S3E9: The Ownership Economy

Justin Norman: In last week's episode, we explored the creator economy in Africa. Many African creators are building the hype locally, while consumption and monetization comes internationally. It's strictly per capita GDP economics - in African markets there are few consumers with the discretionary spending power for entertainment or the associated goods sold by creators.

But towards the end of that episode, we began to explore a premise - what if we could not just subsidize the local audience, but pay and reward them, as well?

In my conversation with Mr Eazi - the Afrobeats singer and entrepreneur - he shared some future plans.

Mr Eazi: My next album, I want my fans to be able to buy 30% to have access to 30% of the royalties that will make.

Justin Norman: The premise of web3 technology, and tools like NFTs in particular, is that it creates a new paradigm - new ownership and business models that are beyond the scope of what is possible in the web2 context today.

Now, I know, I know. NFTs are confusing, the value isn't always entirely clear. But with the caveats that crypto today isn't entirely user friendly, and that in African markets - and frankly elsewhere in the world, as well - with the caveat the regulatory environment needs to be sorted out, I think NFTs and web3 infrastructure, in general, can play an important role in monetization for creators in African markets and across the global south. And taken to its logical evolution, web3 can play an important role more broadly across sectors and societies, as well.

We're going to look at NFTs as a tool and web3 as a technology and infrastructure that can create new and perhaps more beneficial and inclusive economic models than the status quo. While I don't necessarily think web3 is the holy grail, like some others on Twitter might lead you to believe, I do think we ought to have a sober yet optimistic conversation about the role this could and likely will play in emerging markets.

Last episode, we explored the creator economy, in part through the lens of a shift in the media value chain that gave birth to the creator economy and web2 in the first place. In this episode, our final episode of season 3, and the final episode of our season-long exploration of value chains, we move on to the next stage - to explore how web3 technology powers the ownership economy, and what it means for the African ecosystem.

Justin Norman: Two things to share, before we start.

First, as we explore web3 and its potential impact in African markets, one thing we feel strongly about is the need for increased experimentation in this nascent space. There's still a lot of work to do, and new models of economics and participation to sort out. But we believe that the crypto space rewards participation, and those who jump in with both feet. And for The Flip, we plan to not only talk more about web3, but to actively get further involved in the space from an experimentation perspective, as well.

To that end, in commemoration with today's episode, we've partnered up with an incredibly talented digital artist from Senegal, Linda Dounia, to produce and mint a piece of generative art as an NFT. It's an opportunity to further explore questions around value of art and new business models for creators and the role of gatekeepers and hegemony, and what all of these questions mean for African artists, in particular. And experiments like these, I hope, also create opportunities for us to onboard more curious people into the web3 ecosystem, as well. To learn more about this project with Linda, I've left some links in the show notes.

And second, as always, we'd like to thank MFS Africa, for their sponsorship of the entirety of this season of The Flip.

In this episode, one thing we're going to talk about is a shift in monetization models for creators, from an advertising-based business model to a commerce-based model. The infrastructure, whether MFS Africa's payments hub or nascent web3 infrastucture, is playing an important role in facilitating commerce. So while cross-border payments in Africa we're largely seen as remittance payments, what's actually happening is cross-border commerce. And it's something I talked about with Luke Kyohere. MFS Africa's Chief Product Officer.

Luke Kyohere: We can aggregate data on why people are sending money. And the reason where we have to do this is, interestingly, for AML reasons. We've got to ask what the funds are for, and you've got remittance, you've got just paying for a good or service, you've got a bunch of other options. And then we've got a report on that in aggregate. And it's certainly the case that a big part of it is not remittance. A lot of times you'll see that it's for something either than just sending money for sending money’s sake, and that is becoming perhaps even more prevalent, especially the last few years.

We've got cases where people, especially in the digital side, are offering services across borders. And more and more, we see that physically for physical goods if the logistics part can be borne out I mean, if you look at the volume traveling between Africa and China, that will tell you that SMEs want to buy and sell across borders. It’s just do they see the value, do they know the product, and can they work out the logistics?

