This Week in Web3: Friday, January 21st, 2022
Coinbase and Mastercard partner up, MSFT buys Activision, a Billionaire feud, Web3 Policy for World Leaders and an NFT restaurant opens in NYC
‘Sup friends,
I feel like I’ve finally buckled in for 2022, but man, what a ride it’s been so far! Is January evaporating in front of your eyes as it is for me? Kind of glad.
Tons of fascinating stuff to dig into this week. Let me know what you think in the comments and feel free to share some of the interesting things you’ve come across this week!
Read on!
TL;DR
Coinbase will let you pay with Mastercard in its upcoming NFT marketplace
Microsoft to buy Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion
OpenSea Acquires Dharma Labs, Plans to Onboard Fiat Payments
Tales From Crypto: A Billionaire Meme Feud Threatens Industry Unity
DAOism: How web3 will change creativity forever
A16z Publishes Web 3 Policy Proposal for World Leaders
Founders Field Guide: Jason Citron - Building the Third Place
The Song-A-Day Man | Jonathan Mann (Layer Zero)
Institutions are Bullish | Eric Peters: Exploring the Case for Quantum Change
Royal.io: Invest in Artists. Share Their Success.
Web3 ‘Proof of attendance’ startup raises $10M to mint shared memories as NFTs
An NFT restaurant opening in New York will serve up status with a side of seafood
News we’re following
Coinbase will let you pay with Mastercard in its upcoming NFT marketplace Making it easier for more people to buy NFTs
Coinbase is partnering with Mastercard to allow card payments on its upcoming NFT marketplace. This means you’ll be able to directly purchase an NFT with fiat currency (also known as a government-issued currency, such as the USD) using your Mastercard credit or debit card, all without having to buy cryptocurrency first.
“Expanding the audience for NFTs allows this burgeoning market to support more creators and could spark the next evolution of digital commerce,” says Raj Dhamodharan, Mastercard’s executive vice president of digital asset and blockchain products
Microsoft to buy Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion
Gaming giant Activision Blizzard, under the gun from investors over sexual harassment controversies and ongoing executive turmoil, has pulled the escape cord: The company has agreed to be acquired by Microsoft in a $68.7 billion all-cash deal, inclusive of the company’s net cash.
OpenSea Acquires Dharma Labs, Plans to Onboard Fiat Payments
The world’s largest NFT marketplace is gearing up to become a whole lot bigger. After a massive year for OpenSea, the leading NFT platform has now acquired crypto wallet startup Dharma.
As part of a four-step plan to scale in 2022, OpenSea has brought on the four-year-old company to help create a more mainstream-friendly way to buy, sell, and mint NFTs. In conjunction with the acquisition, Nadav Hollander, co-founder and CEO of Dharma Labs, has been brought on as OpenSea’s new CTO.
Things we’re reading
Tales From Crypto: A Billionaire Meme Feud Threatens Industry UnityA dispute over “web3” in the cryptocurrency industry was publicly exposed in a Twitter spat between Jack Dorsey and Marc Andreessen. Here’s what it’s all about.
DAOism: How web3 will change creativity forever
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are web communities with unprecedented resources. They represent a real shift away from hierarchical business models. DAOs are likely to fund and inform the building of Web3.
Executives love to bang on about flat management structures, but the way companies work hasn’t changed much in the 21st century. A small proportion of people decide how capital and human resources ought to be spent in the same chain-of-command model used by armies and organized crime.
Is this the best way to do business? An emerging model based on Web3 technologies is proving that heterarchical organizations might be a better alternative.
A16z Publishes Web 3 Policy Proposal for World LeadersThe venture capital firm has already spoken with “key leaders on every populated continent,” according to a16z’s Global Head of Policy Tomicah Tillemann.
If you’re a world leader hoping to transform your country into a global Web 3 hub, Andreessen Horowitz wants to show you the way.
On Friday, the venture capital firm – often called a16z for short – released a policy agenda aimed at global governments with 10 guiding principles on how to “build a better internet.”
Things we’re listening to
Founders Field Guide: Jason Citron - Building the Third PlaceJason is the founder and CEO of Discord, a communications network with over 100 million monthly users and communities for every topic you could imagine. We cover the evolving business model for video games, Discord's early distribution methods, and Discord's hiring philosophy.
The Song-A-Day Man | Jonathan Mann (Layer Zero)Jonathan Mann writes and publishes a song every single day. He's done this without missing a day since January 1st, 2009, and holds the Guinness World Record for most consecutive days writing a song.
His inspiration, passion, consistency, and all-around charm really comes through as he explores his journey in both music and crypto. Infatuated with the ideas and methodology behind CryptoPunks, he's launched his own NFT project for his daily songs with an accompanying DAO - SongADAO.
Institutions are Bullish | Eric Peters: Exploring the Case for Quantum ChangeEric Peters is the Founder and CEO of One River Asset Management. In this episode, he joins the Bankless Podcast to bring the perspective of a traditional hedge fund manager into the crypto context. Spending his career in the markets, his insights to the macro environment are vast and inform his investing decisions, and he sees crypto as a pathway to a renaissance – but also to dystopia.
Project’s we’re following
Royal.io
Royal enables anyone to own a piece of their favorite songs to earn royalties alongside the artist. We believe in artists' freedom. Royal opens the door for artists to retain independence and creative control as fans fuel their careers. Here’s how they describe it. Musicians use Royal to sell royalty ownership in their songs and give collectors access to special perks. Collectors can buy royalty ownership in songs directly from their favorite artists in the form of tokens. Collectors can claim royalties for the music they own after they’ve accrued. When artists grow, everyone wins.
Web3 ‘Proof of attendance’ startup raises $10M to mint shared memories as NFTs
If blockchains are immutable records of our digital history, what kinds of history do we want to inscribe on them? Predictably, most records thus far have been transaction data, but as entrepreneurs expand their ambitions for NFTs, startups are aiming to tie those asset transactions to real world events and interactions.
An NFT restaurant opening in New York will serve up status with a side of seafood
NFTs have been steadily making their way into the restaurant world (along with seemingly every other sphere, from art to politics). And so a restaurant whose founders claim is the first of its kind, essentially offering admittance only to the holders of a limited number of non-fungible tokens, seemed inevitable.