Web3 Wallet Competition | Products vs. Protocols | Largest Crypto Fund | Music NFTs | NFT Of The Month

Gm DOers!

Welcome to the Weekly Rollup, the perfect place to stay up-to-date with everything happening in Web3!

If you haven't noticed, it seems like we've entered a bear market 🤷

The one takeaway you should leave with from here is that now is the time to learn and build!

The strongest protocols have been built during bear markets. This is when the noise is separated from the markets and when the most valuable products are built. 

Good times are ahead!

Here's what we cover in todays weekly rollup:

• Web3 Wallet space and how competition for market share and innovation is heating up quickly!

• Web3 Announcements from: the largest crypto fund, Opensea launches a decentralized protocol,

• Immutable X building the new gaming layer and Terra 2.0 is coming.

• Music NFTs are set to disrupt the music industry again

• Fantasy sports on the blockchain look promising

• NFT of the month!

Before jumping into it, let’s talk about the Web3 Academy word of the week; permissionless, which is the term that differentiates Web3 from Web2.

In this space, you do not need permission from your bank to transact, from your social media to post your thoughts or from centralized protocols to interact with other people.

Web3 is permissionless. You’re in charge of everything!

P.S: Keep reading until the end to see who we’ve chosen as our NFT of the Month! 

Let’s go.

You can watch the episode below, or listen on your favorite platform: Spotify | Apple Podcast | YouTube

Web3 Wallet Competition

It’s important to use the right tools in Web3. Just like using an electric sander to sand your 40 year old deck instead of using a sanding block.

The right tool helps you achieve your goals more efficiently. Web3 wallets are perhaps the most important tool of this space, which is why we see everyone and their grandma creating a wallet. 

• First up is Coinbase coming through with a multi-party computation (MPC) wallet. The biggest pain of using Web3 is that of storing your keys. Where do you store them, what if you lose them? It’s just a pain, one that Coinbase acknowledges and tries to fix. The MPC wallet aims to be able to retrieve a user’s private keys without them being visible to Coinbase. It will be a mix of a non-custodial wallet and a centralized wallet. While the details of how it’ll work are unclear, the bottomline is that this new feature could potentially encourage more users to come aboard in this space because it will remove the need of storing your private keys.

• MetaMask is integrating Coinbase Pay, a feature that allows users to seamlessly buy crypto with their credit or debit cards. Although being competitors, MetaMask is sort of forced to integrate with Coinbase due to the fact that they’re building perhaps the best user experience in this space. 

• On the topic of user experience, Paper, a company backed by Polygon, aims to create a protocol that allows users to seamlessly interact with NFTs without needing a wallet. Paper is aimed for non tech savvy people that do not know how to create a wallet but want to buy and sell some NFTs directly with their credit cards. The concept is very important for achieving further adoption of NFTs.

• Gamestop announces the launch of their wallet that will allow users to hold ERC-20 tokens. The wallet will be built on Loopring, an Ethereum L2 scaling solution. What Gamestop aims to build is an infrastructure for current gamers. GameFi is on the rise and there is a need for a process that will onboard traditional gamers into the GameFi world. Gamestop is perfectly positioned to achieve that.  

• Robinhood, yet another Web2 company, is also creating a non-custodial wallet. Robinhood already allows for the transaction of cryptocurrencies by acting almost like a centralized exchange. This non-custodial wallet will potentially onboard existing Robinhood users into the decentralized web because it will allow everyone to interact with DeFi, NFTs and so much more without any fees and probably great user experience.  

• The Robinhood wallet news came shortly after SBF (founder of FTX) bought a 7.6% stake in the company. On top of that, FTX also announced that FTX Stocks has launched in the private beta phase.

Announcements

• A16Z raises the largest ever crypto fund ($4.3B) dedicated to sustain and back up start-ups and upcoming ventures. To our disappointment, they decided not to buy tokens with that money :(. This news comes a week after they have been chosen by us as the “Web3 Person of the Month”.

• ImmutableX announces a cross-rollup liquidity solution for multiple L2 and L3 zk-rollups to onboard the next billion users of Web3 gaming. Basically, in order for games to operate smoothly and adopt a lot of players, they need an individual blockchain to build upon. It would be unsustainable to build 2 or 3 huge games like WOW, LOL and CSGO on the same blockchain. ImmutableX want to allow each game to build on its own Layer 3 scaling solution, which will imply extremely low fees and fast transaction settlements to allow micro payments to take place.

• Wait, are there Layer 3 scaling solutions? - Not yet, but that’s what ImmutableX aims to achieve. This way, anything can be built really fast on Layer 3. In terms of the transactions taking place in L3, they will be settled on L2 and will lastly be recorded on the L1 Ethereum chain. This procedure removes the feeling of blockchain and makes everything seamless and smooth to use.

• Opensea announces the development of SeaPort, a decentralized product and substitute to the main Opensea platform which is centralized.

• Mirror is basically acting as the Substack of Web3 but it allows you to make your article or newsletter into an NFT which can be acquired by others. The value proposition and market fit of Mirror is still unclear.

• Terra 2.0 has been confirmed. The proposed fork has been accepted by both the validators and the community. The holders of Luna pre-crash will be airdropped the Luna 2.0 token. Interestingly enough, VCs and other early investors will have a vesting period of 1 year while retail investors will have unlocked tokens after 21 days of vesting. This gives the opportunity to retail to dump on VCs, something that doesn’t happen often in Web3. To learn more about the allocation, read this thread.

Music

• Chainsmokers are dropping 5,000 NFTs with their new album to selected engaged fans (apparently based on music streams, concert sales, and social media engagement). Holders will split a 1% share of royalties for the entire album.  In this case the royalties are very tiny. If the Chainsmokers make $10M in royalties, then each holder gets $20. But this concept of giving royalties/revenue share to fans is powerful.

Overall, it is going to be interesting to watch the reaction of the music industry towards Web3. This industry is known for their resistance to innovation. We’ve witnessed a decade long of legal battles from the music industry regarding Web2 adoption.

The main difference that Web3 enables is the fact that it enables the artist to go ahead on its own by using Web3 tools like NFTs or creating a community, two things that are permissionless. 

NFT of the Month

The infinite machine project started with a book that describes the history of Ethereum. Now, it has been decided to make the book into a movie and the fund-raising has been achieved through an NFT collection. 

What’s super interesting about this is that the NFT collection has different traits. Some tiers grant the holders access to the credits of the movie, some allow you to be an extra in the movie and others allow you inside the movie premier. This gives unique utility to each NFT from the collection. 

Lastly, 10% of the fundraising that has been obtained is going to a DAO treasury that aims to implement teaching for others on how to make movies in this space.

The infinite machine project is fascinating and so unique that it had to be chosen as the NFT of the Month. 

Fun fact: The movie is going to be called #WAGMAM , standing for “We’re all gonna make a movie!”

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