🥛 Snoop Dogg's Web3 Vision

GM, this is the Milk Road. We don’t play back and forth with crypto, we move straight to the end.

Today we have:

• 🚀 Funding Friday 

• 🦍 The Bored Ape Takedown

• 📪 The Milk Road mailbag

• 😂 Meme of the Day

FUNDING FRIDAY

This week we saw $750m+ amount get invested in crypto. We’re here to tell you who got the money.

MetaLend got $5M to develop their NFT lending platform. They now let you borrow up to 30% of the value of your NFT in ETH. 

Crusoe Energy got $350M to mine bitcoin using wasted natural gas as a power source. 

Rario got $120M to build NBA Top Shot for Cricket. This is the second cricket NFT marketplace to get big $$$. 

Bastion got $9M to build their lending, borrowing, and exchange on the Near blockchain. They are the largest DeFi protocol on Near.

Flipside Crypto got $50M to pay users to learn about protocols and chains. Learn and earn!

Get our free database of companies here.

THE BORED APE TAKEDOWN

Cobie wrote a great take-down blog post about Ape Coin. 

Quick summary: 

• Bored Ape Yacht Club is the biggest NFT project. They launched Ape Coin. 

• One of the things you can do with Ape Coin is “stake it” (lock it up, and get paid interest). 

• Cobie points out that this is a misleading use of the word “staking”. Staking is a technical term. You stake to help the blockchain function, and get paid a reward for your work.

• But NFT projects are misleading when they say “staking”. There’s no technical functionality. It’s just “I’ll bribe you with some extra tokens if you agree to lockup your tokens and not dump them right now”. 

In summary - they are using “staking” to artificially lower the sell-pressure on the coins (keeping the price up, and preventing it from dumping) until the team and board of advisors tokens get unlocked. 

If you don’t follow Cobie, go do it now. He’s smart, funny, and one of the only people in crypto not trying to sell you sh*t.

THE MILK ROAD MAILBAG

Brad from Detroit writes, "Do a mailbag you [expletive]! Enough about Snoop Dogg. You promised a Mailbag! Mailbag!!!!!!!!!"

OK let’s try it. These are real emails from our readers: 

OK fine. I’ll start using Twitter. Seems like that’s where the crypto action is. Who are the first 5 people I should follow for good crypto tweets? 

-Jessie “strawberry milk” from Miami

Here’s a few I like: 

1. Willy Woo - this is the guy i follow for price analysis of Bitcoin. Great data. 

2. Sam Bankman Fried - the billionaire founder of FTX. Unlike most CEOs, he doesn’t just tweet generic-rah rah stuff about his company. He posts interesting, real stories and advice. Like this one about X

3. Balaji - one of the smartest people on the planet. He talks about crypto things that have nothing to do with price, and everything to do with real world use cases

4. Punk6529 - if you like NFTs and long theories

5. Zach XBT - this guy is an on-chain investigator, he dives deep into what happened and shares the stories publicly

So… fellas.. what % of your net worth do you have in crypto? And I know, I know. Not financial advice, yada yada. 

-Marcus from Austin, TX 

Shaan - I started off small. Just to learn. But over time got more and more bullish. In 2020 I tweeted that I moved 25% of my liquid net worth into crypto. That has grown to ~50-60% now of the total portfolio. 

To be clear, there are rumors that I’m an idiot, and those rumors are not without merit. Not financial advice, but a general way to think about things is: 

What amount of money fits this test: 

• You won’t be crying if it dropped 80%

• You will feel super excited if it goes up 5x

That’s how I think about these types of bets. 

Ben - 40% for me.  If this was a 3 point shooting %, I’d be feeling great about it.

Since  it’s a crypto net worth stat, I feel great about it some days and terrible when the price drops 10% in a single day.

I know you guys know people (who know people, who know people). So what are those smart people saying about the market right now? 

- Joe but you can call me Joe, from Minneapolis

The smartest investors I know don’t overreact to the market. They are always learning and building, and have a few big bets that they plan to hold for a LONG time and don’t get distracted by monthly price swings. 

They are mostly long Bitcoin, ETH, and usually 1 other ecosystem (eg. Luna, Avalanche etc.) that they plan to hold for 10+ years. And then have small bets that don’t really move the needle but let them learn and have fun.

What’s with the weird pictures of the random guy at the end of every email? 

First of all, that’s not a random guy. That’s Vitalik Buterin. Co-founder of Ethereum. Breaker of chains. Mother of tokens. And our lanky king. 

Second, those aren’t ‘weird pictures’. It’s an homage to the guy who helped kick off this whole web3 thing. We would put a picture of satoshi (creator of Bitcoin) too, but nobody knows who satoshi is. The last time the media tried to guess, they harassed this poor asian man.

Fellas - cut the chit chat. I just joined. What are the 3 best things you’ve written so I can see if this newsletter is worth it?

-Carlton from Canada

Carlton from Canada. You should never introduce yourself as anything but Carlton from Canada. Drop the last name. That’s it. Carlton from Canada. That’s the whole name.

Our top 3 rated editions are: 

1. I just spent $200k on an NFT

2. Peter Thiel calls Warren Buffett a sociopathic grandpa

3. The Milk Road gang had a meltdown trying Defi

I’ve been reading Milk Road for approx a month & my understanding of CRYPTO is still only as clear as chocolate milk. Perhaps a “Dictionary of the Day”? One crypto word and a simple definition/description to help us rookies out? I’ve got no clue in this arena; on chain, blockchain, defi, TVL, Play to Earn, etc. ……. THANK YOU!

-Will-I-Am from Gilbert, Arizona

Will-I-Am from…the Black Eyed Peas? Is that you?

We hear you, it’s hard to keep up with the language of crypto.  Our goal is to explain things in plain-jane-english.. And to dumb things down, without making you feel dumb. I like the dictionary idea. Maybe we’ll do that. 

What’s your take on the metaverse. I keep hearing everyone say metaverse, but I have no idea what the hell they are talking about. 

-Laurie from Texas

Don’t worry, they don’t know what the hell they are talking about either. 

Think about it this way. 30 years ago we spent NONE of our time online. Your friends, your photos, your assets, etc.. All of it was the real world. 

15 years ago (2007), some of it had moved online. Facebook helped us keep in touch with friends digitally. Our photos became digital. 

Today - a LOT has moved digital. We have friends we met on twitter. We facetime and zoom instead of meeting in person. We own digital assets like bitcoin and NFTs. Many people’s job is fully digital and remote. 

The arrow is pointing one way. Less physical world stuff. More digital stuff. 

Now imagine 30 years forward. We won’t need phones. A screen will be in a contact lens on our eye. We won’t need cash. Our money will be digital. We won’t fly for business meetings. We will just pop up a hologram and talk. 

What people call the “metaverse” is actually a transition from “most of our life happening physicaly” to “most of our life happening digitally”. 

Ideally, nobody should “own the metaverse”. Facebook changed their name to Meta, but I don’t know about you - I don’t want some product manager at facebook to own the metaverse.

Alright that’s all. Click the feedback button at the bottom of this email so we know if you want MORE MAILBAG or NO THANK YOU NOT AGAIN

MEME OF THE DAY

Hilarious. Every NFT “roadmap” is a pdf of broken promises

See ya tomorrow!

Shaan "Chocolate Milk" Puri and Ben "2% Milk" Levy

A Review from the Road...

What'd you think of today's email?

• 🥛🥛🥛🥛🥛 F**king great

• 🥛🥛🥛 Meh, do better

• 🥛 You didn't bring the heat