Bear Market? What Bear Market?

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Tune into the podcast to hear how Polygon is improving police processes 🎧

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GM HODL Homies!

The weekly brain download that keeps you on the bleeding edge of everything web3.

In this week’s edition, we’ve got some fire to warm your bear market blues:  

• Magic Eden now offers optional royalties. Humble brag: we called it! 🪄
• The world’s largest music festival launches NFT passes 💃
• Plot twist: We’re actually in a bull market 🐂
• DAO of the Month. Hint: They’re building the metaverse we’ve all been waiting for  🤖

We’ve also got a breaking announcement hot off the press from Web3 Academy—don’t miss it!  

Now, let the brain download begin! 🧠

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Magic Eden Gives Users the Freedom to Set Creator Royalties

After reflecting on the current NFT market state, Magic Eden has decided to offer royalty optionality—something they were previously against.

The platform now lets buyers choose between full, half, or zero royalties on any purchase. However, the default setting will be full royalties. 

We’ve been talking about this move potentially happening for a while, so we’re not surprised. 

But what’s interesting is that it happened so soon. 

Let’s be clear, Magic Eden is in favor of creator royalties (FYI so are we). Their stance is obvious since they’ve even invested $1 million in a hackathon to innovate the future of creator monetization. 

They’re even partnering with Cardinal Labs to create smart contracts where creators can mint NFTs and wrap them, only allowing the NFT to be sold on marketplaces that enable royalties. 

But to stay relevant and ultimately achieve their goal of fair creator royalties, they have to make the sacrifice now. 

Don’t get us wrong, we love Magic Eden! They’ve got some excellent talent, are respected in web3, and are always open and upfront about what they’re doing. 

So it’s no fault on their part. It’s mostly down to the Solana NFT ecosystem. 

Magic Eden is the leading NFT marketplace on Solana. And who are the main NFT users on Solana? Speculators and flippers. 

What do they want? To spend as little on their trades as possible. 

And you can see it in the number of wallets interacting with optional-royalty marketplaces 👇

But it’s also down to the fact that it’s extremely difficult to enforce royalties on-chain. Ethereum hasn’t done it. Solana hasn’t done it. No one has yet. 

So if we can’t enforce royalties at the marketplace and protocol level, marketplaces will find a way to skirt them and steal market share from Magic Eden—for example, Sudoswap, x2y2, and Yawww.

And that’s exactly what we’ve seen. Magic Eden’s market share has been steadily dropping, going from 89% across the last six months to just 76% over the last 30 days. 

However, Robbie Ferguson, co-founder of Immutable X, recently tweeted that the platform can guarantee marketplace royalties.

Kyle reached out to Robbie to get the full picture of his announcement, but we’re yet to get an answer. 

How mysterious! 👻

While Magic Eden doesn’t have these capabilities yet, they are creating ways to support Solana creators. On their platform, they highlight all the utilities that NFT holders receive from a particular token, encouraging buyers and sellers to consider its value before deciding on royalties. 

Our take, though, is that, if it can go to zero, it probably will go to zero  📉

That’s exactly why Kyle created his NFT Business Models series. Because even if royalties are enforceable, they’re not a reliable revenue source for creators.

👉 If you haven’t already, check out part 1: Are NFTs a Sustainable Business Model for Tokenizing Communities?

But, there’s one case where we believe royalties should always be enforced, and that’s for artists. 

In the beginning, art (music, paintings, etc.) is often worth very little. It’s only after an artist blows up that they can sell their creations for a significant amount. 

So we think it’s fair that, if someone sells a 1/1 art piece, the creator receives their share. 

We salute Magic Eden for making the hard decision to move to optional royalties. But if Immutable X can enforce royalties, we may well see Magic Eden follow suit.

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Censorship-free social media? Hell yeah! Check out the latest posts on Lenster. 👀

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Rolling Loud Plans to Launch Loudpunx NFT Collection (We Know Jay’s Excited)

Rolling Loud is the largest hip-hop music festival in the world, with 150k+ attending their festivals across Miami, New York, LA, Toronto, Portugal, Netherlands, and Thailand. 

They’re an incredibly successful event company who are excellent at building a culture around music and hip hop, and now they plan to do it in web3. 

Rolling Loud will launch a 10k PFP collection that’s all about utility. Jay heard through the grapevine that the mint date is November 9th—but we all know how NFT mints go. 