And so where someone like in MFS Africa comes in and where the interoperability between platforms between say Safaricom in Kenya and MTN in Uganda and Vodacom in Tanzania and so on like that come in is people are able to do this across borders. And so just the interoperability that makes it possible for someone to see something on Instagram that's being sold by someone in Kenya, and then to actually pay them with mobile money from their Vodacom line in Tanzania to their M-Pesa line Kenya, that wouldn't be possible if it wasn't for a partnership between the companies like MFS Africa. And it's not the need didn't exist before, it just wasn't possible.

Justin Norman: Welcome back to The Flip, I'm your host Justin Norman.

I want to start this week's episode with a premise. I've asked a friend of the podcast to help explain.

Seyi Taylor: So let's start from like an idea that is super interesting to me, which is every time there's a changing technology, which changes how people express themselves, then two things happen.

Justin Norman: That's Seyi Taylor. While Nigerians might recognize him as a co-founder of TechCabal, today he's building a no-code agency and an NFT gaming universe called the YOLO Dice project.

Seyi Taylor: The first thing that happens is that everybody from the old world tries to translate all of them to the new world directly. And then eventually you have native applications for that new paradigm. And then we're like, “Oh, that's how we’re supposed to use that.”

Justin Norman: At the earliest days of the internet, its applications mimicked the analog world. Newspaper on the internet. Radio on the internet. Classifieds on the internet. But eventually, internet native products were developed - like google search and the algorithmic social media newsfeed.

Seyi Taylor: What we're seeing very early on, what we saw very early was, what's a crypto version of X? What's the crypto version of this thing that we've had for the past five, ten years?

Justin Norman: So the premise of web3 technology, and tools like NFTs, in particular, is that they can and perhaps will create new paradigms and economic models and that these models will have positive implications for creators and fans alike.

And when there’s a shift in technology, media businesses are the first to adapt to new paradigms because of their relative simplicity, while others follow later. So while we’re going to spend much of this episode talking about the impact to the creator economy specifically, the upside is that these models will have positive implications for other sectors, as well.

In order to talk about web3 and NFTs, we're going to need to start this episode with some definitions. But there’s a few things I'd like to add in advance - first, there's so much more we need to talk about in the crypto and web3 space in the African context - payments, DeFi, identity, and much more. We will definitely explore those sub-topics further in future episodes, but that's beyond the scope of this particular episode. And second, we know that talking about crypto and web3 and NFTs can get a bit jargony. In this episode, we're going to give some light definitions, but we're going to also make the assumption that you, our listener, have a cursory knowledge. Though in the show notes, I've also linked to a crypto glossary we put together for a past episode, and I will link to some further readings, as well.

So, with that said - to define web3, we first have to look backwards.

Seyi Taylor: There was that whole social, mobile, local movement. It was, you know, nicknamed web2. And we had just a bunch of platforms, and it was like we're all going to be connected and that's going to create, you know, marketplaces and opportunities that were never created before. And in many ways that turned out to be very true. It did turn out that those models of connection and personalization created, you know, tons of value.

Justin Norman: So if Web1 was the nascent internet, read-only. Web2 is read and write - which gave rise to user-generated content and social media platforms. Web3, however, allows for not only reading and writing but ownership.

Seyi Taylor: It seems like it is possible to create a different paradigm.

Justin Norman: This different paradigm - ownership - is made possible by web3's core characteristics. Web3 refers to that which is built on top of public blockchains like Ethereum. It uses a native token, Ether, to conduct transactions on-chain, and as we'll explain, it's permissionless and decentralized, which gives rise to what are known as decentralized applications, like DeFi platforms or NFT marketplaces.

And blockchains like Ethereum use a technology called smart contracts - which are programs stored on a blockchain that run when predetermined conditions are met - and which makes the decentralized apps trustless systems.

