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| The biggest crypto news and ideas of the day Jan. 5, 2022 If you were forwarded this newsletter and would like to receive it, sign up here. Sponsored by Welcome to The Node.
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Today’s must-reads Top Shelf WE WERE PROMISED SMELL-O-VISION: Livepeer, an Ethereum-based video streaming network has added $20 million to its initial $28 million Series B with backing from macro trading legend Alan Howard and Tiger Global. The funding will go towards building new products like its “smart video” service (using AI) and peer-to-peer content delivery. Elsewhere in the videodrome, auteur Quentin Tarantino says he’ll be releasing his “Pulp Fiction” NFTs that were previously flagged for copyright infringement by film studio Miramax.
INSTITUTIONALIZED: Aave Arc, the institution-friendly DeFi initiative by Aave, has officially launched with the help of cryptocurrency custody firm Fireblocks, showing how crypto is an increasingly attractive offer for firms looking beyond traditional banks and investments for yield – even if it means cheapening the original vision of “permissionless” finance. The “whitelist” of 30 licensed trading firms to start includes Celsius, CoinShares and Ribbit Capital. Speaking of stealing market share, a Goldman Sachs analyst argued bitcoin could hit $100,000 if it successfully competes against gold as a go-to “store of value.”
MINING STOCKS: Digital asset mining company Core Scientific mined a total of 1,044 bitcoins in December, taking its total for the year to 5,769 BTC, one of the highest yields for a crypto miner in 2021. The firm plans to go public via a SPAC merger. Meanwhile, Frankfurt-listed mining infrastructure provider Northern Data said it mined 666 bitcoins and more than 26,000 ether since August, following an “operational update” in September. And finally, shares of crypto mining firm Riot Blockchain surged 7% on Tuesday after broker Cantor Fitzgerald initiated coverage with an “overweight” rating and a price target of $45.
BITCOIN DIVIDEND: Blockchain technology company BTCS is offering to pay shareholders a 5 cents-a-share dividend in bitcoin to showcase “the disruptive nature of blockchain technology,” according to CEO Charles Allen. The company says it is the first Nasdaq-listed firm to offer such a dividend, paying crypto instead of cash, and will evaluate whether to continue the program after this initial, one-off event.
PUBLIC INTEREST: CoinDesk has joined a legal proceeding between the New York Attorney General’s office (NYAG) and Tether and its parent company as part of the news organization’s effort to shed light on the reserves backing $78.4 billion of stablecoins. Tether, together with iFinex, which owns Tether and cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex, petitioned the New York State Supreme Court in August to block the NYAG from releasing documents pertaining to its reserves. CoinDesk is now a party to the case because it has a stake in the outcome – and the publication is arguing that the investing public does too.
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Overheard on CoinDesk TV... Sound Bites "In a Web 3 world we can create blockchain solutions and contracts that work with modern streaming technology to protect these artists and provide, you know, a decentralized system for fair compensation"
–Founder of BlockbusterDAO Tasafila, on CoinDesk TV's "First Mover."
What others are writing... Off-Chain Signals NASCAR rejected a potential sponsorship from LGBcoin, a cryptocurrency referencing the Anti-Biden “Let's Go Brandon” chant (Decrypt) Following energy shortage, Kazakhstan is reining in 2021's stampede of crypto miners (The Block) Optimizing Your Token Distribution (Lauren Stephanian/Mirror) Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian predicts play-to-earn crypto boom (Markets Insider) Fun, anonymous article about meme-coins in New York Magazine Politico covers NFT-specific U.S. lobbying efforts OpenSea Valued at $13.3 Billion in New Round of Venture Funding (NYTimes)
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XW Games: If You Build It, They Will Come: The Rapid Expansion of GameFi
The blockchain gaming ecosystem is rapidly evolving with new developments all the time in crypto (play-to-earn), NFTs (digital assets), and social-fi (individual DeFi). On a wider scale, a parallel can be drawn - how Las Vegas was built. At first, there was one bistro with a few slot machines and poker tables. Then more places opened with new games to play, and all winnings could be cashed out and then re-staked at each one of them. That fluidity cultivated the whole ecosystem.
Another parallel would be the growth of alternative asset classes such as financial derivatives, which confer both value and utility to their users. These tend to arrive during periods of uncertainty and over time become investable in their own right. The same is being applied in the crypto gaming space, only that it’s still at an early stage.
Putting the news in perspective The Takeaway 'Meta', Walmart and How Companies Shouldn't Set up in the Metaverse A clip has been tearing its way around Twitter this week, showing a Walmart-branded demonstration of shopping in “the metaverse.”
