Join the creators, students, early career professionals, founders, executives, and more focused on learning and empowering each other on web3 concepts by subscribing below.
My goal is to bring diverse minds together to accelerate our web3 education to build a better future. My hope is that these recaps will be in service of that objective.
Here is today’s roadmap:
Article: Visible Capital
Tweet: Coinbase NFT
Podcast: Andrew Yang & Lobby3
Bonus: Mika Reyes’ NFT Guide
P.S. If you are new here, take a look through this web3 starter guide to get caught up to speed :)
Article:
Visible Capital - Dror Poleg
Web3 can make people feel uncomfortable. One reason is because things are more visible and transparent. People show their expensive NFTs on their profile pictures. You know who the wealthiest people are and what they are investing in. There is a ton of wash trading, where users buy and sell assets to each other to drive up the price.
As Poleg states in this article:
“Crypto markets are not uniquely unfair or corrupt; they are unique for being visibly unfair and corrupt. They show us something about the world that is easier to ignore in other markets. Arguably, the comparison holds even with public markets: There, too, some entities trade on information that is not publicly available, front-run their own customer's trade, and accumulate excessive returns.”
These markets are showing us human economic behavior and a lot of us do not like it. One of the web3 ideas that people are most wary of is creator coins; tokens attached to the value of an individual.
So how do creator coins work? Imagine you could buy a $JAY coin. In exchange for purchasing $JAY, I could provide consulting for your business, provide 1:1 mentorship, or give you a financial stake in my future earnings. Imagine if you could take a financial bet on the potential of talent.
When discussing this idea with colleagues and friends, they get queasy. Here are a few reasons why:
People struggle with their mental health on social media. If we get upset by not getting enough likes on a post, what happens if someone sells our token?
What value is being exchanged here? Is this yet another speculative investment?
Any kind of ownership associated with people sounds awful and dystopic.
To borrow Poleg’s framing, I believe creator coins are making visible what already exists. When investors put money behind founders at an early stage, one of their investment criteria is ‘we are investing in the individual’. People in Silicon Valley know that there is an upside to investing time and energy in young talent.
Supporters are able to leave a legacy behind, help people, and can ride their upside by having first dibs in investing in their projects. It’s an unspoken truth in tech, and I’m sure it exists in other industries. This is not inherently bad, it just happens behind the scenes. This occurs in private today but may lean to becoming more public in the future.
Capitalism is not a pretty concept. There’s inequality, an orientation towards economic success vs personal or spiritual success, and it can guide people to care more about material possessions. Web3 markets are making us sober up to the fact that this is how our society operates. We can feel down by this or we can use the understanding of this stark reality to change things for the better.
Tweet:
I’m keeping a close eye on the launch of Coinbase NFT. They announced last year they will be launching their own competitor to OpenSea. Now customers will be able to purchase crypto and buy NFTs on one platform.
Today OpenSea is the largest platform with 56 percent of the NFT market. There have been 1.3m traders since OpenSea launched in 2018. To date, Coinbase NFT has over 3.1m people on their waitlist. Assuming a conservative conversation rate of 5% (accounting for net new users who have not bought NFTs on other platforms), that would still bring in ~150K users into this market. Rough calculations, but you get the point.
What will this mean for NFTs? Will prices continue to increase? Will existing traders be able to sell to buyers that are entering the market late, therefore decreasing prices? I’m not sure but it will be interesting to observe.
Podcast:
Andrew Yang was a 2020 presidential candidate. He became notable for popularizing universal basic income. I like him because he is one of the few politicians to have a forward-looking perspective on technology. He speaks openly about smarter regulation around AI, how automation of jobs will help or hurt the workforce and has recently started leaning into web3.
Last week he announced his team is launching a DAO called Lobby3. Their goal is to advocate for web3 in DC by prioritizing and proposing new policies to regulators. They will be selling NFTs in exchange for governance and voting rights in the DAO. Below is their description from their Discord.
In this podcast, Andrew shares more about why he believes the web3 community needs to be more in touch with regulators in the short term.
Bonus:
We are building a strong community of people subscribing to this newsletter. One of those wonderful people is Mika Reyes. We were connected through a friend at LinkedIn, and since then she’s been educating me on the NFT space. She recently launched “The NFT Playbook”, a guide with insights from projects like Crypto Covens, Chainrunners, World of Women, & more.
Her goal is to inspire, grow, and give back to the early and developing NFT ecosystem. Like myself, they believe in its future and want to see more well-intentioned NFT projects succeed in the long term.
You can check her guide here!
Additional Resources:
That does it for this week of Web3 Wednesdays.
Till next time,
Jay 💕