This Week in Web3: Friday, February 4, 2022
Google and the Blockchain, Packy McCormick on Braintrust, replacing middlemen with middleware protocols, ETH going to $3T, decentralized marketplaces and more!
Hey friends,
Went down the Brainstust rabbit hole this week, in part because I think decentralized marketplaces, especially for talent, are incredibly interesting. Also, the Bankless guys are really some of the smartest folks out there, but man, are they hot for ETH and not much else. Check out their interview with Kevin Rose on the Modern Finance podcast. Would love to hear your take.
Enjoy!
TL;DR
Google CEO Sundar Pichai Name-Dropped Blockchain. It Could Shake Up Cloud Computing.
Morgan Stanley Sees $8 Trillion Metaverse Market — In China Alone
Pixel Vault banks $100 million in funding to chase an NFT media empire
Not Boring: Braintrust: Fighting Capitalism with Capitalism by Packy McCormick
Web3 innovations are replacing middlemen with middleware protocols
Why $ETH is going to $3T | Ryan Allis
Braintrust’s Founders on How to Run a Decentralised Marketplace
MetaAngels: An NFT Membership Community
Developing a More Social Metaverse With Supersocial Inc.
PompCryptoJobs
News we’re following
Google CEO Sundar Pichai Name-Dropped Blockchain. It Could Shake Up Cloud Computing.
Sundar Pichai, CEO of the tech giant and its parent company Alphabet (ticker: GOOGL), acknowledged the power of Web3 and blockchain in the group’s quarterly earnings call Tuesday.
It was one of his first—if not the first—public comments on the technology.
Web3 describes an emerging vision for the internet based on blockchain, which is a decentralized, secure, and transparent technology underpinning cryptocurrency networks, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and other digital asset applications.
Morgan Stanley Sees $8 Trillion Metaverse Market — In China Alone
In a note to investors, Morgan Stanley said mass adoption of the virtual world will “take a long time, given major technological and regulatory hurdles.” Virtual reality headsets offer early exposure to the metaverse for investors, according to the bank, which described the technology as “an entry ticket to the metaverse” Morgan Stanley expects the metaverse to replace the mobile internet with a more “immersive experience”
Pixel Vault banks $100 million in funding to chase an NFT media empire
Investors’ latest NFT bet is on a startup called Pixel Vault — a massive NFT collection of superheroes that has the goal of growing into a decentralized Marvel-esque empire. The NFT startup tells TechCrunch it has closed a whopping $100 million in funding from Adam Bain and Dick Costolo’s 01 Advisors and Velvet Sea Ventures.
Things we’re reading
Not Boring: Braintrust: Fighting Capitalism with Capitalism by Packy McCormick
Or, how web3 businesses can use tokenomics to create and capture long-term value
Braintrust is a user-owned talent network that is growing fast and reaching real scale just eighteen months after launching the public beta of the protocol last June. $37 million in Gross Service Value (GSV) – what Clients pay Talent – has flowed through the network, with nearly twice that contracted for the coming months.
Web3 innovations are replacing middlemen with middleware protocols
Thanks to the DeFi revolution, it’s no longer companies extracting value from users, rather it's developers extracting value from protocols.
Cryptocurrencies and the wider blockchain ecosystem are helping change the status quo of how we conduct our day-to-day lives. With these emerging technologies, Web3 is being ushered in as a permissionless and open innovation using middleware blockchain protocols. By doing so, they’re replacing middlemen software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies by capturing value at a greater level.
Three things web3 should fix in 2022: A viral video highlights some very real shortcomings in the next-generation internet
Last weekend, it felt like everyone I knew was sending me the same link. “The Problem With NFTs,” a long video essay by the Canadian media critic Dan Olson, ricocheted around all corners of the tech world since it was uploaded on Friday. (It now has 2.6 million views and climbing.) Over 138 meticulously researched minutes, Olson traces the history of the 2008 financial crisis, the creation of Bitcoin and Ethereum, and the rise of NFTs and DAOs, and reaches the conclusion that what we have taken to calling “web3” is effectively beyond saving: the technology is too broken, and its creators too indifferent to its failures, for it to ever to live up to the promise of its most starry-eyed backers.
Things we’re listening to
Why $ETH is going to $3T | Ryan Allis
CORRECTION: It's actually ETH to $4 Trillion 👀
Ryan Allis is the managing partner at Heart Rithm, and a serial entrepreneur with 20 years in technology, marketing, and business. Ryan write about Ethereum, Bitcoin, Polkadot, DeFi, Blockchain, Web3, and the future of money on his substack - Coinstack.
Today, we're evaluating ETH according to Ryan's recent DCF (discounted cash flows) model, and getting to the bottom of why ETH could be fairly valued at $10k with a market cap of $3 Trillion.
Braintrust’s Founders on How to Run a Decentralised Marketplace
Gabe Luna Ostaseski & Adam Jackson on why the way we work is broken and how to fix it. A recurring theme on this show has been creator and user empowerment—more specifically, how founders can build scalable businesses that don’t just extract value from their users, but instead, allow them to directly benefit from the value they help create.
The Future of Decentralized Banking with Bankless
Kevin is joined by Ryan Sean Adams and David Hoffman of the Bankless podcast and newsletter to discuss the current state of decentralized finance, the role of layer one versus layer two protocols, and the future of banking.
Project’s we’re following
MetaAngels: An NFT Membership Community
An NFT membership community harnessing the metaverse to unlock real life opportunities. Founded on the values of generosity, transparency, and accessibility.
Developing a More Social Metaverse With Supersocial Inc.
“The metaverse by definition, needs to be social,” said Yonatan “Yon” Raz-Fridman, CEO and Founder of Supersocial Inc. Supersocial Inc. works to provide games for metaverse platforms, specifically for Roblox. As of late last year, the company raised $5.2 million in seed funding from several investors. Supersocial Inc. offers multiple games as well as a creator lab for designers and dreamers alike to make next-level games.
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