First up on the list, we have Aave governance voting. This is about using a software license that prevents people from using the Aave codebase until a few months after the software is launched. What sparked my thoughts here was that we’ll continue to see projects start to have conflicting motivations between crypto ideology and economic incentives. What was interesting about this vote was the fact that defimaximalist.eth (Defiance Capital) tipped the vote over to yes. Kind of ironic for the name huh.
Things are heating up in the DAO service provider space. We had Open Zeppelin request a few million a year to provide Compound with continuous auditing services and what followed were many counter-proposals. We’re finally seeing the end stages go through governance. Why this matters: service providers going and making public proposals is a new level of transparency we’re seeing, but also a different sales process altogether. Feels like the new enterprise sales process.
Jeffery Morris Jr is a pretty well-known Web2 social investor. Seeing him raise a new fund focused on Web3 is a leading sign of what’s to come when you have a boatload of Silicon Valley VC money flood the space. This fund is one of many that will obliterate the space soon in my view. It’s things like this that make me think multi-year bear markets are less plausible.
Jacob Shiach from Union Finance wrote about some interesting properties of how uniqueness in crypto addresses can be used for risk mitigation and management. There’s going to be a clear $ value associated with Web3 identities and we’re only accelerating in that direction.
Dune is raising a round at a potential billion-dollar valuation while Nansen raised at a $750m valuation. What struck me as interesting is that Dune is spinning a newsletter sub at $450/month which is half the price of Nansen’s $1000 pro/month. The most probable path here is that the two giants will compete with each other and drive the price of analytics down throughout the industry. When you have a shared data layer what is the true defensibility?
Shopify is entering the NFT space with its own NFT marketplace! Talking about Silicon Valley entering the space, this is just the start. We also have Coinbase entering this race soon as well! Web3 is here to stay and the building is happening as we speak.
Anyways, that’s it for now. Have a great holidays :)