Sesame Summit 2026 – application open

Ben’s List 44

Web3

Digital ownership, the birth of a new concept

“From a legal standpoint, our immersion in this entirely digital world is posed to challenge a number of legal concepts that have arisen out of the material world, including the fundamental concept of ‘ownership’. Important questions, such as whether virtual assets qualify for ‘ownership’, or whether new forms of ownership will emerge from the metaverse, are going to demand attention from users of the metaverse, and potentially from law makers, as the world transitions into virtual environments.”

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Fat Protocols

“What’s significant about this dynamic is the effect it has on how value is distributed along the stack: the market cap of the protocol always grows faster than the combined value of the applications built on top, since the success of the application layer drives further speculation at the protocol layer. And again, increasing value at the protocol layer attracts and incentivises competition at the application layer. Together with a shared data layer, which dramatically lowers the barriers to entry, the end result is a vibrant and competitive ecosystem of applications and the bulk value distributed to a widespread pool of shareholders. This is how tokenized protocols become ‘fat’ and its applications ‘thin’.”

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Publishing on crypto

“Crypto’s innovation is infusing value exchange with all the desirable attributes of a digitally-native information medium—programmability, interoperability, composability, virality, transferability. Importantly, crypto solved the one major limitation of digital mediums that previously made them unsuitable for a purely digital representation of value—scarcity guarantees.

Crypto protocols therefore blur the line between information and value. They encode value as information, and, consequently, information as value. Crypto turns media into financial assets, and as well as financial assets into media.

With crypto, sending five dollars to a relative across the globe is finally as easy as sending them a family photo.”

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Chris Dixon and Packy McCormick on the future of crypto

“The year ahead will show that blockchains can support a lot more applications beyond money and finance. In 2022 decentralised services will chip away at big tech companies’ stranglehold on the internet. A cluster of new ‘web3’ technologies, such as tokens, will dramatically improve the digital economics of creators, technologists and small businesses.”

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Crypto & NFTs: Network Effects in Web3

“The second possibility is that we are still too early in the web3 cycle for sustainable defensibility to emerge — similar to Yahoo during the early years of web 1.0 and Myspace in web 2.0. In other words, most projects are still experimenting with the capabilities of web3. And the long-term winners — with stronger and more defensible network effects — will only emerge after this phase of experimentation.”

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GovTech

Game Design for Public Services

“Gamification, or the use of game mechanics in non-game contexts, has demonstrated a unique ability to capture attention and promote behaviour change in users. This is true across a number of fields that are relevant to public sector challenges, including Health and Social Care, Sustainability, and Education. We explore the opportunities for Gamification to transform public service design across these areas, as well as in Diversity and Inclusion and Financial Welfare and Wellbeing, and make recommendations for government to enable and take advantage of this transformation.”

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  • public.io/research-reports/game-design-for-public-services (Report) :: Jess Taylor + Lichelle Wolmarans

Art

Generative Art Guide: Examples, Software and Tools to Make Algorithm Art

“Generative Art is a process of algorithmically generating new ideas, forms, shapes, colors or patterns. First, you create rules that provide boundaries for the creation process. Then a computer  follows those rules to produce new works on your behalf.”

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Generative Art by Manolo Gamboa Naon, an Argentinian artist who uses algorithmic tools including Processing to create art.

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Events 2 days ago

Last week, I spent three days at Bits and Pretzels in Munich — a startup-focused event with a distinctly Bavarian flavor. Think Oktoberfest meets startup conference, complete with dirndls, lederhosen, and more beer than you might expect. As someone building an AI-powered event platform, I went in with a specific mission: Observe how startups actually market themselves at events. Here’s what I discovered: GoodBytz: The power of good demos What they did: Robotics startup GoodBytz set up a booth where its robots prepared kaiserschmarrn (a traditional German dessert) all day long. Why it worked: Nothing beats seeing a product in action. While other booths had brochures and demos, GoodBytz’s robots were actually cooking. The smell, the movement and the end result stirred together an experience that people will remember and talk about. The lesson: If you have a physical product, show it in action. The old writing adage generalizes well: Show, don’t tell.  Let people see, hear and touch the product. WeRoad: The bathroom hack What they did: Posted “Missing Investor” flyers in bathroom stalls with QR codes pointing to their website. Why it worked: Pure genius. Every startup at the event was looking for investors, but the “Missing Investor” headline, while a bit on the nose, proved irresistible. Plus, bathroom stalls are one of the few places where people have 30 seconds to actually read something. The lesson: Think about where your target audience’s attention will remain undivided. Sometimes, the most effective marketing leverages the most unexpected places. Emqopter: Visual impact matters What they did: Designed a bright orange booth that displayed their drone prominently. Why it worked: In a sea of grey, white, beige and brown, Emqopter’s bright orange booth was impossible to overlook. The drone was real, too, and proved a real conversation starter. The lesson: Your booth is competing with hundreds of others. Make it visually distinctive and ensure your product is the hero. Quests: Community building using the product What they did: Created a busy, branded booth with accessories (toy car, traffic cones, a bulletin board) and used their anti-loneliness app to build communities among founders at the event. Why it worked: Quests used their product to solve a real problem right at the event, and the busy booth design generated energy and curiosity. The lesson: Use your product to solve a problem at the event — if it’s possible, of course. Demonstrate your value in real time. Dyno: Event-themed marketing What they did: Distributed branded electrolyte packs with the tagline “Your hangover ends. Your pension lasts – with Dyno.” Why it worked: Dyno aligned its messaging perfectly with the Oktoberfest theme. Every attendee was thinking about beer and hangovers, so Dyno’s goodies were quite relevant. The tagline was clever, memorable, and directly addressed a pain point most people at the event might have to deal with later. The lesson: Tailor your marketing to the event’s theme and culture. The more you tie your messaging and product to the context, the more memorable you become. So, what did I learn? Event marketing is about more than just showing up and setting up a booth; you have to understand your audience and create experiences that people will remember. Here’s what really struck me: most startups and even big companies don’t know how to leverage events properly. They book the booth, show up and hope for the best; maybe they bring some branded pens and a pop-up banner. Then they’ll go back home and wonder why they spent €5,000 in exchange for 50 business cards that never convert. The startups that stood out at Bits and Pretzels understand something fundamental: event ROI isn’t about booth size or location; it’s about strategy, creativity and planning. None of the startups above improvised on-site, or planned something the night before the event in their hotel rooms. They laid everything out 4-6 weeks before the event. A solid pre-event strategy is what separates successful event marketing from expensive booth rental.  But what matters most for early-stage startups is that you don’t need a massive budget to stand out. WeRoad’s bathroom stall hack probably cost €50 to print the flyers. A standard booth package at Bits and Pretzels would go for €3,000 to €5,500. The ROI difference is staggering when you compare the cost per meaningful conversation. That’s the difference between simply spending money and investing smartly. Building Sesamers has taught me that helping startups find the right events is only half the equation. The other half is helping them understand how to maximize ROI once they’re there. Good props aren’t a marketing expense; they’re opportunities to meet customers, investors and partners, and strike up engaging conversations.

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New Materials 3 days ago

Lios Group, the Irish startup behind SoundBounce, was a winner of JEC Composites Startup Booster 2018, and has been making significant strides since taking home the award.

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New Materials 1 week ago

Tree Composites aims to accelerate the energy transition with innovative composite joints.

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