📝#81: Adidas' NFT Revival
Hey, it’s Marc. ✌️
In this week’s field notes, your 100% signal in Web3:
Adidas’ is back in NFTs
Walmart goes Roblox
Memecoin launchpad Pump.fun beats Ethereum
OKX enteres Web3 gaming
Sony launches crypto exchange
Nubank brings Bitcoin lightning to 100M customers
SEC sues ConsenSys
VanEck and 21Shares filed for Solana ETF
Circle the stablecoin to comply with the EU's MiCA regulations
Google launched a new LLM - Gemma 2
Let’s dive in. 🦈 | Read time: 4min
📚 Top 4 Reads
Telegram: The Next Big Consumer Platform for Brands? By Marc Baumann. Link
Web3 Gaming Revolution: The Rise of Decentralization, Interoperability, and Real-Economic Value in the Gaming Industry. By David An. Link
The Evolution of Memes and Their Place on Blockchains. By Galaxy. Link
Sizing the price. By PWC. Link
Boson Protocol – Real Web3 Commerce, with Web2 UX
As the next bull market emerges, so does a new crypto-rich, Web3-savvy demographic, who are demanding authentic Web3 commerce experiences. Uniquely, with Boson, you can sell physical things as NFTs, with a slick Web2 experience while running on a fully decentralized Web3 backend. No more Web3 washing required!
✨ Web3 & Consumer
Adidas Onchain: Summer of Sports
Adidas has launched "Adidas Onchain: Summer of Sports," an NFT collection on Ethereum L2 Base.
Why it’s important: The Web3 consumer space has gotten quiet, as brands are figuring out their next move. NFTs released by major brands are noteworthy again.
The three editions of digital memorabilia by Adidas are:
Football edition: Features vibrant football-themed artwork with over 22.6K mints.
Base edition: Features blue NFT collection to celebrate Adidas debut on Base network with over 14.4K mints.
OCS edition: Features OCS 2024 color palette with the abstract 2024 Adidas Onchain Summer of Sports template with over 12.5K mints.
By the numbers: Over 28k people minted the collection within two weeks of its launch, for approximately 50k mints. The current price of each edition is $2.56 (~0.00086 ETH). This means that Adidas has earned $127k so far.
By the numbers: Adidas sold over $22M in NFTs with its "Into the Metaverse" NFT collection in 2022. It earned $10.94M from NFTs, with over 51K secondary market transactions generating $176M in volume.
Be smart: Base has been using high-profile partnerships (e.g. Coca-Cola, Doodles, etc.) to become the consumer blockchain of choice.
The big picture: Adidas has been an early adopter of Web3, consistently exploring new campaigns, but has struggled to build a strong brand connection with mainstream consumers. By collaborating with Base (16M total accounts) and tying it to the Euro 2024, Adidas aims to capture this mainstream attention.
More on Web3:
Walmart launched the “Walmart Discovered AR Experience”, letting customers shop trending UGC and discover indie experiences while earning virtual items through Roblox gift card purchases. Link
E.L.F. Beauty and Walmart Partner to enable in-game purchases of beauty products in Roblox. Link
Nubank, a major Latin American digital bank, has integrated the Bitcoin Lightning Network for 100M customers. Link
Polkadot is facing backlash for its $37M marketing spend amid a dip in ecosystem revenues and allegations of discrimination from Asian developers. Link
Polymarket, the decentralized prediction market platform, hit $100M in monthly trading volume in June as bets on the U.S. presidential election surged, totaling over $200M. Former President Donald Trump leads the bets with 62% odds, backed by $24.7M. Link
Osmium-ART debuts the world’s most expensive modern violin for $6.32M as a phygital asset on Rarible. Link
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🌎 Crypto & Macro
Solana-based memecoin launchpad Pump.fun surpassed Ethereum's daily network revenue with $1.99M due to a surge in celebrity coin speculation. Link [Read our deep dive here]
Sony plans to restart the Japanese crypto exchange Whalefin, which it acquired from Amber Group in August 2023, rebranding it as S.BLOX. Link
SEC sues Consensys for operating as an “Unregistered Securities Broker”. Link
Bitcoin miner Northern Data eyes $16B IPO. Link
🎙️ Podcast Highlights
Episode: How KIKI World is Flipping the Script on Traditional Beauty
In our recent podcast episode, we had the pleasure of hosting Brendon and Jana, co-founders of KIKI World. KIKI World, a next-gen beauty brand, is pioneering a new, Web3-enabled business model with community and co-creation at the core.
Key Takeaways:
Consumers are co-creators and co-beneficiaries: They're rewarded for voting and sales, depending on the product traits they keep in their wallets.
KIKI World products contain a chip that tracks how much members use their products in real life; usage gives rewards.
Each vote generates first-party data (accessible on-chain!) and helps KIKI World to understand and predict what consumers desire and shorten the time-to-market for its products.
