📝 Web3 Field Notes #7

“When you arise in the morning think of what a privilege it is to be alive, to think, to enjoy, to love...” ― Marcus Aurelius

📚 Readings:

• Rebels with a cause: A personal New Year’s address. Link

• Coinbase 2023 crypto market outlook. Short, but hits the most important points. Link

• Messari Crypto Thesis 2023. Detailed and opinionated. Link

• HBR: What is Web3? A solid primer. Link

• An in depth overview of what’s going on with NFTs. Link

• Bloomberg: All the ways that crypto broke in 2022. Wonderful visuals. Link

• Bloomberg: How not to play the game. A postscript to Bloomberg Businessweek’s crypto issue last year. Link

• Web3’s wallet opportunity. Link 

• Ethereum “account abstraction”: Possibly the next big step for wallet UX. Link

• On application-specific blockchains (“AppChains”) and layer 3. Link

• How crypto is traded: A paper showing that the value of cryptocurrencies is largely based on expectations about potentially wider future adoption, unlike in other asset classes. Link

• My top 5 reads of 2022 on crypto and Web3 Link

🚨 What caught my eyes: 

• On January 3rd, Bitcoin turned 14. The cheering was clearly subdued compared to previous years. Happy birthday, Bitcoin. Genesis Block

• Animoca Brands, a Hong-Kong based blockchain gaming company, halves fundraising target for web3 fund to $1bn. Bear markets. Link

• CFA Institute, one of the biggest global association of investment professionals, released a paper “Cryptoassets: Beyond the Hype”. Link

• Celsius Network wins ownership rights to customer crypto deposits. This is huge as it sets a precedent for other bankruptcy cases, including FTX and BlockFi. Even Coinbase isn’t safe.1 Link

• Kraken launched Kraken Pro. Together with their partnership with Bankless, Kraken is capitalising on the FTX collapse as the trusted US player, now also for advanced traders. Link

• Solana, VCs darling that was primarily backed by FTX, continues to falter. The most prominent PFP projects on Solana, DeGods and y00ts, have announced their imminent departure from the blockchain. Link

• In Nov and Dec 2022, MicroStrategy added another 2’500 BTC to their treasury. Whales mostly stay passive. MicroStrategy Whales

• China launched an exchange for NFTs and for copyrights related to digital assets that runs on the “China Cultural Protection” blockchain. Important to know: In China, NFTs are not really “NFTs” and blockchains aren’t “Blockchains”: it’s all centralized. And Bitcoin is banned. Link

🚀 Interesting Web3 start-ups: 

• Tally: A platform for on-chain decentralized organizations.

• Context: Follow Ethereum wallets so you can track and discover the NFT activities of your favorite people and groups in real-time.

• Galxe: On-chain credentials. Could be very interesting for marketing applications.

• nxyz: Web3 indexing. Makes it easy to pull data from dApps.  

💡Ideas & Take-Aways: 

New year, fresh start. Speaking with the community, I feel that confusion exists around what web3 is and the value it delivers to the users and brands. Now it’s the time flesh that out. In the coming weeks, I’ll write about actionable use cases. Stay tuned!

That’s all for now, folks. Back to building an learning! 🚀

– Marc

Bonus 💎 : Here’s a list of all the major brands that entered web3.

Feedback or ideas? Please leave a comment!