Apple Introduces Web3 to its 1B Users

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This is the Weekly Rollup 

The fren that holds your hand across the bumpy road of web3.

Here’s today’s TL;DR

📈 Interoperability is bringing sexy back
🤯 Did Apple just put wallets on 1B iPhones?
👀 The term every business leader must know: Token-Gating 
⚡ Coinbase NFT marketplace pivots to aggregation

Enjoy 🔥

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Let’s Talk About Interoperability, Baby

We are experiencing exponential growth in the interoperability of the internet via NFTs.

WTF does that mean?

Let’s start from the beginning…

18 months ago NFTs hit the mainstream. Just like the ICO boom and DeFi summer a lot of people made life changing money. If you bought a Bored Ape when it minted in April 2021, with an original mint price of 0.08 ETH ($192) and you had diamond hands…

You would now have a complete BAYC set worth a floor of 168 ETH ($220,000).

That’s like winning the lottery!

Sorry folks but those days are over. Thankfully better days are ahead. Unfortunately they don’t involve us all getting rich the easy way. But the decade ahead is full of opportunities for businesses that learn that NFTs are a protocol for interoperability. 

The main use cases for NFTs are NOT communities or speculative assets.

Most NFTs will not be created to accrue value but rather to enable users to move across applications and prove things like ID or credentials in a manner without friction.

Just like what Lens Protocol is doing (yes they are our sponsor, no they did not ask us to write this). 

Lens uses NFTs for everything and most of them do not have any value. The main point is that it enables you to be social and grow your social graph across the internet and across various social platforms. 

Rather than having 5+ independent social graphs like we do now with Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google, etc. With Lens we just have 1 social graph which is connected by various apps built on top of Lens open source NFT based protocol. Mind blown yet?🤯

It’s this interoperable NFT standard that will enable you to move seamlessly from one app to another and bring your followers and content with you. 

Most of this has no value in terms of selling these NFTs, but plenty of value to the creator building a following and putting content into this ecosystem.

👉 Want to learn more about the macro web3 trends? Listen to Kyle give his thoughts about where all of this is heading by clicking here.

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Speaking of Lens… Go to LensFrens to see which creators already experiment with the new era of social media. 👀

Follow web3academy.lens while you’re over there. 🚀

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Apple Announces NFTs in the App Store 

Apple will start to allow developers to sell NFTs in-game and through apps sold on the App Store. This is a REALLY big deal. 

Previously, apps like Opensea or Axie Infinity couldn’t enable NFT trading natively in the app. So they had to build outside of Apple’s ecosystem.

The news has sparked controversy in crypto Twitter because Apple will charge it’s standard 30% take rate on NFT sales. Let us explain why this shouldn’t bother anybody. 👇

In case you live under a rock, this is Apple: 

• 1B people use iPhones
• iPhones have a 65% share of smartphone sales in the US
• $85B gross sales on the App Store in 2021
• Apple hosts 3.6M apps on App Store of which 1M are games

Now that we’ve established how great Apple is, let’s be clear: we’re not big fans of the 30% fee. However, there may be 1B people that will interact with NFTs because of this move. In the grand scheme of things, that’s all that matters right now. Onboarding more frens! 

Right now, the details of how NFT trading will take place are still undisclosed. It’s likely that trading won’t happen in a peer-to-peer manner, but our hunch is that Apple is working on creating their own non-custodial wallet. 

If we’re right, with 1 click of a button, Apple will create wallets for 1B people across the entire world.

HUGE 🚀

With that being said, we must acknowledge that Apple has built a great product and they’re allowed to charge whatever they want. After all, that is what an open marketplace is all about. 

If we don’t like it, let’s build something better and disrupt them. That’s how business works. 

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Token Gating Goes Mainstream With Tokenproof and Flow

Tokenproof is a leading token-gating platform that raised $5M at the end of August. We first used Tokenproof at NFT NYC where many events were using the dApp as tickets (it was WAY better than Ticketmaster). 

But verifying tickets isn’t the only purpose of token gating. In fact, it’s one of the best ways to drive further engagement with a community. 

For example, if you hold a token-gated concert, 1 year later you could:

• Celebrate the show anniversary by sending unreleased content which isn’t sharable and only accessible through token verification. 
• Offer attendees first access to purchase tickets at the next show in their city.
• Then 5 years from now you could offer anyone who has attended all 5 shows in their city backstage passes

Token gating also solves the issue of piracy. Rather than downloading media, like books, straight to our devices, we’ll only be able to view it on-chain as long as we have the requisite NFT. 

Mainstream token gating happened recently when Neil Strauss (a NY Times bestselling author) teamed up with Jenkins the Valet (a fictional NFT character from the Bored Ape NFT collection) to write a book. 

Yes, we know how crazy that sounds… Welcome to the future. 👀

Anyway, Jenkins and Strauss wrote “Bored & Dangerous” but instead of listing it on Amazon, they sold NFTs which—with Tokenproof authentication—gives owners access to the book.

That’s not all, though. Tokenproof recently introduced support for the Flow blockchain.