Listen to it on Spotify, YouTube, or Apple Podcasts.
🎮 Gaming
OKX has launched 'OKX GameSphere,' a new platform for web3 game developers designed to streamline game development and enhance player experiences with features like NFT integration and promotional tools. Link
zkVerify, developed by Horizen Labs, has integrated its zero-knowledge proof verification tech into ApeChain's Jenkins Testnet, reducing transaction costs by over 90% and enhancing gaming performance. Link
Animoca Brands partners with Futureverse to integrate advanced AI and metaverse tools into its web3 gaming ecosystem, enhancing interoperability and expanding game functionalities within Mocaverse. Link
Immutable, Ethereum L2 for NFTs and blockchain gaming saw a 30% increase in user wallets due to new game releases like Hunters On-Chain and Guild of Guardians, reinforcing its leadership in web3 gaming. Link
🤖Data & Insights
MicroStrategy upgrades its ONE platform with AI-powered HyperIntelligence. It enables frontline workers to access on-demand data insights seamlessly within any application. Link
SingleStore, the real-time data platform integrated with Apache Iceberg, allows easy access to data frozen in data lakes, bypassing traditional ETL processes. Link
NTT DATA uses high-tech tools like digital twins and AI at The Open to make watching golf more interactive and eco-friendly. They're improving fan engagement with 5G and real-time data displays while focusing on sustainability efforts. Link
Over half of Americans have used Generative AI for tasks like research and creativity, foreseeing its growth in shopping and customer service despite believing it can enhance efficiency and creativity, yet not match human creativity fully. Link
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🧠AI + Metaverse
Google Strikes Back
Google has introduced Gemma 2, the latest generation of Gemma, the family of lightweight, open-source LLMs.
Why it matters: Google's new open-source AI model, Gemma 2, outperforms much larger models while being incredibly efficient, making powerful AI accessible to more users and reducing infrastructure costs.
Zooming in:
Gemma 2 comes in two sizes: 9B and 27B parameters, and is available for researchers and developers
It is accessible through various platforms and tools like Google Cloud, Kaggle, Hugging Face, and NVIDIA TensorRT-LLM
Gemma 2 performs nearly as well as the much larger Llama 3 70B model and is better than the older Qwen 1.5 32B model.
It can be efficiently fine-tuned using the Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) technique. This reduces the number of trainable parameters by over 99%, from 9B down to just 14.5B for the base 9B model.
Punchline: Google's open-source Gemma 2 model democratizes powerful AI with its permissive license and seamless integration with popular frameworks, making it accessible and cost-effective for developers, as it integrates with major frameworks like Hugging Face, PyTorch, and TensorFlow.
More on AI:
Google's Gemini is developing customizable AI chatbots, potentially inspired by YouTubers, to enhance user interaction. Google is exploring partnerships with creators similar to Meta's AI characters and plans to integrate these chatbots into YouTube. Link
TIME and OpenAI have partnered to incorporate TIME's 101-year archive into OpenAI's products, enhancing user inquiries with trusted journalism while ensuring proper attribution. Link
ElevenLabs, the AI audio company, now offers the voices of Judy Garland, James Dean, Burt Reynolds, and Sir Laurence Olivier on its Reader App, allowing users to listen to digital texts narrated by these legendary stars. Link
Elon Musk revealed that Grok-2 will be released in August this year. Link
🪙 Regulation Update
Circle has become the first global stablecoin issuer to comply with the EU's MiCA regulations, enabling USDC and EURC usage in Europe under new legal standards. This milestone sets a precedent for regulatory acceptance and expands stablecoin utility in the EU financial sector. Link
South Korea is introducing new investor protection laws on July 19, leading exchanges to review 1,333 altcoins for compliance. In a separate development, a Seoul High Court decision favored Fantom in a blockchain dispute, influencing future legal cases involving blockchain technology in South Korea. Link
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💰 Money Moves
New funds & grants:
Blast, Ethereum L2 network, has allocated 10B tokens for phase II rewards to support Blast’s mobile ecosystem development. Link
DWF Labs unveils a $20M Cloudbreak Fund to support emerging web3 projects in Chinese-speaking regions, focusing on gaming, meme coins, and blockchain tech. Link
Funding rounds:
Iris Energy: Bitcoin mining firm raised $413M to scale up 30 EH/s in hash rate capacity and 510 MW in data center capacities. Link
Benchmark: Venture firm is raising $425M Eleventh fund. Link
Daydreams: AI startup raises $50M to transform e-commerce. Link
Mega Labs: MegaETH blockchain developer raised $20M seed. Link
Sentient: AI startup bags $85M co-led by Founders Fund, Pantera Capital. Link
Prodia: GPUs provider for AI inference, raised a $15M seed round led by Dragonfly Capital. Link
That’s all for now, folks. Thank you for being part of the journey.
Talk soon,
– Marc
PS: Follow me on LinkedIn and X for shorter insights.
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