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- š #68: What now?
š #68: What now?
After Starbucks. Web3 loyalty for restaurants. BlackRock's first tokenized fund. RWA boom. London Stock Exchange launches ETN. Coinbase record volume. SBF gets 25 in prison. Top charts & more.
Hey, itās Marc. āļø
This week, I published a case study on Gucciās Web3 strategy for Harvard Business School. Itās also conference time again! Next week Iāll be at NFT NYC. Reach out by replying to this email.
Be inspiredāØ
āWheresoever you go, go with all your heart.āā Confucius
š Top 5 Reads
āØ Web3 & Brands
Starbucks is out āĀ and now? š¤
Many reached out to me asking what the end of Starbucks' Odyssey means for the Web3 consumer landscape as a whole.
A quick recap of the most important facts:
What now?
We're entering a new phase of Web3 maturity, having seen many lackluster Web3 brand activations over the past two years.
Whatās next? Brands want to:
solve real business problems (brand affinity, engagement, loyalty, cost savings, etc.)
generate actual ROI
This also means that Web3 isnāt just about NFTs anymore. Brands will start looking at this more holistically. Starbucks is a first inning of that.
Zooming out: Weāre seeing four big shifts, driven by a variety of fintech tools, blockchain, disintermediation and decentralization:
From platforms ā> network
From transactional incentives ā> ownership incentives
From top-down ā> bottom-up
From social relationships ā> economically beneficial relationships
Punchline: Future brands will be hyper-personalized and make consumers to co-creators and co-owners with a stake in the value they help to create.
Food onchain in New Yorkš
Blackbird sold out membership to its Blackbird Breakfast Club in less than 24 hours. Link
In 2022, Gary Vās Flyfish Club became the first restaurant to offer a token-gated memberās only private dining club. It has ,327 members and is on track to open in early 2024. Link
Best Dish Ever launched first tokenized community-owned media brand for foodies thatās pushing out high-quality content and real world restaurant perks for holders.
Zooming in:Ā Blackbird has raised $24 million through a16z. It aims give many independent restaurants the means to identify and reward regulars for the first time.
How it works: Consumers earn rewards, restaurants earn tokens and receive valuable customer data.
Dive deeper: Web3, the future of loyalty? Read more.
Why itās important: Blackbird is building an open, interoperable loyalty systems with onchain tokens. Interoperability is a key promise of Web3 based loyalty ecosystems, but itās complex. Will food be the first working use case?
More on Web3:
Refik Anadol launched a Large Nature Model / Living Art with NVIDIA. Link
The Fabricant partners with Maison Margiela to bring their iconic Tabi boot into the digital world. Link
š Crypto & Macro
Tokenization takes offš
BlackRock launched its first tokenized fund, BUIDL, on Ethereum Link
It enjoyed strong demand in its first week, attracting $245M in deposits.
The volume on Google Search trends for RWA is now surpassing Gaming. Link
Boson1 recently launched "Fermion," a protocol tailored for transacting high-value assets.Ā
Zooming in: BlackRock's BUIDL, created with asset tokenization platform Securitize, is investment in a fund that holds U.S. Treasury bills and repo agreements.Ā
What theyāre saying: BlackRock thinks that tokenization will be the ānext generation for marketsā and āmonumental in shaping our ecosystem.ā
By the numbers:Ā
Why it matters: Tokenization makes a product more liquid, more secure, programmable and interoperable. With funds, this means instant settlement and around-the-clock subscriptions and redemptions.
J.P. Morgan started tokenising funds as a proof-of-conceptĀ last year.
UBS is testing a tokenized fund on Ethereum.Ā
Punchline: Weāre seeing institutional adoption happening in real time.
More on Crypto:
The London Stock Exchange is set to go live with their own Exchange Traded Notes for BTC and ETH later in May. Link
A US judge sentences Sam Bankman-Fried to 25 years in prison. Link
Goldman Sachs sees a resurgence in crypto assets from hedge fund clients. Link
Coinbase International sees record daily trading volume in March. Link
š§ AI + Metaverse
šļø Start-ups & Tools to Watch
LimeChain: A leading blockchain consulting & development agency with 120+ chain-agnostic devs. Link*
*partner of Dematerialzd.
š° Money Moves
0G Labs: Blockchain developer raised $35M pre-seed funding to build scaling infrastructure for on-chain AI apps.
MyShell:Ā Dragonfly Leads $11M Pre-Series A Round for Web3 AI Platform. Link
Parallel:Ā Secures $35M Funding for Sci-Fi NFT Card Game.Ā Link
Optimism to grant $3.3B in OP tokens to top ecosystem contributors.Ā Link
Thatās all for now, folks. Thank you for being part of the journey.Talk soon,
ā Marc
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