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In Today’s Email: 

🐦 Twitter Launches Official NFT profile pics!

🏠 Milo Mortgages

💵 Funding Friday

Who wants to go on a hike today? Maybe someplace with no cell phone signal so I don’t have to see ETH UNDER $3k...NOOOOOO

Brb while I go move back into my moms basement. 

Alright. Sorry about that. I’m back. 

Let’s jump into today’s most interesting stories.

Twitter Launches NFT Profile Pics

Twitter just released an official NFT profile picture integration - it’s been teased for months and now it’s finally in the big leagues

You just link your ethereum wallet to your twitter account and voila. Use an NFT as your profile pic. 

The cool thing is - when you own the NFT, your pic becomes a hexagon shape. 

Calling it now, hexagon is the new blue checkmark (which sucks for me because I finally got my blue check mark after years of begging)

I have 2 thoughts on this:  

#1 - I think this kind of thing is actually big for NFTs. 

Digital art is cool…but not if you can’t display your art collection anywhere.

Social media is the place everyone wants to flex, and now you can flex your digital art as your profile pic, and the hexagon means “i don’t just like this picture..I own it”

The only thing bigger would be if Instagram did this. Hopefully they do it soon, which they're hinting at. 

#2 - The problem is..I don’t want my profile pic to just be an NFT. 

I read this blog post ~8 years ago by Ryan Hoover (founder of Producthunt) years ago about why he never changes his profile picture and it totally made sense to me (I haven’t changed mine since). 

Your “brand” is your profile pic. If you change it all the time, or make it a generic NFT, then you lose brand recognition. 

My boy, Bobby Goodlatte (seed investor in Coinbase, and a top 5 first-last name) feels the same way.

Buy A House With Crypto 

Today, if you wanna buy a house with crypto you have to sell your crypto. 

This sucks for 2 obvious reasons: #1 - selling = pay capital gains tax on your crypto 

#2 - you no longer own crypto, and instead own a house. 

The solution seems obvious right? Lend against large crypto positions. Aka Crypto Mortgages. 

I bet we’ll see a bunch of startups trying to do this. One I just saw is Milo. Yesterday they launched “the world’s first “30-year crypto mortgage.”

The best part is that you put down ZERO down payment (ok, that’s pretty sweet) 

If we’re gonna hodl, we need solutions like this so all the milk road readers can get a nice big house without selling all his crypto. 

Every Friday, we’ll share a list of the web3 startups that raised this week 

Over $500m of funding was announced this week (jesus! take the wheel) 

We created a google sheet with every startup investment that was announced this week (feel free to make your own copy of it!)

A few highlights:

• Autograph - The “NFTs for Athletes” startup that has Tom Brady as it’s frontman and sells NFTs inside Draftkings platform raised $170M

• Near - a new layer one founded by ex google guys -  raised $150m!

• Metaplex - A way to make Solana NFTs that can do a lot more than just be images or videos. Tools to fractionalize NFTs, auction them, and a ton more - Multicoin backed it and you should read their thesis

• Seashell - The latest defi mullet product (Defi in the back, bank in the front) where consumers can get 10% APY, backed by Mark Cuban

• Soma Finance - Building the "NASDAQ Of the Metaverse" launching tokenized equities and securities this year, oh and there's a whitelist sign up on their site right now

• Here's the google sheet with all the other action this week in web3 funding!

Alright, see ya monday 

Shaan “aka we don’t write emails on the weekend” Puri & Ben “plz ETH stop falling” Levy