This Week in Web3: Friday, May 20th, 2022
Onboarding 2.9B people to Web3, NFT-Based Twitter rival , The State of Crypto Report, a Web3 manifesto for brands and artists and introducing a new DAO that aims to solve Web3 customer service woes.
Hi Friends,
Due to last week’s crazy crypto market crash, we almost overlooked one of the most important news stories to break in recent months. Instagram is beginning to test digital collectibles with a handful of U.S. creators and collectors who will be able to share NFTs on Instagram that they have created or bought.
We included the story in last week’s newsletter, but I’ll be honest, I didn’t really dig in as the headline felt like a publicity play rather than being anything really substantive.
It wasn’t until I listened to this week’s Bankless Podcast interview with Sandeep Nailwal and Mihailo Bjelic, the Co-Founders of Polygon that I was fully able to digest the news.
The real headline here is that Meta, together with Polygon, and later Solana and Flow is opening up the world of NFTs to the 2.9B people on their platforms.
We’ve talked a lot about Web3’s scaling issues and until now the path to the first billion onboarded users wasn’t exactly clear.
With this announcement and the initial product rollout, Instagram will be able to read from the Blockchain, with users being able to connect a wallet and share their NFT collections on the platform.
This is step one, the “read” phase, but where it becomes even more interesting is when they roll out the ability to mint an NFT to the Polygon L2 Blockchain. Boom! This is going to be huge and will, for the first time, demonstrate the power of bridging Web2 and Web3.
Another thing that was interesting that I took from the interview with the Polygon founders was the amount of respect they have for the product teams at Meta. In their words, they understand Web3 at a deep and profound level and their product vision for what they want to build is incredibly impressive.
I said at a conference I was speaking at recently that we shouldn’t throw the Web2 baby out with the bathwater, and this is a perfect example of why.
Ok, on to this week’s digest, enjoy!
TL;DR
Aave Launches Decentralized, NFT-Based Twitter Rival on Polygon
WSJ: Andreessen Horowitz Debuts $600 Million Gaming Fund to Add to Web3 Bets
Engadget: OpenSea's new measures hope to crack down on fake NFTs
Forbes: An Evolving Strategy For The Emergent Metaverse: A Web3 Manifesto For Brands And Artists
Ethereum Creator Vitalik Buterin Opens Up About 'Contradictions' in His Web3 Values
Bankless Podcast: Instagram Bringing NFTs to 2.9B People | Sandeep & Mihailo, Polygon
Seed Club DAO Podcast: Reputation, Governance, Token Models, and Station with Tina He
News we’re following
Aave Launches Decentralized, NFT-Based Twitter Rival on Polygon
Lens Protocol is designed to power social media platforms that can rival centralized giants like Twitter—and it’s powered by NFTs.
Popular DeFi lending protocol Aave is going a very different route for its latest Web3 project, today announcing the public launch of Lens Protocol, a decentralized social graph that uses NFT assets to power social media platforms.
While Lens Protocol appears designed to challenge centralized social media platforms like Twitter, it takes a very different approach. Essentially, it lets users own their content by storing it as NFTs—unique blockchain-based tokens—within a crypto wallet. The protocol can be tapped by any number of apps or services, so anyone can build on it.
WSJ: Andreessen Horowitz Debuts $600 Million Gaming Fund to Add to Web3 Bets
Venture-capital firm says gaming infrastructure is key to building the metaverse
Silicon Valley venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz debuted a $600 million fund dedicated to gaming startups, stepping up its bets on so-called Web3 technology just as a broader market decline underscores the volatility of the cryptocurrency-based sector.
The venture firm, known as a16z, said Wednesday the fund is its first dedicated to the games industry, pointing to the billions of dollars in annual revenue that hit games such as “Fortnite” and “Minecraft” generate. The fund extends a16z’s yearslong practice of backing gaming startups and builds on its strategy to deploy billions of dollars into Web3 technologies.
Engaget: OpenSea's new measures hope to crack down on fake NFTs
The largest NFT marketplace has been bombarded with counterfeits.
OpenSea is putting in place a new system to spot NFT fakes and verify accounts, in an effort to cut down on the industry’s growing fraud problem. In a couple of blog posts, the NFT marketplace detailed what changes users can expect, including opening up verification to more users, automated and human-assisted removal of so-called “copymints” or fake copies of authentic NFTs and changes to how collection badges — which identify NFT collections with high sales volume or interest — are doled out on the marketplace.
Things we’re reading
A16z: Introducing the 2022 State of Crypto Report
A lot has changed in the state of crypto since we started investing in the area nearly a decade ago.