All of this has massive implications globally and for emerging markets, in particular. Let's start with decentralization.

Seyi Taylor: From a practical standpoint, decentralization has lots of benefits. Forget about the value of the data for a second. Think instead about just the access to data and the idea that you have to essentially seek Facebook's permission to access it at any time, or Twitter's permission to access at any time, as opposed to networks that are where your data or your content are more owned by you, the individual. You don't have to seek a third party's permission to access it. You can essentially plug it into anywhere you like. A third party might create a better home for it and you can plug it in there and use it or not. And I think that that's fundamentally, I think that's one of the biggest ideas that we're seeing in this paradigm.

Justin Norman: Now decentralization can mean a lot of things - censorship-resistant, control rests in the hands of the users, and not a centralized group of decision-makers, and so on.

But I think the most important part of what decentralization means is that it's permissionless. I have my on-chain data - I am the owner of my on-chain data - and I can with my crypto wallet, connect to other decentralized applications that can use my data with my permission.

Today anyone, anywhere in the world can open a crypto wallet like MetaMask to participate in the world of web3 applications. And this is really important in the context of the difficult experiences Africans often have with using web2 platforms today.

Let's imagine a scenario.

Seyi Taylor: A hypothetical scenario where you log into MetaMask, try to create a wallet, MetaMask says, "Oh, you're not in a country where we allow the creation of wallets you need level two verification. Please upload a passport photograph and a driver's license." And then when you try to upload, it says, “Well, I'm sorry, you're not in your country where we do this. Enter your email and we'll let you know when.”

If anybody who’s tried to register for a lot of services from a lot of developing world, definitely in Africa, you've had some version of that experience, right, where you've tried to participate in the global economy and basically been told that actually not yet, not now.

Justin Norman: So what web3 means for those in developing markets, first and foremost, is a true, permissionless opportunity to participate in the global digital economy.

Seyi Taylor: For many people in Africa, the internet economy is something that they've only heard of, the global internet economy, I guess, and I think that this is the one places where crypto helps to do away with some of those barriers, and allow people to participate in global crypto economies.

Justin Norman: Now, what happens when any individual can participate in a global economy? One thing that happens is that they get to design their own communities and institutions their own way - in a permissionless way.

And NFTs are one tool to help with this.

Seyi Taylor: I think NFTs are probably one of the most interesting pieces of technology that we have in crypto.

Justin Norman: NFT stands for non-fungible token, which is decidedly different from a fungible token. One bitcoin is fungible. I can give you a bitcoin and you can give me back a bitcoin, and we couldn't tell the difference. They are the same value.

But with non-fungible tokens, two tokens are not identical and instead are uniquely identifiable, they represent something different on-chain, and as a result, have a potentially different value from one another, as well.

And the key thing about NFTs is that the tokens themselves are owned. The users own that data, and NFTs provide true ownership opportunities for creators and collectors alike. A primary and initial use case of NFTs today is digital art. But digital art is just the beginning.

Seyi Taylor: Art was really great as one application of the primitive, but the token itself, uniquely identifiable, can literally content practically on-chain, that's a very different thing. And that's supremely powerful.

Justin Norman: Any digital file can essentially be stored as an NFT, which broadens their utility far and wide beyond just digital art. And we're beginning to see new and novel use cases, from music NFTs to NFTs as verifiable digital credentials to NFTs as membership passes to digital communities and more.

Cuy Sheffield: That opens this opportunity when you move from an advertising-based business to a commerce-based business model.

Justin Norman: That's Cuy Sheffield, he's the Head of Crypto at Visa.

Cuy Sheffield: And so I think what we're seeing with web3 is just the shift from the primary way that a creator monetizes from advertising to commerce, and it's lowering the barrier to entry for creators to engage in commerce and to sell products online.

Justin Norman: I got in touch with Cuy for two reasons - not only is he leading the charge behind Visa's foray into crypto - in which they’re working to extend their payments network to include cryptocurrencies, and in which they’re developing programs to support digital creators and in which they are buying CryptoPunks - but in his personal capacity, he's a passionate supporter of black creators.

