GM, This is the Milk Road. The email you rely on to keep up with crypto news everyday.
In Today's Email:
- 🖼️ Melania Buys her own NFT
- 🤑 Binance buys a $200m stake in Forbes
- 🚜 The Great Debate: Should You Buy Land in The Metaverse
- 💰 Funding Friday
Melania Trump Bought Her Own NFT
It’s Friday, so let’s start with a laugh.
Here’s what the NFT looked like:
It was bought by the same account that listed the NFT for sale.
Asked for comment, Melania Trump's office did not give any details, saying simply, "The transaction was facilitated on behalf of a third-party buyer."
Yea, sure, whatever you say 🤣🤣🤣
Binance Buys a $200m Stake in Forbes
Binance is the world’s biggest crypto exchange ($76bn daily volume)
The founder, CZ is the wealthiest man in crypto ($96bn net worth), & the 11th richest person in the world.
Btw - $96B net worth means that CZ is wealthier than Satoshi Nakomoto (the creator of Bitcoin).
Alright, you get the point. Dude’s rich.
And what do rich people do?
1/ Regrow hair
2/ Get jacked
3/ Build insecurity-shaped rockets
4/ And buy legacy media companies
And today, CZ (Changpeng Zhao) chose Door #4.
His company bought a big stake in Forbes for $200M (he’s now the 2nd largest stakeholder).
Binance now owns a piece of old school media (Forbes) and new school crypto media (Coinmarketcap.com, which gets an absurd 300m visits per month...4x more than the Wall Street Journal’s website)
The Milk Road’s Take:
- Billionaires gonna do billionaire shit. Play on playa.
- Finance media brands are valuable (ahem, The Milk Road 😏)
- Forbes will host a big crypto conference under their brand, bringing traditional hedge fund types to the same conference as crypto degens
- Binance will acquire more non-crypto companies. Binance is worth ~$300bn, could they end up buying a bank? Or buy Western Union and start using crypto for international money transfers?
CZ if you’re reading this...do us all a favor and end Forbes 30 under 30!
Metaverse Real Estate
I saw a great debate on Twitter this week.
Will real estate in the metaverse be a thing?
With Sandbox being worth $4bn+ (with 2,500 monthly active users) and $500m of Metaverse real estate sales in 2021, it’s no wonder this is a hot topic.
Bulls:
- CPO of Adobe says: “ To the extent real estate is also a form of status, I think it will definitely be a thing in the virtual worlds"
- Co-Founder of Reddit: “ It comes down to utility in game as the first obvious use case. I would absolutely have paid for land/house right near the dock in Freeport simply for the flex of a private space I could "bank" things conveniently in as I wait for the boat to arrive.”
Bears:
- Early Stage VC: "Real estate is valuable because there is a non-zero cost to move from point A to point B in the real world. There is no such cost in a digital world, negating all value of the analogous concept."
- Co-Founder of a Prominent Co-Working Company: "The highest utility for metaverse real estate likely wont happen in the metaverse. It will be a 1-1 virtual overlay onto the real world for historical preservation, emergency response, urban and architectural planning purposes, and the like. Basically IRL design & maintenance upgrade. "
My Take:
- Land is only valuable if people want it. So anyone buying “land in the metaverse” today is speculating that people will want it in the future (because right now there are very small user bases. So, it’s speculation). If you could buy land in Fortnite, you would. But the demand to “spend time on the land” has to be there first, before the land can be valuable.
- People think the metaverse is a place. I think it’s a tipping point. Sounds vague, but I wrote a full thread on it that went stupid viral (20m people read it).
P.S. a kid who I used to work with put his life savings ($100k) into Animoca (the company that invested into Sandbox) when it got kicked off the Aussie exchange, and is now worth $8m (and he’s like 23 or something)
Chart of The Week:
$30bn of venture funding went into crypto in 2021, and it’s going to be even more this year (look at the quarterly growth).
Sure, it’s a lot of hype and valuations are inflated.
But - I see this as a self fulfilling prophecy. The more money that goes in, the more builders will build and inevitably more useful stuff will get created.
Funding Friday
$1.1bn in Web3 startup funding was announced this week. That’s a lotta moolah to put in the coolah.
- Alchemy - raised $400m. They provide the most popular developer tool for building on the Ethereum block chain
- Polygon - raised $400m. They are a layer 2 protocol that makes Ethereum ~30x+ cheaper and faster (we wrote about them 2 days ago here)
- Qredo raised $80m to build DeFi infrastructure
- Primex raised $5m to build a prime brokerage protocol
- Aleo raised $200m to build web3 data privacy tools
- So-Col raised $3m to build a web3 creator platform
- Rift Finance raised $18m to be a DAO liquidity provider
- MetaStreet raised $6m to to be an NFT liquidity protocol
- Quantum Art raised $7m to build a photo NFT platform
- We’ve got 4 weeks of startup funding for you in our database right here
Alright, enjoy your weekend you filthy animals!
- Shaan "Meta" Puri
P.S. Do you like the writing style we use? Do you wanna learn how to do it?
I teach something called Power Writing that gives you a crash course frameworks & techniques.
Normally it’s $950 to join, but I’m giving away 1 free spot in the course to whoever refers the most subscribers (must be real people, don’t cheat) starting now through Super Bowl Sunday (11:59pm PST) just use your unique URL below:
What'd you think of today's email?
Instead of a Vitalik picture today...check out the first forum post he made announcing Ethereum
