This Week in Web3: Friday, December 10, 2021
$100M investment in Braintrust, Reddit's tokenized community points, Benedict Evans on the future, how NFTs will kill Netflix, interview with Coinbase CEO, and a look behind the scenes at Art Basel
Another monster week in Web3. I’m not overwhelmed, you are. Hope this helps a little.
Enjoy!
News we’re following
Breaking: $100M BTRST Purchased by Coatue and Tiger Global to Fuel Community-led Innovation
“Braintrust announced a private BTRST token sale of $100 million by Coatue, Tiger Global and other early backers. This news comes after Braintrust established itself as the fastest growing Web3 network over the last 18 months.
Things we’re reading”
Reddit is bringing its tokenized Community Points to more subreddits
“Reddit is expanding its Community Points beta, allowing any subreddit to request access. This could expand the number of tokens available on Reddit.”
Things we’re reading
Benedict Evans: Three Steps to the Future (Presentation)
“Every year, I produce a big presentation exploring macro and strategic trends in the tech industry. This year, ‘Three Steps to the Future’. The most exciting themes in technology today are transformative visions for 2025 or 2030: crypto, web3, VR, metaverse… and then everything else. Meanwhile, hundreds of start-ups take ideas from the last decade and deploy them over and over in one industry after another. And trying to keep up, the old economy faces waves of disruption from ideas we first talked about in the 1990s.”
How NFTs Will Kill Netflix, by Douglas Rushkoff
“The Balkanization of media will continue, until it doesn’t”
“The more sustainable and revolutionary aspect of all this is the way NFT technology can be used almost like a benevolent, and surveillance-free form of digital rights management for independent creators.”
“I’m using this short toilet anecdote mostly as a way to share the work of Nick Yee, who impressed me with his research and surveys of massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs). I hope it doesn’t get lost just because it’s ‘old’ (2002–2009). Nick’s work confirmed for me why and when people bring IRL habits and etiquette into simulated environments (for example, avatars tend to stand around in clusters that mimic the spacing and positioning that we’d take in our own conversations even if it’s unnecessary in a digital world).”
Podcasts we’re listening to
How I Built This: Coinbase: Brian Armstrong
“Brian Armstrong wanted to be a tech entrepreneur since he was in high school, but his first serious venture—a tutoring website—never quite took off. Around 2010, while looking to get a job in Silicon Valley, he stumbled across an intriguing idea for a peer-to-peer digital currency called Bitcoin, which quickly turned into his obsession. Brian's initial prototype for a hosted Bitcoin wallet got him accepted into the prestigious Y Combinator program, and he launched Coinbase soon thereafter. Many experts warned that cryptocurrency was no more reliable than Monopoly money, but the startup prevailed, surviving wild swings in the crypto market and steadily building a user base. Today, Coinbase is one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world, with 7.4 million monthly users, 2,700 employees and over 80 cryptocurrencies traded on its platform.”
Where Data Lives in an IPFS/Filecoin World with Mikeal Rogers and Kevin Rose
“Kevin is joined by Mikeal Rogers, engineering manager at Protocol Labs, the team behind Filecoin and IPFS. Here, they try to answer the important questions around decentralized storage, like where our NFTs and data live in a Web3 world — especially when a marketplace (like Hic et Nunc) goes down. Also, they discuss what Filecoin is and how it works with IPFS, when major browsers will support IPFS, how we can speed up IPFS image loading, and much more.”
The Tim Ferris Show: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats (#550)
“Between the early adopters and the early majority you have this chasm where all the nerds will love you but the mainstream market has no clue what it is that you do.” - Andrew Chen
Project’s we’re following
“BeetsDAO is a private, global NFT collective first formed in the EulerBeats community amongst 58 collaborators who met on a Discord server, with a shared passion for the long-term power of NFTs.”
“The winner of the first @WoodiesNFT core character, Willow, has just been randomly drawn and will be announced on Saturday. For transparency, here's a 🧵on how the winner was chosen…”
Kickstarter plans to move its crowdfunding platform to the blockchain
“Crowdfunding platform Kickstarter is making a big bet on the blockchain, announcing plans to create an open source protocol “that will essentially create a decentralized version of Kickstarter’s core functionality.” The company says the goal is for multiple platforms to embrace the protocol, including, eventually, Kickstarter.com.”
People we’re following
Resources that are educating us
“Like a lot of things in crypto, staking can be a complicated idea or a simple one depending on how many levels of understanding you want to unlock. For a lot of traders and investors, knowing that staking is a way of earning rewards for holding certain cryptocurrencies is the key takeaway. But even if you’re just looking to earn some staking rewards, it’s useful to understand at least a little bit about how and why it works the way it does.”
Events we’re attending
Year in Review and Outlook for Crypto Featuring: @cdixon and @naval
“Join @sanchans and @coinbase in the last #BUIDLCrypto session of the year on 12/14/21 @ 11am PT: Topic: Featuring: @cdixon and @naval”
Behind the Scenes at Art Basel Miami: The Biggest IRL Metaverse Party Yet
Given that the rise of NFTs happened over the pandemic, there have been very few in-person gatherings of this community. Last weekend however, thousands of NFT and crypto enthusiasts descended on Miami for the annual Art Basel festival, which has become a major sandbox for NFT art. They attended gallery shows, interactive experiences, concerts, panel events, parties and more. One of those attendees was TIME’s own Raisa Bruner, who has been covering NFT art and culture over the last year, and also attended NFT.NYC last month. On Wednesday, she published a dispatch about the collectors at Art Basel.
The Rise of the Metaverse: Populating the Metaverse
December 13-15 2021, Fully Virtual