Slow news days + All the Web3 news you missed this week

I’ve been pulling together these weekly Web3 news recaps for the past 5 months, its been interesting to see the media coverage trends. There’s been a significant slowdown in coverage the past few months for the obvious reasons. Here’s my observation on the themes/trends I’ve seen on different Web3 topics:

NFTs - Larger companies finally rolling out their NFTs, NFT price crashes, people getting hacked

Metaverse - How Meta is screwing up the metaverse, how f-ed up the metaverse is going to be

Gaming - Play-to-earn is dead / toxic

Crypto - X company is in trouble (Although the contagion has subsided in recent weeks)

DAOs - X DAO is trying to buy Y, So and so group is forming a DAO to solve Z

Defi - Defi is going to solve all the problems in the financial world, Defi isn’t going to solve anything.

Maybe we’re just in the doldrums of the summer, but my guess is the narratives on all these Web3 concepts are getting ready to shift after we get used to living a post crash era.

(Personal note: You may have noticed a slow down in interviews, I’ve taken a break for the summer as things have been busier for me. I plan on restarting those interviews in the fall.)

Here’s the Web3 news from the past week

General

SoFi Launches Web 3 ETF Focused on NFTs, Metaverse, Blockchain (WSJ)

SoFi Technologies is launching an exchange-traded fund specifically for Web3-related stocks that deal with NFTs, blockchain technology, metaverse, big data, and AI. As WSJ notes, the personal finance company is catering to a user base “largely made up of Gen Z and millennials.”

How Farfetch is predicting the future of fashion in Web3 (Fast Company)

José Neves, CEO of the online luxury fashion platform Farfetch, appeared on Fast Company’s “Most Innovative Companies” podcast to discuss the intersection of Web3 and fashion. He’s not merely talking about clothes for avatars: “For me, the definition of Web3’s application to fashion is the application of these principles of user control and user ownership and decentralized architecture to the fashion use cases.”

Web3 and shifts in the attention economy (VentureBeat)

In a Web2 world that allows marketers to access vast reams of our personal data, “whoever owns your data owns your decisions,” writes YouBase founder Leonard Kish. A user-owned Web3 could create a different power dynamic through a combination of decentralized identities, which live in a wallet and are controlled by the user, and decentralized content and data.

NFTs

New NFT Privacy Proposal Gets Vitalik Buterin’s Attention (Decrypt)

Crypto researcher Anton Wahrstätter proposed a way of creating a one-time “stealth” address for NFT transactions, publicly obscuring the identity of the new owner. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin shared his analysis of the proposal on Twitter, calling it “a low-tech approach to add a significant amount of privacy to the NFT ecosystem” but noting that NFT transactions could likely be anonymized with more lightweight technology.

Want a Super Bowl ring? Dapper Labs and L.A. Rams offer NFT version starting at $9 (Fortune)

Having surpassed $1 billion in sales with NBA Top Shot, a basketball-focused NFT platform, Dapper Labs is building out its similar NFL All Day marketplace, which launched in beta last year. On Thursday, it debuted a NFT collection in collaboration with the Los Angeles Rams, selling digital versions of its Super Bowl rings on a tiered scale, from $9 all the way up to $699.

Cameo’s CEO fell victim to the latest Bored Ape NFT heist (The Verge)

Steven Galanis, CEO of Cameo, reported via Twitter that he lost several valuable NFTs in a hack, including a Bored Ape that he bought for roughly $319,500 — and that the thief subsequently sold for about $130,000. Galanis said that his Apple ID was hacked, though as the Verge reports, the “exact hack mechanics” aren’t entirely clear.

Metaverse

As metaverse land prices plummet, Mark Cuban says buying digital land is ‘the dumbest sh*t ever’ (Fortune)

Mark Cuban is an investor in Yuga Labs, but in a recent interview, he criticized the company’s recent land sale. Even though the sale brought in $317 million, Fortune reports, “[Cuban] said he views the digital land as less important than creating a sort of exclusivity for Otherside through gated access.”

Ready Player One gave us the misconception that the Metaverse is VR — Everyrealm CEO, KBW 2022 (Cointelegraph)

In a presentation at Korean Blockchain Week, Everyrealm CEO Janine Yorio argued that near-term advancements in the metaverse won’t be happening in VR, but rather on our desktops, where many people already spend their waking hours. “The Everyrealm executive suggested that the Metaverse being ‘exclusively in VR’ contradicts how humans are used to using technology, which is generally multi-tasking or used to ‘procrastinate,’ whereas ‘when you’re using VR you have to check out of life entirely,’” reports Cointelegraph.

Looking For Love In The Metaverse (Forbes)

Tinder may have paused its plans to build out a metaverse dating platform, but a host of smaller dating apps have sprung up to help people find love in virtual reality. Among them are Nevermet, Flirtual, and Planet Theta, which either use existing worlds, like VRChat, or their own metaverses to facilitate dates.

Gaming

Twitch founder Justin Kan: Web3 games don’t need to lure players with profit (TechCrunch)

Despite the bumpy ride that blockchain-based gaming has been on, Justin Kan, the co-founder of Twitch, believes in its potential, telling TechCrunch that “I think the idea of creating digital assets, and then taxing everyone for all the transactions around them is a good model.” Overall, Kan said that he sees the gaming world moving toward an interoperable ecosystem.

In case you missed it - this was the most opened article from last week’s news roundup

3 things that need to happen for Web3 to (really) take off (Venture Beat)

The success of the Web3 space depends on several major changes, writes Emma Cui, CEO and founding partner of LongHash Ventures. Users need to adopt an owner mentality, investors need to shift to a more collaborative outlook, and people starting projects need to move past chasing hype and toward creating long-term value.

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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)