This Week in Web3: Friday, June 24, 2022
Doodles NFTs Announces Pharrell as Chief Brand Officer, Cristiano Ronaldo and Bill Murray are getting into NFTs, Web3 Ownership & Governance and why Mark Cuban’s is still bullish on Crypto
Hi Friends,
This week NFT.nyc brought together more than 15,000 people in New York City for one of the most anticipated Web3 gatherings we’ve seen this year. We’ve certainly had other, perhaps even bigger events over the past few months, including ETH Denver, Bitcoin Conference, and SXSW, but NFT.nyc seems to be where the greatest confluence of people and industry sectors come together.
It reminds me of Social Media Week NYC back in the early days of Social Media. It also proves once again that NYC is one of the greatest cities in the world to host events like these; I know because we hosted SMW here for 12 straight years!
But this week was also a sobering one, a necessary reality check perhaps. As Jesse Kirshbaum puts it in his weekly newsletter Beats & Bytes, regarding the mood during NFT.nyc “The hype cycle is over and it’s time to build something real”.
According to Gartner’s Hype Cycle, which Brian Morrissey also recently referenced in his excellent newsletter The Rebooting, we are almost certainly through the Peak of Inflated Expectations of Web3 and Crypto, and well into the Trough of Disillusionment, a period where “interest wanes as experiments and implementations failed to deliver”. This phase is followed by the Slope of Enlightenment, which introduces new ways for how Web3 can more broadly benefit people and businesses as real-world applications become more widely understood and implemented. This feels resonant. So what happens now?
As we’ve said before, it’s time to build. We need to build from the ground up, which means rebuilding trust among those early adopters who still have conviction but who feel shaken by what has happened. It’s time to build member-owned communities, but ones that have a core purpose as well as being values-based. It’s time to build real-world applications and utilities that solve meaningful problems and that provide sustained value over time.
The past couple of years have been a blast, it’s been a fun and frankly ridiculous ride, but now we need to put our game faces on and get to work. But don’t worry, this is where the fun really happens.
WAGMI Fam, LFG!
TL;DR
Decrypt: Doodles NFTs Announces Pharrell as Chief Brand Officer, Fundraise Led by Alexis Ohanian
Binance announces exclusive multi-year NFT partnership with football legend Cristiano Ronaldo
Decrypt: Why Bill Murray Is Making Ethereum NFTs About His Life
Web3 Ownership & Governance: What You Own, and What You Don’t
As KPMG enters the metaverse, the Big 4 firm calls multitrillion-dollar estimates ‘conservative’
News we’re following
Decrypt: Doodles NFTs Announces Pharrell as Chief Brand Officer, Fundraise Led by Alexis Ohanian
The valuable NFT collection adds a famous face and fresh funding, plus announces plans for Doodles 2 avatars.
Ethereum NFT project Doodles made a pair of significant announcements at an event hosted alongside the NFT NYC conference tonight, revealing that musician and producer Pharrell Williams will join the project and that it has raised its first round of funding led by venture capital firm Seven Seven Six.
Binance announces exclusive multi-year NFT partnership with football legend Cristiano Ronaldo
This is your opportunity to own an iconic piece of sports history and join CR7's Web3 community.
Through this partnership, Binance will launch a global campaign to give Ronaldo’s fans an introduction to the world of Web3, starting with a compelling entry point into the NFT space.
Cristiano Ronaldo and Binance will create a series of NFT collections for sale exclusively on the Binance NFT platform. The first collection will be released later this year and will feature designs created in collaboration with Ronaldo.
Techcrunch: Facebook Pay will be renamed Meta Pay soon
Facebook Pay will soon be renamed Meta Pay, according to a blog post written by Meta’s head of fintech, Stephane Kasriel. With the rebrand, the company is focusing on enhancing the payments experiences it already provides with Facebook Pay in regions where it’s seeing good adoption, as opposed to focusing on expanding to new countries.
Meta is also exploring how it can further simplify the payments experience across its platforms to make payments easier to access and process in the metaverse. Kasriel noted that Meta is in the “very early stages” of considering what a single wallet experience may look like. He outlined that in terms of its early thinking, Meta is looking at how you prove who you are and carry that identity into different experiences in the metaverse.
