📝 Web3 Field Notes #27 - It's Time to Face Reality

Hey, it’s Marc. I write about Bitcoin, Web3, and brands. ✌️ Welcome to another issue of my obsessively curated field notes to help you filter out the noise.

⏱️ Reading time: 3 min

“Persist, pivot, or concede. It’s up to us, our choice every time.” ― Matthew McConaughey

📚 Key Reads

• Rethinking community design to build better communities. By Mashal Waqar. Link

• Tokenized communities. By Jihad Esmail. Link

• The three transitions. By Vitalik Buterin. Link

• Hyperstructures. By jacob. Link

• Why AI will save the world. By Marc Andreessen. Link

🚨 What caught my eyes

✨ Web3 + NFTs

• Recursive inscriptions went live on Bitcoin. Wait, what? The ordinals protocol allowed to inscribe files fully on-chain onto Bitcoin. Now, inscriptions can request content of other inscriptions and build on each other. This is huge. This would make it possible to put a 3D video game fully on-chain on Bitcoin. The possibilities are endless. After ordinals, this is another pivotal moment in the history of Bitcoin. Link

• Salesforce leads $6M round for AI-backed Web3 data platform Mnemonic, which provides artificial intelligence-backed NFT data and analytics for enterprises and Web3 developers. Web3 marketing tools are getting sophisticated. Addressable and Absolute Labs are other leading contenders in this space.

• Wallet-as-a-service start-up Magic has raised $52m led by PayPal Ventures. Magic has made a name for itself by building a white label version that lets corporate clients provide wallets en masse to users without worrying about seed phrases, private keys, and other elements of Web3. Simplifying the wallet onboarding process will be key to Web3 adoption. Its biggest competitors: Paper, Crossmint, and Sequence. Link

• Lens protocol closes a $15m funding round. Lens is one of the leading blockchain-based open-source social graphs that aims to bring social media on-chain. This means that every post and every like (called “collect”) becomes an NFT in users’ wallets. Users own their content and connect to the interface they like best. Link

• Goose sold for $5.4mn, 3237 ETH, to Punk6529. In ETH terms it's the highest Art Blocks ever sold (see picture at the bottom). Link

🌎 Crypto & Macro

• BlackRock filed for a spot Bitcoin ETF, with Coinbase as a crypto custodian. This is clearly one of the most important events in the space in a while. Given their reputation, this has the highest likelihood of happening out of all the attempts at a spot ETF so far. It would likely cause an influx of institutional money. Six years ago, Blackrock’s CEO Larry Fink called Bitcoin an “index of money laundering”. The timing is definitely bold. Link

• Bitcoin miners are churning out more computing power than ever. Average difficulty is up 71.50% from one year ago. This is partly due to a drop in electricity costs and a new wave of more efficient machines that had been pre-ordered and are now arriving in the hands of miners.

• Uniswap Labs has released a draft code for Uniswap v4. The code features “hooks,” or plugins that allow developers to create custom liquidity pools, such as on-chain limit orders. Uniswap is still the biggest DEX by a large margin. The median trading volume across the top three decentralized exchanges (DEX) jumped 444% after the SEC crackdown on Binance and Coinbase last week. Link

• One of the biggest VCs, a16z, announced its first international office in London. It cited "predictable” crypto regulation and signaled its focus on supporting crypto and Web3 startups. a16z has allocated $7.6 billion to crypto startups globally. Above all, this is certainly a very effective PR stunt against US regulators. Link

🧠 AI

• The European Parliament passes a draft AI Act to curtail facial recognition, force data disclosures, and more; a final version is expected to pass later in 2023. Link

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🚀Interesting start-ups:

• Primsell: Unlock the power of digital ownership & leverage consumer engagement with NFT campaigns.

💡Word on the street:  

With the SEC suing both Binance and Coinbase last week, the crypto bear market has reached a new moral low point.

It was another wake-up call that it’s time to face reality. Whether that involves reconciling with regulators, or developing mass-market products that prioritize UX and utility: Now, we need more realism and pragmatism, and less ideology.

It’s crypto/Web3’s biggest test yet.

That’s all for now, folks. Back to building! 🚀

– Marc

📈 Top charts to share with friends

🎨 Artwork: “Ringers #879”, by Dmitri Cherniak ($5.4mn, 3237 ETH)