This report is the first of what will be an annual overview of trends in the crypto industry, shared through the a16z crypto vantage point of both tracking data and across the countless entrepreneurs and builders we meet. It’s for anyone who seeks to understand the evolution of the internet, and where we are on the journey towards a decentralized, community-owned-and-operated alternative to the centralized tech platforms of web2 – especially as it touches creators and other builders.
Forbes: An Evolving Strategy For The Emergent Metaverse: A Web3 Manifesto For Brands And Artists
Web3 is a collective evolution in experiences between brands, artists, and audiences. Web3 is compelling enough to command attention but daunting enough to stall many efforts before they even start, especially for brands that are tasked with other strategies, executions, and KPIs. Those that leave little room for exploring a largely unproven capability with the potential to change the experience between brands and their audience.
Ethereum Creator Vitalik Buterin Opens Up About 'Contradictions' in His Web3 Values
Vitalik Buterin is not quite sure how to feel about the state of Ethereum.
One might expect the inventor of the world's second-largest cryptocurrency to boast about its successes. But Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin is instead preoccupied figuring out how he feels about his creation, which has become the epicenter for DeFi, NFTs, and DAOs.
In a Twitter thread Monday evening, Buterin lays out 10 contradictions in his values that he is mulling over—and most of them deal, directly or indirectly, with what Web3 and Ethereum should be.
Proofs of attendance are Web3’s new status symbol
Seen as the Web3 approach to displaying backstage passes and event photos, digital collectible proofs of attendance could offer brands both a short-term and longer-term utility.
With the return to physical events and the rise of virtual ones, a new Web3 trend is emerging: a digital proof of attendance.
Considered metaverse mementos akin to VIP lanyards, ticket stubs and post-event Instagram pics, these blockchain-based tokens offer considerable potential for fashion and beauty brands to encourage loyalty and reward engagement. They also appeal to the data-shy sentiment of the emerging Web3 community and are a relatively easy way in for the NFT curious.
BONUS: How many types of NFTs are there?
The most difficult thing in anything blockchain, crypto, NFT, metaverse these days is to be able to separate signal from noise, let’s try to bring some clarity into what is happening with NFTs.
It’s clear that blockchain can have many uses, smart contracts being one of them, with tokens being both fungible (example: cryptocurrencies) and non-fungible, and the market has started expanding with creative cases in the last year or so.
As I was researching the web to find how people — smarter than me -have categorized the existing cases already launched in the market, I found a wealth of listicles with different takes, so I decided to aggregate the best understanding I have as of now.
TL;DR; All types: Digital Artworks, Music NFTs, Video clips & GIFs, Memes
Avatars & PFPs, Video games items, Trading cards & collectibles, Metaverse land, Virtual fashion, NFT/Crypto domains, Text-based NFTs, Ticket & membership NFTs, Real world assets
Things we’re listening to
Bankless Podcast: Instagram Bringing NFTs to 2.9B People | Sandeep & Mihailo, Polygon
Sandeep Nailwal and Mihailo Bjelic are the Co-Founders of Polygon. They’ve been on Bankless in the past, but not during a time like the one we currently find ourselves in.
However, the bear market is not stopping Polygon from building. Polygon is enabling Instagram to bring NFTs to 2.9B people. And that's not all! They're also working with Stripe to allow USDC payments via Polygon.
Hear how exactly they plan on doing this, what they plan on building next, how they're thinking about the bear market, and so much more!
Seed Club DAO Podcast: Reputation, Governance, Token Models, and Station with Tina He
Today we bring you a conversation with Tina He, product designer, entrepreneur, and co-founder of Station. We got into some big topics: reputation, governance, token economic models, and Station. A web3 data toolkit focused on showcasing contributors' history of contributions and making that visible to DAOs.
Projects we’re following
Rug Radio is one of the first fully decentralized media platforms. From their site:
What does this mean?
It means that our community, our hosts, and you, own the platform you consume from.
Why is it important?
Because we need to own the narrative and the memes. Together, we can build a network where the incentives favor truth, ownership and long-term care for the commons. Ownership means we each get to decide what we consume, how it's delivered, and we all benefit from the abundance created through it.
New DAO Aims To Solve Web3’s Customer Service Woes
VillageDAO intends to be the first decentralized customer service platform
ConsenSys, the Ethereum developer and MetaMask parent, is launching VillageDAO to enhance community engagement and scale customer service for Web3 brands.
Working with LivePerson, a customer service software based in artificial intelligence, ConsenSys will use MetaMask as the platform’s pilot.