📝 Field Notes #52: Comebacks and FOMO

NFTs on 7-month high. New brand drops. Industry-wide vulnerability revealed. Reebok & Futureverse. First BTC Ordinal in Sotheby's. Crypto FOMO. Crypto on WhatsApp. Google's next-gen AI model & more.

Dec 08, 2023

Hey, it’s Marc. Welcome to my weekly, obsessively curated field notes on crypto & Web3 to help you filter out the noise. ✌️ Follow me on LinkedIn.

⏱️ Reading time: 3 min

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“The question shouldn’t be whether blockchains are necessary, but rather whether they’re helpful.” — Alana Levin, Variant

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📚 Top 5 Reads

A few of the things we’re excited about in crypto (2024). By a16z. Link
The Benefits of Building Apps On-Chain. By Alana Levin, Variant. Link
Turn Your Customers into Your Community. HBR. Link
The next NFT use cases. By Mippo. Link
Navigating the Wallet-as-a-Service Landscape. Link

🚨 Top Stories That Caught My Eye

✨ Web3 + NFTs

Comeback? 🖼️

Top NFT project floors have risen to a 7-month high, with Blur dominating almost 80% of NFT trading.
FIAT has dropped its first collectible to its 55,000 strong “FIAT Pass” community, which launched in November. Link

New brand drops. In the past four weeks we’ve seen new drops from Adidas, Bugatti, Nike, Louis Vuitton and now, FIAT. Most of these latest drops go beyond simple collectibles and are embedded in a bigger loyalty strategy or physical-virtual activations.

The IP play. NFT collections are changing their business model from earning from mints and royalties to building up monetizable IP brands. Pudgy Penguins, almost doubling in value this month, sets the benchmark with toys in Walmart and over 1 million followers on Instagram.

Punchline: Brand applications remain largely disconnected from overall market volume. Nevertheless, this might be the beginning of the beginning of a market comeback for NFTs.

Breaking Bad🚨

ThirdWeb, one of the biggest Web3 developer platforms, disclosed a security vulnerability in an open-source library, affecting its pre-built smart contracts.
This affects some of the biggest Web3 startups and NFT collections.

Punchline: In a space that’s built on “trustless” systems, one of the biggest challenges for brands is to find trustworthy partners to work with. These industry-wide infrastructure incidents are rare, however.

🌎 Crypto & Macro

FOMO and YOLO 📈

Bitcoin surged to more than $44k this week, making it one of this year’s best-performing assets.
Crypto experienced the 10th straight week of inflows, the largest period of inflows since October 2021, with more than 70% of the $176m flowing into Bitcoin. Link
Robinhood has launched crypto trading in the EU, which is up 75% in November. Link

Punchline: The widely expected Bitcoin spot ETF, the upcoming halving in April 2024, and regulatory clarity around Binance might be the reason for spurred optimism – particularly among institutional investors. The start of another cycle? We might not be there yet, but we’re getting closer.

🧠AI

Google reveals Gemini, a GPT-4 challenger. Gemini Pro (GPT-3.5 level) is already accessible via Google Bard. Gemini Ultra will come early 2024. Link
Meta, IBM, and over 50 other companies and organizations form the AI Alliance. Link

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💰 Money Moves

Sona: The Web3 music streaming platform emerges from stealth with $6.9m seed funding. Link
Babylon: Bitcoin staking protocol closes $18m round led by Polychain and Hack VC. Link
Shadow: Crypto data startup has raised $9m in a seed round led by Paradigm. Link

That’s all for now, folks. Thank you for being part of the journey.
Talk soon,

– Marc

PS: Follow me on LinkedIn for shorter insights.

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Artwork: Refik Anadol, Quantum Memories

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