In saying that, the collection promises some serious utility: 

• Lifetime access to all Rolling Loud festivals (you read that right 🤩)
• Premium lounge access at each event
• Exclusive Discord channels
• And, of course, some sweet, sweet merch

Rolling Loud isn’t the first to dive into web3 (Coachella, another popular music festival launched a collection previously). However, they’ll be the first to launch a 10k NFT collection. 

To be honest, we’re torn about whether this is a smart move or not 🤔

On one hand, there isn’t an obvious business model behind lifetime access passes. Rolling Loud will have to create value for their 10k holders at every event even though holders only have to purchase the NFT once. 

And since NFTs are on-chain, they can be passed on in perpetuity—even 100 years from now! 

In saying that, we’re not against lifetime access itself. There are two situations where it makes sense: 

• If a business wants to build with its community to create something of greater value than the initial NFT—for example, creating a Rolling Loud DAO.
• And if it’s a smaller collection. For example, Coachella sold 10 NFTs that included lifetime passes. These NFTs ended up selling for $170,000 to $250,000 each, making the ROI much better.

But on the other hand, will there actually be 10,000 unique NFT holders? Probably not. So let’s say there are 60% unique owners. And of those 6,000, maybe 30% would show up to every show. 

Would it really cost that much for Rolling Loud to have an extra few thousand people at their festivals? We don’t have an answer, but we’re sure Rolling Loud has done the math. 

The interesting point is that they’re specifically targeting web3 consumers. We know this because Rolling Loud got roasted on Twitter by their fans since mainstream consumers still hate NFTs. Plus the fact that these NFTs can only be bought with ETH. 

So it could be an attractive opportunity for degens since there’s some real-world utility attached to the NFT as opposed to promised utility. 

Regardless, what we need to question is if you’re a big business and you have an opportunity to create a community of 10,000 loyal fans right now, what is the long-term effect of a community? 

In web3, we talk about wanting to decentralize. We talk about wanting to build a culture and involve our community in our products and decision-making.

This is the way to build that. 

Rolling Loud’s move is a massive commitment to the ethos of web3. They’re saying hey we want to play in web3 and we’re going all out.

And at Web3 Academy, we’re all for it! 

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If NFT royalties were optional, how would you decide the amount to pay? 🤔

• By the art
• By the community
• By the utility
• Royalties? Not for me 🙅‍♀️

👉 Let us know by replying to this email. Bonus points for sharing how much you’d pay!

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Web3 Developer Activity Reaches All-time Highs This Year

During previous bear markets, developer activity usually takes a nose dive. 

But this time it’s different.  

Developer activity is up 40% this year, 36% of all verified smart contracts were deployed in 2022, and Q3 is the biggest quarter in crypto history from a developer standpoint. 

Here are some highlights: 

• Ethereum SDK Installs per week are up 178% year over year
• Smart contracts (verified) per month are up 160% year over year
• dApp numbers have increased by 12x since 2018
• 700% – 1,000% increase in developer teams across L1s and L2s
• Polkadot hits an all-time high in developer activity

When you’re in the web3 trenches day-to-day it’s easy to forget where we’ve come from. But when you zoom out, you can see that we’re making some serious progress. 

Sure, many users have left the space. But the most important part is that the developers are still here, and they’re in builder mode.

Every day we hear about new blockchain infrastructure, protocols, token standards, and how web3 is disrupting different industries. 

Speaking of disruption, if you want to know how Polygon is helping to overhaul police complaint processes in India, make sure to listen to the podcast. 

Yes, we’re still in the building stage. But when web2’s product and UX specialists come on board, web3 is bound to explode. 

One word: Bullish

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TreasureDAO: Building a Truly Open Metaverse

Now that we’re leaving it up to you to decide our DAO/NFT/Tool/Person of the Month, we’re really seeing the power of community. 

For this DAO of the Month, we received over 300 votes with a whopping 89.8% going to this month’s winner, TreasureDAO! 

Interestingly, the reason they won is because of someone who really understands community— the CMO of Arbitrum, Andrew Saunders (who recently shared some killer career-building advice on the podcast).

He saw our poll and got the Arbitrum community involved and, of course, it worked. Now TreasureDAO has some free marketing. Way to walk the talk, Andrew!

So if you want your DAO, tool, NFT, or favorite web3 person to win, make sure to vote on our Wednesday pinned poll. Next week it’s Tool of the Month! 

Now, who is TreasureDAO? 

TreasureDAO is a decentralized video game console, aiming to connect games and communities through MAGIC (their token) and NFTs.