Cuy Sheffield: I think this is an area that I am incredibly passionate about because it's just the power of particularly black culture and music and art and fashion, and the influence that black creators have had on popular mainstream culture fo the decades and how the internet has really grown and distributed that but hasn't really provided great ways to monetize, is now changing.

Justin Norman: We can reference plenty of experiences through history of where this has been the case. One recent occurrence, most notably, was a strike of TikTok by black creators over the degree to which black creativity on social media apps is constantly stolen, replicated, and profited off of for the benefit of others.

Cuy Sheffield: Who are the creators that are actually producing the culture that is demanded all across the world? And I think increasingly, and over history, it's been black creators. And so now black creators have the opportunity to become enormous commerce participants, both as collectors, resellers, curators, and as the primary sellers. And that's something that just never existed before. And we're really trying to figure out how do we accelerate that because we think this is fundamentally good for the world and good for economies to have this new space.

Justin Norman: This new paradigm is playing out in several ways.

From a creator perspective, NFTs are first and foremost creating a digital commerce opportunity, as Cuy said, in the 1000 true fans sense that we discussed last episode. And some music creators, for example, are making more money selling NFTs to their true fans, than they have earned from streaming royalties from Spotify.

But in this new paradigm, we can take this even one step further. Last episode, we talked about subsidizing content for a local African audience. What if we could not just subsidize the local audience, but pay and reward them, as well?

Cuy Sheffield: The analogy I like to use is if you think about all of the amazing, famous artists, you know, like Jay-Z today, who got their start selling mixtapes out of a trunk. Imagine if you were walking by, that artist in the early 90s and you stopped and you listened to their music and you bought one of their mix-tapes and you had a conversation with them. And then you took that mixtape back and you put it in a glass case and you had a recording of the conversation or a note from them and you then held that for 20 or 30 years and that artist's now becomes world-renowned. And then imagine if that artist knew the first 500 people who bought their mixtape and gave them invites every time they were in town and continued to build that relationship and got their feedback on different tracks that they were putting out. I think that's the opportunity for music NFTs.

Justin Norman: So reflecting back on last episode and subsidizing local consumption of content - today, a concert in Lagos gets subsidized by a brand. Tomorrow, perhaps an emerging musician throws a free concert, and everyone in attendance gets an NFT for their support. That creates a greater incentive alignment between the audience and the musicians.

So that scenario - "Oh wow, you have a Jay-Z mixtape from 1995!", in 2030 will sound like, "Oh wow you went to so-and-so's first concert and got their NFT in 2025!" And you can imagine the potential upside - from both a commercial perspective and from a social perspective - in being an early adopter and fan of an up-and-coming artist.

Cuy Sheffield: And so to me, it's less about, you know, rights and how do I earn revenue. It's more about in appreciation of the art and the culture and the ability to directly support and have a social connection to people whose work that you believe in.

Justin Norman: And the premise of web3, and its ownership model, is that it creates more incentive aligned relationships between creators and platforms, or creators and their fans. We can imagine creator-owned social media platforms, for example, or mechanisms that reward a fan's early support.

Cuy Sheffield: And now that you own their art, you're also incentivized to become their promoter and their distributor. And the communities that build around them can help to bootstrap the success of these creators.

Justin Norman: After the break, we take this conversation on new paradigms even further - from new models for creators to new communities and institutions altogether. But first, here's another word from our sponsor, MFS Africa.

Justin Norman: Earlier in the show, we heard from MFS Africa's Chief Product Officer, Luke Kyohere on the increase in cross-border payments in Africa for commerce and not remittance reasons.

Cross-border trade is another intriguing use case for cryptocurrencies, and as a payments network, it's something MFS Africa is exploring further, as well.

