstraction, rollups and cheaper data layers, Align Network aims to strengthen and broaden web3's third place and lay the groundwork to bring the physical world's third places into the future.
The internet at large has provided a third place for many people of diverse backgrounds and geographical locations. Unburdened by the need to congregate at physical addresses, online internet communities flourished as soon as internet chat rooms were created. What crypto did was provide a strong financial layer to some of the ideas postulated in online forums and social platforms. With the explosion of the NFT sector in 2021 and the isolation brought on by COVID-19, vast swaths of new entrants found a third place where they could have positive experiences online, interact with others, enjoy art and discuss social issues. This experience exemplified the power web3 has to connect people.
The intent of Align is to build on the concepts of social protocols allowing developers to create applications using Align's reputation and identity layers. Build your third place in a few lines of code whether it be an art NFT, conversational group, rewards based program, or physical events. Cater decentralized finance applications to service these third places utilizing Align to provide rich and actionable user data. It's glaringly obvious at this point that the web3 ecosystem is steps closer to finding it's soul.
Join Align in jumping the chasm to bring physical third places, onchain.