Farez.FM Ep 6 Crypto Winter is here. OpenSea lays off 20%. Uniswap on Robinhood. Coinbase's Market Share Drops. GameStop NFT Marketplace. Polygon to be a part of Disney's Accelerator program.
Farez.FM Ep 6 Crypto Winter is here. OpenSea lays off 20%. Uniswap on Robinhood. Coinbase's Market Share Drops. GameStop NFT Marketplace. Polygon to be a part of Disney's Accelerator program.
Introduction
Hello friends, welcome to episode 6 of the Farez.FM podcast. I’m your host Farez Vadsaria, @farezv on the internet.
What the podcast is about
On this podcast, I talk about Web 3 concepts and news in the tech, music, cryptocurrency, gaming & general pop culture space in a few minutes.
On today’s episode
We’ll explore some recent news in light of the recent crypto market crash. If you’re unfamiliar, the Terra Luna crash followed by the Bitcoin sell off, along with general economic strains caused by Federal interest rate bump, Ukraine and Russia war, supply chain constraints as well as a pandemic that doesn’t seem to wanna quit has officially sent the crypto market into the winter.
This term essentially means prices are down, Web3 companies are struggling and everyone’s NFT portfolios have gone from seeing life changing gains to, well just being life changing. Without the gains.
All investment portfolios are on a diet shedding weight. Turns out the Wu Tang Clan was right about C.R.E.A.M. Cash does indeed rule everything around me.
Crypto News
OpenSea lays off 20% of its workforce as co-founder and CEO Devin Finzer shared in a tweet. In February, the company had secured an additional $300 million in funding with a valuation of $13.3 billion and was the dominant player in selling NFTs, earning a 2.5 percent commission on every trade. Crypto price crashes have reduced the value of NFTs recently which are even more speculative due to those communities being smaller and more susceptible to volatility.
This is in line with other Web3 layoffs with Coinbase laying off 18% of its work force recently in June. Today it’s market share tumbles to less than 3% according to CoinDesk.
Robinhood has been expanding its crypto trading menu with Uniswap being the most recent addition. If you don’t know, Uniswap is a decentralized exchange whereas companies like Robinhood, Voyager, BlockFi, FTX, Gemini and Coinbase (among others) are centralized exchanges. More on how DEXs work in a separate episode. This has resulted in Uniswap’s ERC-20 token UNI to surge 20% in the last day or so. Its market cap is $4.7 billion. Robinhood now offers a total of 13 crypto assets.
Gamestop launches it’s NFT Marketplace “to allow gamers, creators, collectors and other community members to buy, sell and trade NFTs. The Company’s NFT marketplace is a non-custodial, Ethereum Layer 2-based marketplace that enables parties to truly own their digital assets, which are represented and secured on the blockchain. The marketplace, which can be accessed at nft.gamestop.com, allows parties to connect to their own digital asset wallets such as the recently launched GameStop Wallet. Over time, the marketplace will expand functionality to encompass additional categories such as Web3 gaming, more creators and other Ethereum environments.” [GameStop]
Disney expands into Web3 with Polygon as part of it’s accelerator program to help innovate within NFTs, AR and VR using Web3 technologies, causing MATIC to surge in price “almost 21% to just over 69 cents over the last 24 hours.” [CoinDesk]
Here’s a great thread by @PuffYatty that covers all companies involved.
Flickplay is a web three social app where users can create augmented reality videos. Using their NFTs. This looks pretty cool. It's frog dude, walking around. That's pretty awesome. Imagine if all your NFTs were these incredible 3d models, just walking around, that'd be pretty cool.
Next company called Inworld AI creates "our brains for virtual characters". @inworld_ai provides a developer platform for creating AI powered virtual characters for use in the metaverse, AR VR games and virtual worlds.
@ObsessVR creates virtual stores for brands. Clients include Coach, Fendi, AT&T, Mattel, NBC and more. I kind of saw this coming. I mean, Walmart has one of their. VR experiences. I think this is going to be the future of e-commerce.
And as mentioned Polygon, the most widely used Ethereum L2 for NFTs is also partnered up with Disney.
@red6ar has created a patented AR headset used for much more realistic air combat training than traditional flight simulators.
Lockerverse. Disney describes Lockerverse as a Web 3 platform that empowers creators and brands to tell culture defining stories, and deliver a unique access and experiences. Very little information can be found about the company besides a 2021 trademark application.
So there you have it. Disney's planning to grow into the Web 3 space and they kind of see where this whole space is going and with the amount of IP they have, it makes sense that they're really expanding the space.
And that is episode 6, a short one, my friends of the Farez.FM podcast. Thank you for tuning in. If you're unfamiliar, I post written transcripts of this podcast on farezv.com, which is my blog slash newsletter. Feel free to go there and subscribe. I also post the video editions to this podcast on YouTube.
And as always, you can hear the podcast on all your typical podcast platforms. I'm @farezv on the internet. Thank you for listening and you have a good one. Cheers.