NYC Web3 Founders Meetup + All the Web3 news you missed this week
NYC Web3 Founders Meetup + All the Web3 news you missed this week
Next month, I’m excited to be hosting a Web3 Founders meetup for 40 people. If you’re working on a Web3 startup and are interested in attending - please sign up using this link. I’m excited to start a broader series of in person meetups and workshops in the coming months, including one at Permissionless in May!
Here’s the Web3 news from the past week
General
Inside 3 Crypto Funds' Investor Decks (Newcomer)
Crypto funds are raising billions of dollars right now. After reviewing several fund decks, Eric Newcomer breaks down exactly how they’re selling themselves to investors — to such booming success.
Will Solana become the base layer of Web3? (Fortune)
A blockchain war may be heating up: Solana Labs CEO Anatoly Yakovenko is making a bid to overtake Ethereum as the crypto world’s most widely used blockchain.
Building Web3's foundation for scale, an interview with Mysten Labs Co-Founder/CEO Evan Cheng (Web3 Roundup)
Evan Cheng believes that current crypto infrastructure can’t meet the demands of a rapidly scaling ecosystem. For Tuesday’s newsletter, I spoke with him about the technical flaws that he sees in the existing infrastructure and how he’s aiming to solve them with his team at Mysten Labs.
NFTs
Why Jack Dorsey’s First-Tweet NFT Plummeted 99% In Value In A Year (Forbes)
Last spring, the NFT that Jack Dorsey created from his first-ever tweet sold for $2.9 million — only to elicit bids in the tens of thousands in a recent auction. Per Jeff Kauflin at Forbes, it seems to be a tale of a buyer who got swept up in a moment of extreme NFT hype, paying a price that turned out to be “nearly impossible to justify.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, an author known for his influential Black Swan theory about “ultra-rare events for which the market is unprepared,” sees the Dorsey NFT saga as a sign that this particular bubble is about to burst. “All you need is higher interest rates for things that make no sense to start making no sense,” Taleb tweeted.
Coinbase launches NFT marketplace in hopes of appealing to crypto and mainstream users (Tech Crunch)
The largest crypto exchange in the U.S. has launched a beta version of its promised NFT marketplace, with the platform opening up to all users over 18 in the coming weeks. Coinbase NFT has a strong social angle, allowing people to follow and interact with other creators and collectors.
Metaverse
Bandai Namco’s Gundam ‘metaverse’ dream mixes esports, Web3, and Gunpla (The Verge)
Japanese video game publisher Bandai Namco is launching a Gundam metaverse, building out “virtual communities for aspects of the fandom like video games, anime, music, and Gunpla (aka Gundam model-building).”
Augmented Reality
Mark Zuckerberg’s Augmented Reality (The Verge)
Zuck is out to restore his company’s innovative reputation with the development of AR glasses, the Verge reports. Meta’s team is “racing” to create a first generation model by 2024, a “lighter, more advanced design” by 2026, and a third generation by 2028. “Zuck’s ego is intertwined with [the glasses],” a source told the Verge. “He wants it to be an iPhone moment.”
Gaming
Consider this a live study in the viability of certain blockchain-based games: The horse racing game Pegaxy modeled its play-to-earn economics off Axie Infinity, but as the latter pivots away from that model, having determined it to be unsustainable, Pegaxy is staying the course. “The two games' conflicting outlooks reflect the larger debate over how companies will harness the blockchain—the technology currently used to race digital ponies and battle digital monsters—to shape the future of how the world plays, works, and conducts commerce,” writes Grady McGregor at Fortune.
Crypto
Ethereum Merge No Longer Expected in June (Coindesk)
Ethereum’s much-anticipated (and much-delayed) shift to a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism will come several months later than previously expected, according to core developer Tim Beiko. Compared to its current proof-of-work system, PoS will drastically reduce energy use and allow Ethereum to scale more easily.
US officials link North Korean Lazarus hackers to $625M Axie Infinity crypto theft (Tech Crunch)
The U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) announced new sanctions against Lazarus, a hacking group backed by the North Korean state, which it has linked to the recent $625 million exploit targeting the Ronin Network. Though an estimated 14% of those funds have already been laundered, the sanctions on an Ethereum wallet owned by Lazarus are intended to prevent the group from further cashing out through U.S. crypto exchanges.
In case you missed it - this was the most opened article from last week’s news roundup
How DAOs Could Change the Way We Work (Harvard Business Review)
As with the industrial revolution and the advent of computing, Web3 marks a fundamental shift in how we work, argues Steve Glaveski. He predicts DAOs will power that sea change, offering contributors greater autonomy, more flexibility, the freedom to do work that aligns with their values, and innovative compensation structures.
About Me
Hi, I’m Andrew Chang - I created the Web3 Roundup to share what I’m learning in this space. I’ve spent my career at the forefront of the technology industry in areas such as crypto/blockchain (Former COO @ Paxos, co-founding partner of Liberty City Ventures), video and adtech. I learn by meeting with founders, investors and other thought leaders and approach Web3 with the same enthusiasm – and skepticism – I had about crypto/blockchain technologies 10 years ago.
You can connect with me on LinkedIn or Twitter (@DigitalDrex)