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📝 Web3 Field Notes #37 – Tornados & Big Waves on the Open Sea

📝 Web3 Field Notes #37 – Tornados & Big Waves on the Open Sea

The end of royalty fees for NFTs. Shopify adds USDC. Mercedes Benz launches 2nd NFT collection. Tornado Cash: Existential thread for DeFi. Ethereum gains momentum. New start-ups, charts & more.

Hey, it’s Marc. I write obsessively curated field notes about Web3, crypto, and brands to help you filter out the noise. ✌️ Happy reading!

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Be inspired

“We are investing in the metaverse. We want to be where our consumer is. And that's where the younger population is.” – Patrice Louvet, CEO Ralph Lauren

📚 Top 5 Reads

Big Brands & Web3: NFTs and the Consumer Brand Revolution. By Camilla Mcfarland. (video) Link
Digiphysical Goods: Bringing Programmable Utility to Physical Products. By 1kx. Link
Onchain is the Next Online. By Jacob. Link
Co-Ownership as a Web3 Social Primitive. By Chase Chapman. Link
Bejing is Coming for the Metaverse. By Gian Volcipelli. Link

🚨 Top 6 Stories That Caught My Eye

✨ Web3 + NFTs

OpenSea & Royalty Fees: OpenSea ended mandatory resale fees for artists last Friday, sparking criticism within the NFT community and among investors. Subsequently, Yuga Labs (IP holders of Crypto Punks, Bored Apes, a.o.) announced it will stop support for OpenSea for its collections (about 25% of OpenSea’s volume). Link
- Punchline: First, this shift significantly disrupts creators who anchored their businesses on guaranteed royalties—a cornerstone of Web3's pledge. Second, this matters for brands, since a lot of NFT projects from top brands have earned millions in royalties. This means that monetization has to happen somewhere else. Business cases need to be built differently. And other marketing KPIs become more important.
Shopify adds USDC: Solana Pay is now available as an approved app integration with Shopify. This allows millions of merchants and consumers across the globe to pay with Circle’s USDC stablecoin. Link
- Punchline: Shopify accounts for 10% of total U.S. e-commerce and $444 billion worth of global economic activity. In March, Shopify launched NFT token-gating for its merchants. These are small steps towards crypto mass adoption.
NFTs & brand heritage: Mercedes-Benz NXT announced its second collection “Mercedes-Benz NXT Icons”. These collectibles are digital re-interpretations of the most notable designs across seven design eras, resulting in a total of 18’860 NFTs. Link
- Punchline: Monetizing brand IP, i.e., launching limited digital collections, has been a popular way for more traditional brands to experiment with NFTs (e.g. Nike’s “OurForce 1” or Porsche’s 911 collections). As NFTs will be more tightly integrated into brand ecosystems, I expect more complex applications to follow.

🌎 Crypto & Macro

DeFi & Regulation: The two developers of Tornado Cash, a privacy mixer, have been arrested and charged with money laundering. Link
- Punchline: Crypto folks argue that just providing software (speech) is a fundamental human right – even if used for illicit activities. Prosecutors allege that Tornado Cash devs were actively complicit in money laundering through operating the platform via a DAO and governance tokens. This approach is common among DeFi protocols, and could pose a potential existential threat to the sector.
Ethereum on the rise: The introduction of the Shanghai-Capella fork in April has increased demand for ether, contrary to prior concerns. On-chain metrics for ether show signs of increasing resiliency, with the Total Value Staked (TVS) for the asset rising 5.7% month-over-month.

🧠 AI

Meta has open-sourced an AI model called SeamlessM4T, which translates and transcribes nearly 100 languages across text and speech. Link

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💰 Money Moves

ZetaChain, a public EVM-compatible L1 blockchain, has raised $27m from Blockchain.com, CMT, Foundation, GSR, Jane Street, VY Capital, and Sky9. Link

🚀 Start-Ups in the Spotlight

Journee: Immersive online applications for businesses.
Whal3s: Integrate token-gated experiences into your website or app with just a few lines of code.

That’s all for now, folks.

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Thank you for being part of the journey. Back to building! 🚀

– Marc