Luke Kyohere: So about a year ago, maybe eight months or so ago, we decided to take a position on crypto where we now accept on-ramp and off-ramp. And so we've got a bunch of customers where we're helping them in some jurisdictions to convert crypto to fiat and back.

And now the next step is to figure out what things like stablecoins mean for us. The fact is crypto, if you can trust stablecoins then the difference between them and cash is moot, right? They would be a digital version of the dollar. And in that case, all of the advantages of the digital version are hard to ignore. And so if we say we're facilitating commerce moving across borders, then we might, we definitely want to look at that. And if we don't, at some point, someone else is going to do it.

Justin Norman: Before the break, we explored one possible scenario and paradigm of this global, web3-powered ownership economy, from a creator perspective. Visa's Cuy Sheffield talked about using NFTs as a tool for creators - because as we spoke about earlier, media businesses are the first to adapt to new paradigms - and in the web3 context those tools can also be used to bootstrap communities.

That's another paradigm - entirely new communities and institutions. Here's Seyi Taylor again.

Seyi Taylor: I posit that people are made up of different identities. And I think that the desire to localize an individual to their geographic identity alone is a fail. And that we're going to see a lot of people transcend geographical barriers to identify with groups that they identify with groups that they identify with on a different level or in different parts of their identity.

Justin Norman: Whereas communities and creators - and creator monetization - has heretofore been largely constrained to geography, this global, permissionless economy changes that paradigm.

Seyi Taylor: Let's just talk about fandoms. Anime fandoms are not restricted to Nigeria or to Japan or to the US, you know? There are anime fans literally everywhere, all across the world. So should a Kenyan anime fan be restricted to relationships with other Kenyan anime fans? I hope not.

Justin Norman: That's not to say there aren't going to be local communities. Of course there will be. But if Africans can more meaningfully participate in global communities, it no longer remains an either/or scenario.

Seyi Taylor: I think there's definitely utility to being localized, localized communities. I think that that’s always going to be useful and powerful. But I think it's on top of that, the ability to find a community that is beyond local and participate in a global scale.

Justin Norman: So here's what that could look like. Here's Cuy.

Cuy Sheffield: We're starting to see, you know, NFTs and crypto to some extent in general, it's connecting black communities all over the world. And so you have this kind of global, black diaspora. You have a over billion black people across the world that have some shared cultural affinity and are starting to collaborate and work together. How do you connect black people across different spaces? And it was very hard to do that physically. But now that's starting to happen digitally. And not only just connect and, you know, socially of, okay, you can connect on Facebook or Twitter and you can talk, but to connect and cooperate economically. And so I think that that is a really exciting thing that can really grow and crypto have really been a place that has started to drive it. I think there's still a long way that could go.

Justin Norman: And in this context, this kind of opportunity extends to new types of institutions. Back to Seyi.

Seyi Taylor: I think that we'll also end up using other places. NFTs for example as membership cards. I think we're already seeing those as tradable membership cards.

Justin Norman: Here we can talk about DAOs - decentralized autonomous organizations. Despite the fact that DAOs aren't necessarily decentralized nor autonomous yet, the name has caught on as digital organizations whose governance and economic activity is coordinated by web3 tools. DAOs are interesting in the African context in that, structurally and functionally, they may be similar to and a digitally-native version of the cooperatives we see across the continent.

Digital cooperatives are not a concept that is unique to web3 in particular. In reaction to the rise of social media platforms - whose incentives are at times misaligned with the creators who use them - a movement called platform cooperativism was born in 2014, proposing a web2 alternative in which platforms operate as cooperatives, collectively owned and controlled by the users.

DAOs and web3 tools, and so-called governance tokens, in particular, may in many respects be better at enabling collective ownership at scale, across borders and payments systems. And the underlying blockchain infrastructure could create more trust in the system, as well. Though I will caveat - human nature is still human nature, and humans still do write the code. But in theory we could and should see more trust in the system.