They kicked off their partnership with the help of one of the largest entertainment brands in the US—Nascar. In a recent race at the Texas Motor Speedway, attendees who had a race day NFT could use Tokenproof to access exclusive areas and events. 

Now, let’s talk about Flow for a sec because they typically fly under-the-radar and don’t get much love with the web3 community. But they’re making serious moves in the industry, especially with big corporations—which could be why they’re underappreciated. 

But not every chain needs to be maximally decentralized, provide sovereign ownership, or shun web2. Instead, Flow is improving web2 experiences with the help of some cool web3 features. 

To give you an idea, Flow also has partnerships with Mattel, NFL, NBA, UFC, and tons more, generating well over $1 billion in NFT sales volume. 

The team at Meta even added support for Flow-based NFTs on Instagram, so holders can showcase their NBA Top Shot NFTs. 

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Coinbase NFT Marketplace Now Shows Listings from LooksRare & OpenSea 

After the disappointment of Coinbase’s NFT marketplace play not working out, they’re back for more. Coinbase NFT now aggregates NFT listings from other marketplaces including LooksRare and OpenSea, allowing users to buy NFTs at the best price from multiple marketplaces.

This isn’t something totally unique as we’ve seen many aggregators pop up over the past 6 months—for example, Gem and Coral Cube. But it does highlight the transparency and interoperability of web3. 

In web2, being an aggregator would be a pain-in-the-ass, requiring formal partnerships and extensive meetings to figure out the best way to aggregate. But in web3 data is in the open, allowing companies like Coinbase to innovate as they please. 

Now, let’s put this move into perspective. Opensea, the largest NFT marketplace in web3, has roughly 1 million active users. 

On the other hand, Coinbase has over 100 million users—yes, 100x more than Opensea. 

And there’s a reason why Coinbase has so many users, their UX far exceeds what web3 currently offers.

So while some web3 maxis might be against Coinbase gaining more market share, the mainstream adoption they can potentially drive more than makes up for it. 

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Turning Consumers Into Contributors: Koop

From now on, it’s up to you, and the rest of our community to choose our Tool of the Month. 

This week we pitted some excellent tools against each other. It was a tight race until the very end with Koop edging out Wonderverse by a few percent. 

So congratulations on your win Koop and thanks to everyone for voting! 

For those of you who don’t know about Koop, let’s break them down. 

Koop is all about dissolving the barriers between organizations and consumers. Their main goal is to turn consumers into contributors and owners. They believe that communities should be able to build, shape, and be rewarded for supporting a project—similar to how DAOs function. 

Koop aims to simplify token and access distribution while solving a huge problem in governance—poor proposal engagement. 

Current DAO proposals are usually text-based with details that most people don’t understand or need to know, leading to poor engagement. They’re also a solitary affair unless some members start up a debate on Discord.

Koop aims to boost governance engagement and, therefore, improve decision quality, by making voting fun. They do this through live voting events, excellent UI, and open discussions.

Some other Koop highlights include: 

• Compatibility with several ERC token standards.
• CRM capabilities based on NFT holder wallet analysis. 
• The ability to offer membership tiers based on new and existing NFT collections. 
• Quests and rewards for simple tasks or long-term contributions. 

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$1,300,000

That’s how much somebody borrowed in Ethereum using Mutant Ape NFTs as collateral.

7,500,000 

That’s how many monthly users Audius reached. Audius is a web3 music streaming dApp. Like Spotify except with tokens. If you make a top playlist you get rewarded with tokens.  We also love Audius because they do not use words like crypto, NFT or web3. 

$100,000

That’s how much Opensea rewarded a user for spotting a bug on the platform.

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Fundraising

• Eclipse raises $15M in the pursuit of developing customizable modular rollups, using any chain under the hood. Source

• Sardine, a key payments infrastructure provider across traditional and decentralized finance, raised $51.5M in a round led by a16z. Source

• Bitcoin payments company Strike raises $80M. The plan is to use the money to grow with the “largest merchants.” Source

Launches

• Lens launches Cultivator DAO to establish community driven content curation for trust and safety. Source

• Proof of Steak – Chipotle offers a 99.95% discount on their new garlic guajillo steak if you spend ETH using Flexa. 99.95% represents the amount of energy reduction achieved by the Ethereum Merge. Source

• Nasdaq makes the first steps into web3 by offering crypto custody. Source

• New England Patriots (NFL team) announces Chain as their official blockchain partner. Source

• Walmart launches Walmart Land, Walmart’s metaverse, built on Roblox. I said Walmart way too many times there, didn’t I? Anyway, here’s the – Source

Other Web3 News

• Opensea rewards a user with $100,000 for spotting a bug. Source

• Audius reached 7.5M monthly users. Source

• SEC files ICO suit against crypto influencer Ian Balina. Source

• Disney is looking for legal help as it expands into web3 territory. Source

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Take Action & Level Up

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Who do you most want to make an NFT loyalty program?

• Your favorite Airline

• Your favorite Gas Stations

• Your favorite Supermarket

• Your favorite Clothing Brand

Let us know by replying to this email with your answer! 🔥

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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.