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June 24, 2022

🥛A new crypto phone is coming, you buying?

GM. This is the Milk Road. The crypto newsletter you love. And guess what? We love you too.

It’s Friday, let’s dive in:

  • Solana is building a new phone

  • Shopify drops some new crypto features

  • Funding Friday

  • Meme of the day

SOLANA IS RELEASING A NEW CRYPTO PHONE

Solana is building an Android phone with crypto functionality built-in.

They’re calling it Saga. Ambitious project, but weird name. And that’s coming from a guy who named his company The Milk Road.

Anywho.. what’s the big idea?

  • Crypto today isn’t very mobile friendly

  • But if you want the world to use something, it needs to be mobile first

Here are some of the key features and why it matters:

  • SolanaPay – wanna pay for stuff using crypto? The phone will let you scan & pay (like Apple Pay, but using crypto)

  • Decentralized App store – the App Store will have no fees. (typically, google play and apple take ~30% of all revenue)

  • Seed vault – this stores all your private keys securely on your phone. Your phone = your wallet

  • Solana Mobile Stack (SMS) – a software development kit to help developers build dApps. They’re also giving out $10m as a way to incentivize the devs

By the end of his presentation, Anatoly Yakovenko (founder of Solana) was looking like the modern-day Steve Jobs. All that was missing was the black turtleneck.

The phone is scheduled to be released in early 2023. It’ll cost $1,000 and can be pre-ordered with a $100 deposit.

The Milk Road’s Take: Love the ambition – but we’re skeptical of big flashy announcements like this. Remember the Facebook phone? Remember the Amazon phone? Every company wants to have its own phone, but it’s a lot harder than it sounds.

Also – Solana’s blockchain is notorious for its downtime.

I can already see the “Can you hear me now?” commercials.

SHOPIFY INTRODUCES NEW CRYPTO FEATURES

Shopify is huge. Over $175B in sales happened in Shopify stores last year.

And they just dropped some new crypto features.

Here’s what they’re releasing:

1/ Token gated stores: basically, you can make a store that requires an NFT to enter. Holders will get access to exclusive merch and events.

2/ NFT minting: Shopify brands can mint custom NFTs to list and sell right from their stores. They can use blockchains like Ethereum, Polygon, Solana, and Flow to create their NFTs.

Alright, Shopify, we see you.

FUNDING FRIDAY

Each Friday, we give you a rundown of Web3 companies that got funded.

This week we saw $750M+ get invested into crypto companies. Here’s who got the money:

Magic Eden got $130m for their NFT marketplace on Solana, now valued over $1B. The founder also tweeted out a great story of how he started the business while sleeping in a van after his first crypto company failed.

Vibe Bio got $12m to build a DAO that funds & develops treatments for rare diseases.

Terrible Pets got $4m to build NFTs that create memes & viral content. The creators behind the show "Silicon Valley" are behind this one.

Neol got $5.2m to develop a web3-enabled learning & talent platform. It’s like On Deck but for Web3.

Endstate got $5.5m to help shoe brands create NFTs that come with a physical pair.

EcoWatt got $110m to create tokenized carbon credits.

If you wanna check out the full database of companies that have raised money in 2022, we got 'em for you right here.

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MEME OF THE DAY

😂😂😂

STAT OF THE DAY

Another day, another big hack. This time Horizon got got for $100M+…

We’ve now had three 9-figure hacks this year. Over $1b gone. Ouch.

WHAT YOU MIGHT'VE MISSED THIS WEEK

Check out what you missed below:

Monday: WOW! What happened to crypto prices over the weekend?

Tuesday: Introducing the NEW Milk Road

Wednesday: Have no fear, SBF is here

Thursday: Facebook’s coming for NFTs

That's all for today folks, see ya next week!

Cheers to the weekend.

Ben "2% Milk" Levy & Diego "All-Organic Milk" Salinas

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DISCLAIMER: None of this is financial advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. Please be careful and do your own research.