Gm DOers!
Welcome back to our Weekly Rollup, the place where we help you stay caught up with the abundance of market news circulating around Web3.
This week, we initiated our Rollup by going down the bull market memory lane to understand the crazy phases we went through, which saw unbelievable adoption in terms of users, influencers, institutions and nation states.
In terms of news this week, we will cover:
- Multiple announcements of companies and protocols acquiring NFT marketplaces
- Lens Protocol taking over New York City
- A popular Ethereum app moving to Cosmos
- NFT innovation
- And more!
Let's get right into it, but first... We wanted to let you know that if you're considering a Web3 Job, we've got you!
If you're thinking about working in this space... Or if your Web3 company is hiring...
You can also watch the episode below or listen on your favorite platform: Spotify | Apple Podcast | YouTube
A Trip Down The Bull Market Memory Lane
Now that we all agree about being in a bear market, let's go through what happened during the bull market where we made the significant gains and then lost them all... (you didn't sell, did you?)
It all started with the tokenized food memes: Yam, Kimchi, Pickle, Ham, Beefy, Grape etc... All of which were created due to the invention of liquidity mining which incentivized everyone to basically hyperinflate these worthless tokens that were valued at hundreds of millions of dollars in market capitalization.
Then, we moved on to the appearance of DEXs which allowed us to be independent from the centralized exchanges and trade shitcoins on Uniswap, which did 100x in a couple of hours. Of course, this phase brought a lot of pump and dump schemes once influencers and VCs joined the party. Every other token launched on Uniswap reached a billion dollar valuation, typically just in time for the dump to occur. So much fun...
Afterwards, as we all know, we entered the freaking dog coin phase. After Dogecoin gained traction and popularity, there were dozens of new dog meme coins, appearing every day with trillions of coins in circulation, having a price of like $0.000000000082. Then every coin promised to reach 1$ and make everyone millionaires from investing 50 bucks... Madness!
Then there came Elon Musk pumping dog coins and buying Bitcoin, which led the price of BTC from 30k to 60k in a matter of months.
We then had the phenomenal crash in the summer of 2021 which basically liquidated half of the crypto markets in a matter of days. Meanwhile BSC appeared, which brought 4000 rug pulls a day... A DAY!
Then Bitcoin decided to go on and top at exactly $69k in the 2021 fall which was just beautiful, wasn't it...? The only thing we missed was that $69.420 Bitcoin that everyone asked for.
That's when we basically entered the bear market, which we had no clue of. We then witnessed Solana breaking down (a lot), we saw DeFi being bullied by regulation, a DAO almost bought the constitution, Luna crashed and VCs were heavily liquidated.
What a freaking roller coaster... In hindsight, it was all a mess but we enjoyed it because ultimately, we learned a lot about this space. We always acknowledge the fact that we're still in the speculation phase for Web3 but we cannot ignore what's being built. Despite all of the noise and mess explained above, we've massively evolved into a really exciting industry that truly has a bright future!
Read this thread, of @drnicka, who did a way better job explaining the phases of the bull market than me!
Web3 News & Highlights
eBay gets into NFTs more seriously through acquiring the NFT marketplace Known Origin. The move comes one month after eBay released its debut collection of NFTs.
Uniswap Universe is expanding... Uniswap announced that they've bought Genie XYZ, which is the first NFT marketplace aggregator. Uniswap wants to integrate the marketplace straight into their DEX, making it extremely more seamless for users to have everything in one place. Very exciting for UX!
Meta partners with Balenciaga, Prada, and Tom Brown and launches a digital fashion marketplace. This is good for adoption because these brands have a lot of awareness and a big marketing budget to spread the word. Here's what the community thinks about this:
Lens Protocol was everywhere to be seen in New York, during the 2 biggest NFT conferences: ApeFest & NFT NYC. Remarkable marketing campaign!
Jack Niewold has an interesting perspective saying that the users are destroying the space t hrough poor governance after the complications that occurred in the case of Tribe/Rari, YGG/Merit Circle and the Solend drama. Read this thread to learn all about it!
NFT Innovation
Hop and Arbitrum are partnering to incentivize users to bridge from Ethereum (or other L2s) to Arbitrum through Hop, by doing NFT giveaways.
Australian crypto focused accountant is selling 1 to 1 sessions through an NFT collection. Really cool implementation of NFT technology by a usual individual.
P.S. This news story was shared in our Discord by our member Tim, who's also Australian and runs our Monday weekly community calls. Join our Discord and attend our community calls!
Politician Jared Polis is launching an NFT collection to raise funds for his campaign.
NHL partners with Sweet to offer digital collectibles in form of NFTs. Sweet is a really cool NFT marketplace that already has amazing partnerships with Elton John, Milwaukee Bucks, Macy's and more.
Web3 Launches
Slope Finance and Dialect have partnered to enable users to receive messages and push notifications from dapps—right to your wallet, right on your phone. Really cool idea.
Circle (founders of USDC stablecoin) announces the development of Euro Coin, a euro stablecoin backed by full reserves.
ImmutableX is launching the Developer & Venture Fund worth $500M to accelerate the adoption of Web3 games & projects. Immutable is also hiring hundreds of new people. As Lark said on our previous podcast, the projects that still have capital during this bear market will be the ones that make it.
P.S As you can see, there are still plenty of working opportunities in Web3! If you consider getting a job, don't hesitate to apply here!
Polygon just announced Polygon ID which is a self-sovereign identity solution powered by ZK cryptography that brings huge potential for DAO governance. ZKs are basically a way to prove who you are or what you own without revealing either or those things. We’re going to have Polygon on our podcast to expand on this topic as we know very little about it right now.
The 1s & 2s
dYdX, an Ethereum based decentralized exchange is moving to Cosmos in order to scale. They've announced that they're going to build their v4 of the DEX on a standalone Cosmos-based blockchain. What Cosmos allows is for each project to build their own blockchain, powered by their own native token. Although more scalable, this move may neglect security and decentralization, the ultimate blockchain trilemma.
Layer-2 scaling solution Synthetix recently collaborated with liquidity provider Curve Finance to create Curve pools for Synthetic Ether (sETH)/Ether (ETH), Synthetic Bitcoin (sBTC)/Bitcoin (BTC) and Synthetic U.S. dollar (sUSD)/3CRV, allowing investors to cheaply convert synths such as sETH to ETH. Given the investors’ willingness to hold tokens instead of synths, the protocol racked up over $1.02 million in trading fees.
Web3 Person Of The Month
Our Web3 Person of The month is... Sam Bankman Fried, founder of FTX and Alameda Research who has piled enormous amounts of money into various protocols and lenders, like BlockFi to avoid further liquidations.
He basically saved the markets from going even more into madness. Our gratitude goes your way, ser!
Attend our Weekly Community Podcast Discussion
We’re hosting a community call in Discord discussing the state of the markets Monday, June 27th at 7pm EST. Join for a Q&A and discussion to make sense of the markets together!
