Almost everything is becoming digital these days, courtesy of the continuous COVID-19 epidemic and our ever-evolving technology. Even the simple act of reading a book has become increasingly digital in the last two decades. The book club, one of any passionate reader’s fundamental communal experiences, has also changed.
Laura Shin, a known Web3 journalist, started a series of Discord-hosted book club events earlier this month to promote the release of her new book “The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze”, which was released in February 2022.
The book serves as both a 496-page exposé into Ethereum’s origins and a carefully charted map of its position in the growing mainstreaming of blockchain technology – a huge endeavor.
Free-wheeling book club
Shin invited special speakers like Chatroulette co-founder Andrey Ternovskiy to two of the planned book club meetings and hosted the other three alone to assist organize and expand the debate. Shin said that her chosen guests ” were involved in the highest-stakes drama of the book — the DAO hack on Ethereum, which is the blockchain’s only existential crisis.”
” They gave me countless interviews to relay this crucial moment in Ethereum’s life to me and also to explain some of the technical aspects of the DAO”, Shin says of his guests’ contributions to the book’s developmental process.
These meetings have been a very unique experience from Shin’s work as the host of the Unchained Podcast. “Much more free-wheeling and unstructured,” Shin explained, “since a lot more people can talk to each other and jump in, whereas, on my podcast, I’m the moderator and drive discussion.”
Crypto-native tickets sale
Enthusiastic readers must purchase an NFT to get into these book club meetings. “It seemed like the right move given that it would be more crypto-native and aligned with the community,” Shin said of her choice to gate admission to her book club with NFT tickets.
The decision to utilize NFTs as tickets worked nicely given the fact that the sessions were held through Discord. “Since Discord is the main communication platform and [it] has a token-gating feature that allows you to use NFTs to grant access to certain channels […],” Shin explained, “it seamlessly integrates the NFT with admission to the event.”
Shin picked Bitski, a blockchain wallet infrastructure provider, to manage ticket sales because of the platform’s focus on simplicity. For example, to purchase NFT tickets, participants don’t even require current crypto wallets — Bitski is selling them for $100 each.
Anyone interested in attending must respond quickly, since there are only two book club meetings left, on May 9 and 10, with just 22 seats available for each meeting.
