Hey, it’s Marc. I write about Bitcoin, Web3, and technology. ✌️

Welcome to another issue of my obsessively curated field notes.

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“Life isn’t happening to you, it’s happening for you”.

📚 Key Reads

  • Brands in Web3. Lighthouse report, highly recommended. By NFT Tech. Link

  • The current SEC disclosure framework is unfit for crypto. By Paradigm. Link

  • Anti-crypto regulators are blocking the pathway to a digital American dream. By Li Jin, Variant Fund. Link 

  • All Punk 6529 mega-threads. By Punk 6529. Link

  • The Bitcoin monthly, April report. By Ark Invest. Link

  • Guest essay on AI in the NYT. By Yuval Harari. Link

  • ‘The Godfather of A.I.’ leaves Google and warns of danger ahead. By NYT. Link

🚨 What caught my eyes

✨ Web3 + NFTs

  • Sotheby's launched a secondary marketplace for fine art NFTs, which builds upon the Sotheby's Metaverse, the company's digital collectibles platform. The marketplace will honor creator royalties. Link

  • POAPs announced POAP Drops, a new, easier interface for creating and distributing precious digital collectibles. Link

  • Mattel, one of the largest toy manufacturers in the world, launched its own peer-to-peer marketplace, allowing owners of Mattel virtual collectibles to display, trade, and sell their assets. Powered by Rarible. Link

  • Lens protocol announced Bonsai, an Optimistic L3 scaling solution, that will process transactions at hyperscale. It is designed to support the next generation of web3 social users. Lens.xyz currently runs on Polygon’s L2. Link

  • US judge rules Bored Ape Yacht Club ripoff NFTs violated Yuga trademarks. In short: NFTs can be protected as trademarks. Link

  • A former product manager at NFT marketplace OpenSea was at the center of a trial that kicked off in Manhattan last week over whether his alpha constituted a form of insider trading. On Wednesday, he was convicted of fraud and money laundering for using inside knowledge. Important: The outcome of that trial could determine whether NFTs constitute securities or commodities, which is still an evolving area of law and regulation. Link