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- š„ WeWorkās Founder is back...and his new thing is in crypto
š„ WeWorkās Founder is back...and his new thing is in crypto
GM. This is the Milk Road where we always remove the foil before we cook our lean cuisines in the microwave. If you just poke a hole in the top, I salute you.
Estimated read time: 2 minutes and 59 seconds
š Adam Neumann is...back?
š» How to prepare for the bear
š¦ A Bored Ape was going to be on TV, until it got stolen
š Chart of the day
ADAM NEUMANN IS BACK WITH A NEW CRYPTO STARTUP
You might remember Adam Neumann, the founder that took WeWork to WeCrashed. And then they turned it into a TV show. Side note, I just watched that series and man, it was good.
Guess what? He started a new company, Flowcarbon, with his wife.
The big idea is to tokenize carbon credits. And he just raised $70M to do it.
I wonāt lie to you, we arenāt environmentalists and had no idea what carbon credits actually were so we did a little researchā¦ hereās how I'd explain it to a first grader:
Global warming is getting bad. The good thing is there are a ton of smart people out there building solutions to try to save us. But the issue is a lot of them donāt get much funding.
So in order to solve this, a carbon credits market was created. The way it works is every time a project successfully removes 1 ton of carbon from the atmosphere, they get 1 carbon credit.
These carbon credits are then sold to individual companies. This is one way that companies are reducing their carbon footprint and meeting regulation requirements- they buy 1 carbon credit for every 1 ton of C02 they create from factories, company trucks, etc as an āoffsetā.
The companies get to say theyāre net-zero and the projects get some funding. Itās a win-win.
But the issue is these transactions are slow and mostly done over-the-counter. That's where Flowcarbon comes in.
Theyāre putting it all on the blockchain. Now projects can take their carbon credits and tokenize them as GNT tokens so anyone can buy them - you, Apple, your Aunt Sally.
Each GNT token is backed by 1 carbon credit from a carbon removal or reduction project.
And Voila, the carbon market is now more transparent, liquid, and accessible.
The Milk Road's Take: Crypto gets a ton of hate for hurting the environment, so it's good to see a few projects all tackling ideas here.
Flowcarbon's business model and approach isn't a new idea here, but it's a good one.
We just donāt fully back that Neumann guy. Call it trust issues.
FROM A CRYPTO INVESTOR: HOW TO PREPARE FOR THE BEAR
We (and everyone else in the world) have talked a lot about how weāre officially in a bear market.
The questions on our minds are:
How long will it last?
What should I be buying?
Whereās the reset button?
During these times, the Milk Road likes to do one thing: see what the smartest people in the room are doing and saying.
Mika Honkasalo is one of those people. Mika is an investor for Parafi Capital where theyāve invested in things like ConsenSys, NEAR protocol, and more.
Yesterday he dropped some gems in a blog post, Preparing for a long bear market and identifying the next growth opportunities.
Hereās what stood out to us:
Don't rush to buy the dip. Everyone wants to be the person to say āI successfully bought the dip,ā but the reality is we donāt really know how long this bear could last or how low the prices could actually go. Itās a marathon, not a sprint, so donāt rush and buy up using all your money at once.
What sustains crypto is building cool and useful stuff. The crypto market cycle is a function of building ā frustration with the market not reacting to it ā a financial innovation triggering growth.
This holds true in all of the previous cycles. For example, in the previous cycle projects like MakerDAO and Uniswap launched in early 2018.
But the DeFi run didnāt start until liquidity mining happened in mid-2020 (aka financial innovation).
It took 2+ years for the market to react but now MakerDao and Uniswap are some of the most important protocols used.
Bullish on ETH with the ETH2.0 merge coming, Mika thinks that it will open up āeasy modeā to perhaps the highest degree in crypto ever:
Miners are less likely to sell because they donāt have to cover electricity costs (the largest force of dumping).
A lower inflation rate combined with the burn leads to negative issuance. It will actively take money going out of the ecosystem to bring the ETH price down.
DeFi is something crypto canāt live without. Mika believes 3 things are true:
DeFi is still the biggest use case for crypto
Most of the growth in the ecosystem is reflected in DeFi TVL
If DeFi is completely useless as a category, itās difficult to imagine what blockchains will be used for
Because of this, Mika thinks that there is a category of DeFi protocols that are difficult to imagine crypto growing without. Things like Lido and Aave are two examples of these.
A solid crypto game is the most likely path to 100M+ new users. A good game with token economics that boosts growth seems like the likeliest path out of the bear and into a real new bull market.
He says that getting this one right is such a monumentally right investment that itās worth continuing to watch this space closely.
THIS BORED APE WAS GOING TO BE A TV STAR, UNTIL HE GOT STOLEN
You might know Seth Greenā¦if youāre in your early 30s like me. If youāre not, heās like that D-list movie star who you would faintly recognize if he was eating a slice of pizza next to you.
Up until recently, he was an owner of a Bored Ape. That all changed last week when Seth got got. He fell for a phishing scam and lost all his Apes. 1 Bored Ape and 2 Mutant Apes.
Now this is a financial blow for sure, but Seth has a bigger problem... Heās currently in the process of creating a new show, āWhite Horse Tavernā.
The star of his show? Fred - Bored Ape #8398. Aka the Ape that just got kidnapped.
This is a problem because Seth doesnāt own Fred any more, which means he canāt technically use Fred in a show without permission.
The Bored Ape rulebook is pretty clear: When you purchase an NFT, you own the underlying Bored Ape, the art, completely.
So now that someone else owns the Ape, whatās gonna happen to the show? Will it be released? Will the new owner of the Ape allow it? Will they want a piece of the revenue pie? Will Seth have to buy a new Ape to replace the old one in the show?
While Seth figures it all out, he tells us one thing: If thereās a door to kick in, he promises heās gonna kick it in.
BITE-SIZED COOKIES
A16Z has announced it has raised a new $4.5B crypto fund. This will be their 4th crypto fund and have raised over $7.6B in total. Insane
Coinbase officially enters the Fortune 500 for the biggest U.S companies by revenue. They are ranked 437th and are the first crypto company to join the club.
Stripe is launching a new app to allow instant Fiat-to-Bitcoin conversions for businesses.
Sam Bankman-Fried announces heās planning to donate up to $1B in the upcoming 2024 presidential election.
CHART OF THE DAY
Uniswap, the popular decentralized exchange, has officially passed over $1T in all-time trading volume š¤Æš¤Æ
See ya tomorrow!
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DISCLAIMER:
None of this is financial advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. Please be careful and do your own research.
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