💸 Funding pours into web3
This is Shashank’s Newsletter, a newsletter with bite sized content on everything that happened in web3 over the past week.
Welcome to all the new subscribers and hope you can learn a few things from my newsletter as we embark on this web3 journey :)
In today’s email,
💸 650M$+ raised as funding pours into web3
⚔️ LooksRare vs OpenSea: Battle of the NFT marketplace
💪 ARK Invest bullish on Defi
🏜️ Coachella auctioning NFTs
🤝 MetaMask and MyCrypto merger
Weekly gainers
💸 650M$+ raised as funding pours into web3
Polygon raised $450M from Sequoia Capital India, SoftBank, and Tiger Global with a 20B$ market cap. 2022 is predicted to be the year of L2s and Polygon is set to lead this pack with their fast transaction times, ultra-low gas fees, and massive ecosystem of 7000 Dapps including Aave, Curve, Sushiswap, Uniswap, and OpenSea. One of the unique moats in my opinion for Polygon is that they are one of the few technology-agnostic chains out there with a large ecosystem of solutions including plasma, zero-knowledge rollups, optimistic rollups, and validium to scale blockchains. Blockchain tech is bound to evolve with time and Polygon will stay relevant as it adopts new technologies onto their developer ecosystem.
Bold prediction, Polygon could be the most valuable tech company from India in 3-5 years. They are already more valuable than some of the most successful tech companies from India, over the past decade like Paytm, Zomato, Oyo, and Ola.
In more funding news, Alchemy raised 200M$ at a 10B$ valuation as the AWS of blockchains. Their valuation has grown 20x in less than a year 🤯 Their goal is to be the starting place for blockchain developers and already have several large customers such as OpenSea, Dapper Labs, Axie Infinity, and Adobe.
Btw web3signals.xyz is a great site if you want to stay on top of funding news in web3.
⚔️ LooksRare vs OpenSea: Battle of the NFT marketplace
OpenSea continues to be a large monopoly of NFT marketplaces with a massive market share. To take over this share, LooksRare is taking some bold measures with their vampire attack tokenomics. At a high level, LooksRare hands out a set amount of their native LOOKS tokens to all traders, every day based on their sales volume. They also provide eye-popping APRs for staking these tokens (240% at the time of writing). This incentivizes heavy wash trading. But importantly, LooksRare is collecting a 2% fee on these sales which is being directed towards the stakers. This flywheel between trading and staking is a genius move to capture market share from a monopoly. As such, traders are basically swapping ETH for LOOKS, which could pay off should the price of LOOKS appreciate relative to the price of ETH. Essentially, there’s an interesting bit of game theory in motion, as early adopters will be rewarded if the LooksRare platform succeeds.
Is this sustainable? LooksRare’s trading rewards will inevitably come down over time at which point they will have to compete on its product and community alone.
💪 ARK Invest bullish on Defi
A great slide from ARK Invest's presentation comparing the revenue per employee in TradFi & DeFi showcasing the true power of transparent, globally accessible, and autonomous platforms.
🏜️ Coachella auctioning NFTs
Love em or hate em, you can’t ignore em - NFTs.
The possibilities of NFTs are boundless ranging from art, gaming items, event tickets to real estate titles. Another day and yet another large brand adopts this technology. Coachella is now selling access to their festivals and other digital goodies as NFTs. Coachella Keys, one of the most notable collections consisting of 10 tokens sold for a whopping $1,474,000.
Interestingly, Coachella partnered with FTX, powered by Solana for the launch and not Ethereum.
🤝 MetaMask and MyCrypto merger
Consensys owned Metamask merges with MyCrypto to make the wallet experience safer, more stable, and even more feature-rich. Both of these wallets have existed for over 6 years and have been battle-tested by users.
This merger comes amidst news of MetaMask amassing rapid growth with over 30M monthly active users and over 300M in all-time revenue (source). They make a large portion of their revenue with the token swapping feature in the wallet where they charge users 0.875% of the transaction. MetaMask is reportedly making 170K$ per day based on their recent transaction volumes proving the financial models for open-source wallets and protocols in general.
Lots of more exciting features coming to the wallet space as L2s and bridges gain more adoption in 2022.
Peace,
Shashank
How did you enjoy this week’s edition?