Reactions from Twitter users have been, in a word, brutal. The demo was “worse than current online shopping in literally every way,” one said. At the most basic level, it would destroy the main benefit of shopping online: not having to navigate store aisles and shelves.
To be clear, this isn’t a new clip: It was produced for SXSW in 2017. Nonetheless, the video does capture the default approach as corporate America works frantically to show that it’s ready for “the metaverse.”
On the surface, the entire premise of this sort of nonsense is that people will enjoy and use inferior metaverse applications just because … 3D is cool, I guess? Certainly, there’s no attention paid to what users actually want or need out of an online shopping experience. On the most basic level, why would you go to the trouble of designing a virtual Walmart that looks … exactly like a physical Walmart? Shopping in a real Walmart is fairly awful. You’re in a 3D virtual world, maybe take advantage of the literally limitless possibilities to redesign the experience.
Don’t expect anything better as various moribund and existentially terrified organizations trot out their “metaverse applications.” They’re mostly going to be awful, in part out of a pure lack of imagination: Remember, for instance, when newspapers “got on the web” by posting what were essentially PDFs of their print pages?
More importantly, these efforts aren’t really for users in the first place – they’re meant to dazzle investors, especially those in their fifties and above looking for public market opportunities to extract profit from young people. That, of course, was the real point of Facebook’s own rebranding as “Meta,” so we can’t expect any better from the drooling dinosaurs who will inevitably fall into step behind Mark Zuckerberg’s Pied Piper routine.
And it’s likely to end with them all cheerfully shambling off a (virtual?) cliff. That’s exactly what happened with Facebook’s embarrassing, disastrous “pivot to video” circa 2015-2016. The site started telling news organizations to prioritize video, leading companies like Vice, Vocativ and Upworthy to fire print journalists and hire videographers in their place.
Oh yeah, remember Upworthy? Vocativ? If not, maybe it’s because the pivot to video helped nudge them further into bankruptcy and collapse by tanking page views. In fact, Facebook’s video push cost hundreds of journalists their jobs (eventually including those newly hired videographers) and badly wounded dozens of news organizations. Partly that was because Facebook didn’t understand its own audience and was wrong about the initial pivot. Partly it was because Facebook then allegedly lied to content creators and advertisers about the views videos were receiving.
And that was just a first draft. By pulling the rest of the tech world along on its farcical effort to sell VR headsets, Meta is going to trick hundreds of potential competitors into wasting effort and capital on a fundamentally flawed idea.
Divergent visions of the metaverse The metaverse-shopping clip also highlights confusion and controversy over what exactly the “metaverse” is. As many pointed out around Facebook’s announcement, the term was coined in ‘90s cyberpunk fiction as essentially a synonym for “virtual reality.” But starting around 2017, when no one else was really using the term, devs and theorists around Ethereum started using “metaverse” to refer to a world built on owned digital assets, such as NFTs, usable across a variety of interfaces. Sotheby’s was drawing on this discourse when it launched a “Sotheby’s Metaverse” brand for NFTs, for instance, before Facebook announced its own name change.
VR wasn’t really part of that blockchain-centric discussion at all, but the discourse did help Facebook co-opt some blockchain clout with its VR rebrand. Facebook already tried this once, with the utter faceplant formerly known as Libra, a would-be “cryptocurrency” (whatever that might have actually meant coming from Zuckerberg) that was so stupidly conceived and poorly thought through that leader David Marcus seemed not just unprepared, but genuinely surprised when members of Congress pressed him on some really obvious problems with the idea.
This is why blockchain and crypto insiders see control of the “metaverse” narrative as a competition between Facebook’s centralized corporate VRscape and a more radical decentralized, open version backed by systems like Decentraland or Ethereum itself.
If Facebook wins that conflict, we’ll have a repeat of exactly the same problem we see with Web 2 – if one company controls the backend infrastructure, particularly data-gathering, they face no competitive pressure to improve or innovate on the front-end experience. And have you visited Facebook.com lately? It’s at least as noisy, distracting, unpleasant and inconvenient as your average brick-and-mortar Walmart.
Facebook’s inept and allegedly deceptive handling of both social video and the Libra project should also be a deafening warning klaxon for companies currently pouring millions of dollars into “metaverse” projects. Facebook’s “Meta” rebrand is entirely self-interested, oriented towards selling a few headsets and bamboozling credulous investors. They certainly don’t give a damn about their users, and they don’t care much more about companies dependent on their platforms.
Companies that trot along obediently behind the newest declared buzzword will get exactly what they’re signing up for – a total lack of control, complete subservience to a more powerful entity and no guarantee that any of it will work. When Zuck rugs you, you’ll have no one to blame but yourself: Like Lucy with the football or the scorpion begging a ride from a frog, it’s just in his nature.
The Chaser...
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