📝 Web3 Field Notes #7

Bloomberg stories; Web3's wallet opportunity; top 5 reads of 2022; Bitcoin turns 14; Kraken attacks; CFA on crypto; Celsius customers lose deposits; China's new blockchain; new start-ups & more.

Jan 06, 2023

“When you arise in the morning think of what a privilege it is to be alive, to think, to enjoy, to love...” ― Marcus Aurelius

📚 Readings:

Rebels with a cause: A personal New Year’s address. Link
Coinbase 2023 crypto market outlook. Short, but hits the most important points. Link
Messari Crypto Thesis 2023. Detailed and opinionated. Link
HBR: What is Web3? A solid primer. Link
An in depth overview of what’s going on with NFTs. Link
Bloomberg: All the ways that crypto broke in 2022. Wonderful visuals. Link
Bloomberg: How not to play the game. A postscript to Bloomberg Businessweek’s crypto issue last year. Link
Web3’s wallet opportunity. Link
Ethereum “account abstraction”: Possibly the next big step for wallet UX. Link
On application-specific blockchains (“AppChains”) and layer 3. Link
How crypto is traded: A paper showing that the value of cryptocurrencies is largely based on expectations about potentially wider future adoption, unlike in other asset classes. Link
My top 5 reads of 2022 on crypto and Web3 Link

🚨 What caught my eyes:

On January 3rd, Bitcoin turned 14. The cheering was clearly subdued compared to previous years. Happy birthday, Bitcoin. Genesis Block
Animoca Brands, a Hong-Kong based blockchain gaming company, halves fundraising target for web3 fund to $1bn. Bear markets. Link
CFA Institute, one of the biggest global association of investment professionals, released a paper “Cryptoassets: Beyond the Hype”. Link
Celsius Network wins ownership rights to customer crypto deposits. This is huge as it sets a precedent for other bankruptcy cases, including FTX and BlockFi. Even Coinbase isn’t safe.1 Link
Kraken launched Kraken Pro. Together with their partnership with Bankless, Kraken is capitalising on the FTX collapse as the trusted US player, now also for advanced traders. Link
Solana, VCs darling that was primarily backed by FTX, continues to falter. The most prominent PFP projects on Solana, DeGods and y00ts, have announced their imminent departure from the blockchain. Link
In Nov and Dec 2022, MicroStrategy added another 2’500 BTC to their treasury. Whales mostly stay passive. MicroStrategy Whales
China launched an exchange for NFTs and for copyrights related to digital assets that runs on the “China Cultural Protection” blockchain. Important to know: In China, NFTs are not really “NFTs” and blockchains aren’t “Blockchains”: it’s all centralized. And Bitcoin is banned. Link

🚀 Interesting Web3 start-ups:

Tally: A platform for on-chain decentralized organizations.
Context: Follow Ethereum wallets so you can track and discover the NFT activities of your favorite people and groups in real-time.
Galxe: On-chain credentials. Could be very interesting for marketing applications.
nxyz: Web3 indexing. Makes it easy to pull data from dApps.

💡Ideas & Take-Aways:

New year, fresh start. Speaking with the community, I feel that confusion exists around what web3 is and the value it delivers to the users and brands. Now it’s the time flesh that out. In the coming weeks, I’ll write about actionable use cases. Stay tuned!

That’s all for now, folks.
Back to building an learning! 🚀

– Marc

Bonus 💎 : Here’s a list of all the major brands that entered web3.

The famous headline which Satoshi Nakamoto eternalized in the Bitcoin Genesis block on January 3, 2009.

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