Things we’re reading
Decrypt: Why Bill Murray Is Making Ethereum NFTs About His Life
Murray’s son Jackson tells Decrypt about the actor’s new NFT project, which bundles infamous stories with in-person events and other perks.
Bill Murray has a lot of stories—and there are a lot of stories out there about Bill Murray.
Some are from the actor’s nearly five-decade entertainment career, from “Saturday Night Live” to films like “Ghostbusters” and “Caddyshack,” and his relationships with fellow comedic legends. Others are tales about the 71-year-old and his propensity to, for example, crash random weddings or steal people’s French fries.
Web3 Ownership & Governance: What You Own, and What You Don’t
Web3 is all about ownership. But hypermarketing has led many non-technical users to believe they actually have more rights than they do. Let’s set the record straight.
Your “governance” tokens probably aren’t that useful, since they’re likely just a Facebook “thumbs-up” button instead of any real ownership mechanism. And that NFT you bought? Probably just as good as you owning a random image Apple issued you on your iPhone. Most terrifying of all, the “decentralized” crypto tokens you hold in your low-fee exchange account are almost certainly not yours, and won’t be the “digital gold” that help you survive the fiat apocalypse the doomsayers are fond of predicting.
But it’s not all doom & gloom — crypto has incredible potential, you just have to stay ahead of the marketers enough to know what’s fact and what’s fiction.
As KPMG enters the metaverse, the Big 4 firm calls multitrillion-dollar estimates ‘conservative’
KPMG U.S. and Canada are opening a metaverse “collaboration hub” to connect employees, clients, and others with Web3, a so-called decentralized version of the internet built on blockchain, the firm says. It’s collectively making a $30 million investment this year in Web3 experiences, with the metaverse “hub” as the “signature piece.”
“The way we look at it, it’s not just augmented reality and virtual reality. It’s really the next iteration of the internet. It really encompasses everything that the internet would encompass, but it’s more interactive,” Cliff Justice, KPMG U.S. leader of enterprise innovation, told Fortune of the metaverse and Web3.
Things we’re listening to
Hear what Mark’s been up to since his first Bankless appearance, how he explains crypto to noobs (hint: he doesn’t), what he envisions next for crypto, how long he believes the bear will last and so much more!
web3 with a16z: Auction design for web3
In this episode, we go into all things auctions -- which applies in web3 contexts to everything from NFT mints to blockchains themselves. We provide an overview of auction types and incentive design, and how it works in both theory and practice -- including the nuances of market-clearing prices, gas wars, and more… sharing tradeoffs, choices, and principles for builders designing these systems throughout.
Seed Club DAO Podcast: The Rabbit Hole That Is Nouns DAO
Today we have Brian Flynn, CEO, and co-founder of Rabbit Hole. Brian is a dear friend who helped inspire the birth of Seed Club. In this episode, we dig into reputation, DAO tools, what we get right, and what we get wrong.
How do we ultimately scale DAOs from 50 people collaborating with each other to 5,000? We spent a bunch of time talking about Nouns DAO. The bull case, the bear case. We also talk about building value in DAOs, the importance of it, the challenges of it, how far we've come, and how far we have to go.
Project’s we’re following
The most advanced effort to build a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) for professional venture capital investing comes out of stealth mode today. VC3 invests in Web3 startups by tapping into the networks and expertise of more than 150 members, all of whom are venture capital professionals and Kauffman Fellows, a VC leadership program with alumni representing more than 600 firms across six continents with $290B+ AUM and $8.5T+ in exits.
The e-commerce giant posted a video on Twitter (NYSE: TWTR) featuring a skateboarding woman who transitioned from the normal world into a Doodles NFT. A narrator in the video talked about inviting community members into a “world that recognizes and rewards loyalty.” According to the narrator, token holders can connect a crypto wallet to access exclusive shopping experiences. One benefit of connecting one’s crypto wallets is having early access to drops. Also, there is an advantage of accessing limited collections, unique experiences, and more.