Their ultimate goal is to build a truly decentralized metaverse. And to do this, we need a few things: 

• Interoperable standards that allow you to port items across games
• A common currency that can be used across games
• Tools for developers to build, such as token standards and platforms

And TreasureDAO aims to be the home base where developers can access these tools. 

But what’s really cool about TreasureDAO is its community. 

When they first launched last year, their focus was on free mints because they realized that, if you want to create a decentralized metaverse, you need people. So they allowed users to freely mint MAGIC and gaming NFTs. 

There’s a lot happening around this free-to-own model and we believe it’ll change the face of gaming over the next decade.

And who’s at the forefront of this paradigm shift? None other than TreasureDAO.

So we’re going to have the founder of TreasureDAO on the podcast soon. We’ll talk about their community and product to get a clearer picture of what they’re doing in web3 gaming. 

Don’t miss it!

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Tired of Twitter Noise? We’ve Got You Covered 👇

Web3 Academy is all about learning and growing in web3. We’re learning about where the space is going and how to build community. 

But it’s not just about learning from Jay, Kyle, and the Web3 Academy team. It’s about learning with you, our community. 

And where better to do that than Discord? 

Now, our Discord was open previously and it was amazing! Podcast listeners and newsletter readers from our community would get together to chat about the latest web3 news and share their thoughts on podcast guests. 

We even had private Discord sessions and member meet-ups where we could learn and grow together. 

It went so well that our community ended up turning into a DAO (a tokenized community). We’ll cover this transition in-depth at a later date, but it drew so many people into our community (including scammers and spammers) so we had to shut it down. 

But we’re back and better than ever. 

We’ve re-designed the experience with help from the DAO and the team at Web3 Academy, making it simple and easy to navigate—all about that UX baby! 

It’s essentially a couple of forum channels (kinda like Reddit, but better of course). Every podcast episode has its own space for discussions and questions. And we even have a web3 news feed where Jay, Kyle, and the community share news and opinions on web3 events. 

Truth be told, we even prepared this Weekly Rollup during a Discord community call! 

On top of this, we run Sandbox Sessions every Thursday where we bring in an experienced web3 builder to chat about their journey. Other times we help someone from Discord refine their business idea with the community’s help.

Next week we’ve got the founder of GM (who we’ve previously talked with about building community in web3) coming in to walk us through the future of web3 social platforms. After that, we’re covering how retailers can use web3 with the help of some guests from companies like Walmart. 

And right now, you can get involved in the Web3 Academy community. It’s free and easy to join right now, but we’re eventually going to token-gate it so that we can drive even more value to the community. 

But at the moment, we’re bringing everyone back in and growing the community so now’s your chance to join!

The early degen gets the alpha, right? 

There are tons of smart web3 peeps in our Discord right now that are exploring and learning about the space together. We’ve got creators, entrepreneurs, business professionals, and more—and we want you to join us. 

So if you want to get rid of the noise and bots on Twitter, hop into the Web3 Academy Discord and have an engaging conversation with real people. 

👉 Here’s your chance: Join the Web3 Academy Explorers Club.

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24,000 

That’s how many ATMs in Brazil will allow people access to USDT starting from November 3rd. Source

2,500,000

That’s how many Reddit users have opened Reddit Vault Wallets (Reddit’s crypto wallets) since the launch of Reddit’s NFT marketplace in July. Source

30,000

That’s how many signups have been recorded for Bluesky, a decentralized social network backed by Jack Dorsey, in the first 48h. Source

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Web3 Adoption

• The first house has been sold as an NFT through a company called Roofstock onChain which is a marketplace that lets you buy single-family properties using NFTs. Source

• FIFA partners with Roblox to launch the FIFA World metaverse. Source

• Winners of the Ballon d’Or (the most prestigious soccer award) receive NFTs and Golden Ledger, on top of their physical trophies. Source

• Cryptopunks, Social Tokens, and Bitcoin debut in the Guinness World Records for crypto. Source

• Lexus driving school gives NFT credentials using the Polygon blockchain. Source

• Fidelity will start providing Ethereum trading for institutions, starting next week. Source

Other Web3 News

• Coin Center and Bankless co-founder David Hoffman sues the Department of Treasury. Source

• After being hacked for over $100M, Mango is set to approve a $47M deal with the hacker. Source

• Aptos, a new L1 blockchain launches. This is being developed by the team from Meta that was working on the Libra blockchain a while back. Source

• SBF says that FTX US will not list assets its lawyers think may be securities. Source

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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.