This Week in Web3: Friday, January 14th, 2022
Gamestops NFT marketplace, how web3 will offer superior UX than web2, The Metaverse: 101, The Great L2 Migration, Twitch Co-founder Justin Kan Talks Gaming NFTs and more!
TGIF (Only two more days obsessing about Web3 until Monday)! :-)
Felt like a choppy week, lots more volatility in the crypto markets, which I’m generally trying to ignore, but a TON of fascinating things happening more broadly. It’s insane how fast this eco-system is evolving.
Ok, here’s this week’s digest. Hope it’s helpful.
News we’re following
GameStop Is Working on an NFT Marketplace for Gaming
n Thursday, Jan. 6, the Wall Street Journal reported that GameStop is gearing up to join the 2022 NFT ecosystem. Citing people familiar with the legacy gaming institution’s plans, WSJ broke the news that GameStop is launching a division to develop its own NFT marketplace.
Near Protocol raises $150M to promote Web3 adoption
Ethereum competitor Near Protocol raised funds for Web3 adoption, with Three Arrows Capital and Andreessen Horowitz supporting the PoS blockchain.
Web3, Silicon Valley’s New Obsession, Looks a Lot Like Its Last One
Crypto enthusiasts are pitching a decentralized internet. The investors backing their companies have other ideas.
Things we’re reading
The Year, Explained
2022: It can only get better from here. To start, here are some predictions from The Explainer Studio.
It’s 2022 — right? Time has indeed become a bit of a blur, but amidst what may have felt like a couple years of the same, a lot has changed. And there’s a lot to come, even if that feels a little bit scary (starts googling “what is flurona”).
But that blur means there’s a lot left to understand. We at the Explainer Studio are a curious bunch, and more than anything, we want to understand the world around us. It’s why we’re intent on creating work that enables brands to break through a sea of content, to give audiences useful context and move people from curiosity to understanding (like this Explainer about sleep, or this one about VR, or this one about ghost kitchens).
The web3 stack: how web3 will offer superior UX than web2
A lot of web3 skeptics are quick to criticize the terrible UX. Even web3 advocates have often conceded that UX may not be as good, but we’ll make up for it with the nice properties enabled by decentralization. Turns out, all of the building blocks for better UX than web2 already exists, and in this post, I’ll attempt to put it all together to give a clearer vision of one possible outcome where web3 out-UXs web2.
The Metaverse: 101
By Meagan Loyst, Founder of Gen Z VCs & Investor at Lerer Hippeau
Despite its recent rise to fame, the term metaverse was first coined thirty years ago in 1992 by science fiction author Neal Stephenson. His novel Snow Crash depicted the metaverse as a 3D virtual world where people walk around as avatars and socialize / interact with one another and AI-generated characters.
Fast forward 30 years, and the definition has come to mean different things in various contexts. Put simply, the metaverse is a virtual world where people can socialize, work, shop, and play. I categorize it in three ways: virtual reality, augmented reality, and virtual worlds.
A simple guide to the Web3 stack
Web3 is the latest buzzword to see an uptick in interest in recent months — What does it actually mean?
The Web3 stack is still nascent and fragmented, but with much innovation over the years, it’s beginning to come into focus. What follows is not a mutually exclusive nor completely exhaustive lay of the land. Rather, it’s a framework for thinking about this landscape as it continues to evolve.
Things we’re listening to
Bankless Podcast: The Great L2 Migration | Cross-Chain L2 Panel
We think 2022 is going to be a huge year for Layer 2 scaling solutions. Cross-Chain protocols will be a crucial infrastructure for the great migration to L2s, allowing users to bridge assets across platforms.
Composability and user experience is the glue of modular blockchains, which optimize for decentralization, scaling, and cost. The projects and representatives each present cryptographic solutions for building a web of liquidity across the many suburbs of DeFi, where average users will live and engage.
NFT Now podcast: Coinbase NFT’s Product VP on Taking NFTs Mainstream
Prior to fulfilling the position of Coinbase’s VP of Products, Sanchan Saxena had already established a proven track record of spearheading products at fortune 500 companies like GM, AirBnB, Instagram, and more. In helping Coinbase join the world of NFTs, Saxena has become an expert on NFT and Web3 consumer culture, and is poised to help lead the charge towards mainstream adoption of blockchain technology.
Bankless Podcast: ROLLUP: LooksRare Airdrop | Fees.WTF | Inflation | PayPal Stablecoin | Top Shots Ban
Project’s we’re following
Crypto Citizens
An IRL community project minting 10,000 CryptoCitizens around the world in 10 different cities. Each CryptoCitizen is a DAO member and can vote on governance proposals to create legendary IRL experiences and build the most diverse DAO around the world. CryptoCitizens are non-fungible and created through a Powered by Art Blocks generative art smart contract.
Icy Tools
We uncover trending NFTs, track floor prices, alerts & more @ http://icy.tools . join our discord community.
Learn more and join the community
LooksRare
LooksRare is the community-first NFT marketplace that actively rewards traders, collectors and creators for participating.
Insight: Looksrare has had 1.4b of sales vs Opensea of 741M of sales since looks rare launch. and looks rare i believe had a 50M sale with the Meebit
The counter is Opensea has had 165M users vs Looksrare 19k users since Looksrare launch. Which says, the heavy hitters may be moving to Looksrare, but Opensea is still the mass option, but the question is will the centralized first to market platform win, or the decentralized new platform with an incredible launch strategy win?
Social media we’re following
Profiles on people we like
Twitch Co-founder Justin Kan Talks Gaming NFTs and the Institutional Investment Case for Crypto
“It’s likely that gaming is the introduction for most people into some sort of durable digital assets,” Kan told Blockworks
Kan announced the launch of his gaming NFT marketplace, Fractal, on Dec. 30, 2021
Kan previously co-founded Twitch, a live-streaming service that was acquired by Amazon for $970 million
Behind The Drop: The Making of Tristan Eaton’s G.E.M.M.A. Generative NFT Drop
Over the years, Tristan Eaton has continued to prove himself to be anything but conventional. From designing iconic toys to creating some of the most visually striking public murals to ever exist, Eaton is regarded as an artistic maverick, and is now endeavoring to innovate in yet another field with his first large-scale NFT project.