🐦 New record breaking NFT project - Moonbirds
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🐦 New record breaking NFT project - Moonbirds
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 :) Here are some of my popular posts if you want to catch up:
In today’s email,
🐦 New record breaking NFT project - Moonbirds
🛍️ Consumerization of web3
🎵 Snoop Dogg drops a new song on 4.20
💨 New proposal in Compound to change token rewards
🫘 Some cool beans
Interesting stat
BTC holding up pretty well compared to growth stocks 💪💪💪
🐦 New record breaking NFT project - Moonbirds
Well-known silicon valley personality, Kevin Rose launched a new NFT collection called Moonbirds on the full moon on April 16 (creative right?). This collection broke record volume doing over 300M in sales over the past week. 🤯
Why is this NFT making so much news? This project is deemed to be much more than a regular 10k PFP (profile picture) project. Here are the main reasons for the success of this NFT:
Impressive founder: Kevin Rose was the founder of a social media startup and also well known for investing early in several successful companies like Twitter, Facebook, Uber and Foursquare. (btw if you are into podcasts, highly recommend Kevin’s podcasts - Modern Finance and Proof. A+ content 👌)
Culture and Community: Kevin’s first NFT collection called Proof was an amazing success. This NFT was basically an access pass to a strong loyal community of 1000 hardcore NFT collectors and artists. Members of this group own close to ~250k NFTs 🤯 including best sellers such as Bored Apes, Meebits and Crypto Punks. You might have heard of the Paypal mafia from 2000s, YC mafia from 2010s. I call the Proof members the NFT mafia of 2020s.
This unique community takes pride in buying NFTs to support artists and participate in projects for the longer term, and not just flipping for a quick 2-5x return. Kevin is launching these collections to play the long term game with long term people.
It is so cool to take this concept of a 1000 true fans and build a strong community around it…. and actually monetize it using NFTs and not ads. This concept has been one of the primary motivating factors for me to do this newsletter :)
Utility: Moonbird holders get access to the private discord server of Proof members. This discord is where a lot of the NFT investments and projects are discussed among group members and is highly valuable.
They will also get access to one of the largest NFT conferences and several IRL events. With the kind of revenue they are generating from secondary sales, they have budget to organize larger than life sized events. This is bridging the digital community in real life, which is very powerful for creating a loyal community.
Access to Highrise Metaverse: Kevin’s vision for Highrise is wildly different from other metaverses which he thinks are just rip-offs of 3D spaces and games so far (are you listening Facebook?). His vision is to create a space that is much more immersive and personalized for the community.
At this point, metaverse means so many things to each person that it’s going to be really interesting to see everyone’s imagination play out. It’s always nice to see so many wild experiments.
Bottomline: NFTs are increasingly becoming a fundraising mechanism to back bold ideas and founders (specially experienced ones) to build a product. If you think about it, Moonbirds was essentially a 300M funding round to build some products. Kinda like Kickstarter …. but on steroids.
🛍️ Consumerization of web3
punk6529, a well known crypto personality put out a great thread on consumerization of web3. This is something all builders and operators of web3 need to understand for mass adoption of web3.
When people use web2 consumer apps like Instagram, they don’t really care about the tech stack and don’t need to learn how to setup nginx, learn python and grok Postgres. They just use the app to FOMO their friends about their lifestyle. (Hope, I didn’t hurt some feeling here 😉)
Compare this with the web3 experience….. where you have to learn how to setup metamask, understand Ethereum transactions and gas fee, understand ERC-20/ ERC-721 standards. NFTs were such a big hit because they are simple and usable for mass adoption. It is web3’s consumer moment.
So what about things like BTC, ETH, Uniswap? They are infrastructure, they must be protected, but they are mostly building blocks for other experiences similar to Linux, Http for web2.
People are going to do what is fun and easy because people have busy lives and too many things to think about already. People don't change when they go online
There is still lots to build in web3 from easy and fast UX to easily explainable transactions. It’s still early days 🚀
🎵 Snoop Dogg drops a new song on 4.20
“If the ride is more fly, then you must buy” said Snoop Dogg.
And his latest music drop on sound.xyz was more than fly!!! Cos the fans did buy…. and for how much you ask? His song was sold out in minutes for a whopping 100 ETH!!! 😮💨
Btw sound.xyz is a great example for consumerization of web3. It’s a music platform that allows artists to drop their songs as NFTs, without any middlemen flipping the music industry using web3 primitives. Now you have the right to buy Snoop’s song, own it, trade it and make money off of it. You actually own a piece of Snoop's legacy.
This drop was called 4.20 (creative timing). One of the cool things about this drop is that, he shared the proceeds with his collaborators through Splits protocol (this is an on-chain protocol to split royalty payments perpetually)
Snoop has been an artist for over 30 years now and it’s crazy to me, how he adapts to the changing times and always stays relevant. Some golden nuggets for all of us here as we grow in our career. Don’t be afraid of change, embrace it!!!
💨 New proposal in Compound to change token rewards
Compound finance is one of the largest decentralized banks with more than 7B in locked value. It is essentially a marketplace for lending and borrowing using an algorithmic, autonomous interest rate protocol.
What are $COMP rewards? Compound incentivizes users to participate in lending and borrowing by giving out their $COMP token as rewards to their users. This helped them bootstrap growth to 7B dollars. 📈
So, what’s changing with their reward program? The reward attracted lots of new users but the main problem is, almost all of these free $COMP tokens were sold instantly. As a result, the token has been down over 80% in the past 2 years and this new proposal aims to reduce the rewards over time. 📉
“This farming behavior is not the kind of activity that will bring value to the protocol, or for the existing users and token holders. Incentives need to be used to grow the protocol to the benefit of the protocol itself and its users and token holders”
The proposal to reduce rewards by 50% attracted 82.1% of the ~900k votes – just 8% of COMP holders voted against. Btw, it’s great to see so much active participation in the governance of protocols. Imagine….Uber shareholders had governing rights on how much money they were burning early in the form of reward programs or in other key business decisions. Crazy to think about these paradigm shifts and see such major reforms being discussed openly.
🫘 Some cool beans
Coinbase launches their new NFT marketplace in Beta. This will expose NFT trading to 90 million users. Have to appreciate the speed and execution of Coinbase at their scale. 💪
Stripe announces crypto USDC payouts with Polygon integration. Stripe keeps getting deeper into crypto to grow the internet’s GDP.💲
Talking about Polygon partnerships, look at the amazing growth numbers Polygon has seen in a year 📈
Will NYC be the “crypto valley”? 🌄
How did you enjoy this week’s edition?