Solana Exploit | Gucci + ApeCoin | NFTiff | Magic Eden + ETH
Gm DOers!
Welcome back to our Weekly Rollup, the place where we help you stay caught up with the abundance of market news circulating around Web3.
Unfortunately, we’ve experienced yet another week full of hacks and exploits. Make sure to stay safe out there.
Our word of the week is community because when tough times occur, it’s all that holds a project alive and glued together. Without community a project cannot be born nor can it live, which is why we put so much emphasis on this concept.
Top news this week:
- Solana exploited, again
- Gucci accepts ApeCoin as payment
- Tiffany launches NFT collection exclusive for CryptoPunk holders
- The battle of Magic Eden and Opensea continues
- Ethereum merge is closing in
Let’s dig in.
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Web3 News & Highlights
9,200 Solana wallets drained of $4m , exploiting crazy stupid information storage in the Slope wallet. Essentially, Slope lied about being a non-custodial wallet and instead kept the seed phrases of their users in a database, which of course got hacked. This exploit was isolated and hardware wallets used by Slope remain secure.
It’s important to note that the Solana blockchain is secure and it has not been hacked. This is yet again a consequence of irresponsible human behavior… When will we learn?
Nomad, a cross-chain bridge has been drained for $200m. A recent update to one of Nomad’s smart contracts made it easy for users to spoof transactions. This meant users were able to withdraw money from the Nomad bridge that didn’t actually belong to them. This led to absolute madness and thousands of people joined the hack when they found out about the “opportunity”.
Chris Dixon has joined the board of directors at Opensea. Chris is part of the a16z team so he’s already been heavily involved with Opensea but it’s now official which is pretty exciting.
Gucci is accepting ApeCoin as payment in the US via BitPay. Just one year ago ApeCoin didn’t exist and now it’s accepted payment in one of the largest luxury retailers in the world. Yuga Labs continues to flex its partnerships muscle and show the power and influence of the BAYC ecosystem.
75% of retailers plan to accept crypto payments within the next 2 years, according to a Deloitte study where they surveyed 2000 senior executives from the retail industry who represent a range of sub sectors including cosmetics, electronics, fashion, transportation, food and beverage.
Socios (formerly Chilliz) invests $100M in FC Barcelona’s Web3 Efforts by acquiring 24.5% stake in Barca Studios.
🧬 Community Updates 🧬
- Welcome to the 43 new members who joined our discord community last week
- Our aim is to create the best community for learning and making frens in Web3. Here’s how:
- Weekly New Members Info Session every weds at 4p ET
- Discord Discussions on NFTs, Marketing, Community and more
- Weekly Sandbox Sessions brainstorming and solving problems web3 startups and businesses are facing.
- We’ve officially launched the Web3 Academy DAO
- Join the Weekly DAO All Hands every Monday at 4p ET to learn about all the projects, guilds and opportunities to get involved
- Calling all digital artists and graphic designers! We need your help in the DAO designing POAPs, NFTs and more. Msg us in discord or reply to this email if you’re interested.
NFT Innovation
Crypto users spent $2.7B minting NFTs in first half of 2022. 28,986 NFT projects were minted on Ethereum. Over two-thirds raised less than 5 ETH, although 140 collections raised well over 1,000 ETH. Cumulatively, the top five NFT collections on Ethereum accounted for 8.4% of overall minting including the terrible Pixelmon rug.
Miami Mayor, Francis Suarez announced a partnership with TIME, Mastercard and Salesforce to launch an innovative NFT collection of nearly 5,000 NFTs designed by 56 local Miami artists, representing the city’s 56 square mile area. The initiative is designed to drive revenue to local businesses and non-profits through exclusive rewards offerings.
Tiffany’s launches their own NFT collection, featuring 250 NFTs, each priced at 30 ETH (over $50k). These crazy expensive NFTs come with a custom pendant and are only available to CryptoPunk holders. Yuga Labs yet again making partnership magic.
British rock band Muse’s upcoming new album will be released as a limited-edition NFT on the Polygon-powered platform Serenade. The 1000 piece collection will be minting for $25 each and will include a limited-edition digital format containing digital signatures of the members of Muse. Each of the 1,000 buyers will have their names permanently listed on the linked roster of purchasers.
VeeFriends closes seed funding round at $50 million, led by a16z. Can VeeFriends challenge Yuga Labs and Larva Labs?
Fun Fact: Over 90 Web3 companies received $1.7b in funding in July!
Magic Eden adopts Ethereum NFTs, looking to take some market share away from OpenSea who released the support for Solana NFTs back in April. That was their attempt at getting market share from Magic Eden. Now, Magic Eden (responsible for 90% of all volume for Solana NFTs) strikes back. Still a long way to go for ME considering OpenSea had ~78% of all monthly volume for Ethereum NFTs in July.
Web3 Launches
Swype is a brand new protocol that allows DAOs to connect their Gnosis Safe wallet directly to an FDIC insured bank account. Your wallets are entirely non-custodial, and you’ll be able to make proposals that allow you to make payments through a virtual bank account attached to your multisig.
You’ll also be able to create debit cards for your DAO members, and assign them cards with spend limits/category restrictions, much like ordinary corporate cards spend programs. When creating new proposals for payments, every DAO member gets a push notification to their Swype wallet, allowing them to approve or reject new proposals.
This is a super exciting and useful application for DAOs!
The 1s & 2s
Ethereum’s last testnet, Goerli, is expected to transition to PoS sometime between Aug. 6 and Aug. 12, though this could change depending on how fast the hashrate functions. The merge will occur within a certain block. Therefore, it’s impossible to accurately predict the date.
Hot Takes & Funny Tweets
Tool(s) Of The Month
Our first tool of the month goes out to Midjourney, who’s an independent research lab exploring the sector of AI generated art.
A fascinating sector useful not only for Web3 but many other sectors too.
Our second tool of the month goes to OpenAI’s DALL-E 2, yet another business in the sector of AI generated art.
Question: Would you prefer to work with a human graphic designer or program a bot to make the art? Let us know by replying to this email.
🚀 Action Steps For Web3 DOers 🚀
👉 If you are a copywriter / content writer looking for a job, click here to apply.
👉 Secure your crypto assets by getting yourself a Ledger! With the abundance of hacks going around, we think it’s a good idea.
👉 Take our FREE Web3 Rabbit Hole Course to get up-to-speed on the foundational components of Web3 so you can confidently build, work, or use the fastest growing technology in history.