So we can take a step back and imagine a not too distant future in which crypto-enabled institutions create novel social and economic opportunities for Africans globally. While this conversation with my b-mic Sayo Folawiyo was recorded for our retrospective at the end of this episode, I want to share here what he had to say about that.

Sayo Folawiyo: There's something about like creating of institutions outside of institutions. There's something about smaller, even how you guys were talking about these like niche community themed rather than geographical, there’s something about that and like communities building in a more call it organic way. And then from that building institutions, with rules and call it protocols, that people agree with and are more comfortable with.

Justin Norman: In our conversation, this raised the topic of parallel institutions, which is of particular interest to many Africans given the degree of market failures and poor governance across the continent. And the idea of building institutions with design and intentionality is also of intrigue, in the context of the inorganic nature of African borders.

Parallel institutions can co-exist with the state - in the case of religion or unions, for example, or there could be private institutions that perform the same functions as government agencies - logistics providers in lieu of post offices, or private schools, as another example.

The premise, first of all, is that web3 infrastructure could have positive implications on the design and coordination of new institutions, and that we have an opportunity today to build systems that are better and more equitable than the status quo.

And the premise, second of all, is that democratized access to web3 infrastructure means that theoretically, there can now be more new institutions, and more-incentive aligned communities may create better communities for its participants, with increased buy-in from the transparency of the protocols, and the rules that people agree on and opt-in to.

Sayo Folawiyo: I think that that institution piece is very interesting to me. And there's an element of design that is totally missing from our civic life. You know the people that are involved in this stuff, it's mostly just people that, there's a certain like frustration problem-solving thing that's happening that is lending itself to this. So I think a lot of people are excited about this stuff. Generally I find like the technology track, it's full of people that are well-meaning and wanting to actually impact their environment and don't have any other way to do so.

Justin Norman: And for Sayo, in particular, the opportunity for web3 in Africa extends even further beyond all that we've discussed thus far.

Sayo Folawiyo: I was at a lunch thing with some friends when I was in Lagos. And we were talking you know how like in every setting, every gathering had an NFT and metaverse point on the agenda, right? So we reached that point into the agenda and, we were just debating, right? And everyone's like, “Yo, what is this thing? It's not real. The kids. Da da da.” And I'm like, “Look, whatever sure. We're not going to solve all the problems with there right now, but I'll tell you what we're not going do.”

Advancements in technology, yeah, and if you look at it from an African perspective, have always come to our detriment, right, because it's used against us. It's a competitive advantage that's used against us. Always.

And I think that for me less about debating it and is it real, is it valuable? What is value? Just know that let us not allow an advancement in technology to pass us and then be looking when institutions and others come back because that's what always happens is they'll come back to us needing something from us, whether it's consumption, whether it's our raw materials, whether whatever it is, they're going to come back round and they're going to want something from us. And we’ll be looking, not understanding what's going on, taking and shooting ourselves in the foot. So for me, it's like imperative, so when we talk about this stuff, it's like highly imperative that we have a strong understanding of what it is, a strong ability to manipulate it, to use it as a tool, and that everybody is highly engaged and trying and experimenting because I don't want us to be left behind.

I think that's actually the most important thing for me is like, use the tool. It's there. And when we talk about that global borderless world, that's the advantage is that we can see it as it's happening, right? So I think we've got to be active and participating in this space and working out how to use it for our own context before someone else comes and tells us how to do it.

Justin Norman: So we’ll leave you with that the call to arms. Web3 can present a new paradigm for African creators, tech enthusiasts and citizens alike. But that only happens with intentionality and participation. But if that happens, the scope of the opportunity extends far and wide beyond what has been discussed in this episode and even far and wide beyond what we're dreaming up at present.

So that’s it for this episode - and this season - of The Flip. But in the meantime, we’ll still be publishing our weekly newsletter as well as other content on social media - for your fix of The Flip, you can subscribe to our newsletter on our website theflip.africa, and follow us on social media @theflipafrica.

Thanks, as always, for listening to this season, and we’ll see you soon for season four.