Fellows Fund had a successful Web3 gathering last weekend! Over 120 Web3 enthusiasts joined the discussions and analyzed the whole space as investors and technologists. On behalf of the Fellows Fund, I would like to thank some of you who attended our event. We are happy to share some of the event highlights:
TLDR
The State of NFT Market, by Shiva Rajaraman, CPO of OpenSea, Distinguished Fellow at Fellows Fund
NFT volume is down, esp when looking at USD, but not as significantly when ETH. NFT transactions still remain healthy. The number of active participants is lower, though recovering from TERRA/LUNA collapse.
Gaming brings in most new wallets, but, socially-oriented collections correlate with repeat buying.
The focus of OpenSea is to provide liquidity to the NFT market.
Composability is more important for the gaming NFT space.
Metaverse and GameFi, by Stefano Corazza, VP and Fellow at Adobe, Distinguished Fellow at Fellows Fund
One way to look at a map of the metaverse is basically what level of abstraction and how connected to the world they are.
Another way to look at it is to really look at the stack: Experiences, Devices, Commerce, Engines & delivery, and Creative ecosystem.
Chicken and egg problem in the content space: Awesome Content ->Consumer Join Platform -> More Content Developers Get Involved.
Two kinds of possibilities Blockchain enables: Technical Probability of the Experience and Portability of the IP
Because of GameFi, Metaverse can be a space for people to live and work
The Path to Defi 3.0, by Kyle Bailey, VP Eng at dYdX
Defi 1.0: Token farming, Defi 2.0: Liquidity ownership, Defi 3.0: Farming as a service
Main problems we are facing: Trust(low trustworthiness and high centralization) and Risk(Correlated financial and technical risk)
The pathway forward: Infrastructure(more liquidity and participants in the space) and more utility(more businesses solving real user problems needed)
Web3 Security Issues, by Huagang Xie, Founder of Ancilia.xyz and ex-SVP at Palo Alto Networks
YTD $1.7B loss due to hacks in the crypto space
Audits are necessary, but not enough.
The future of Web3 is to build an end-to-end solution from audit, to monitoring and prevention.
Blockchain Analytics & NFT Recommendations, by Haixun Wang, VP of Instacart, Distinguished Fellow at Fellows Fund
To build NFT recommendations, we need: Features about on-chain activities, Features about customers and Features about market value predictions
How we get the data: OpenSea APIs, Blockchain APIs, Centralizing the data from Blockchains and The “OLTP” vs “OLAP” analogy for the blockchain world
The motivations to build decentralized recommendations: Trustworthiness, Private&Secure and Crowdsourcing
The solutions of decentralized recommendations: Blockchain-based recommendation as a service, Private computation over decentralized data
The Collapse of Terra/UST and Stablecoin Market, by Dawn Song, Professor at UC Berkeley, Co-director of RDI center, Founder of Oasis Labs and Distinguished Fellow at Fellows Fund
Terra/UST was using a two-token mechanism, which only works in a small price range of Luna and UST
UST/Luna market cap ratio was not big enough. It should be at least 10x+
More luna were printed during the panic, the luna prices started to collapse, then the market cap of Luna dropped a lot, then people panicked to convert UST to Luna, which caused the death viral to drive the Luna price to lower and lower.
The collapse of Terra/UST didn’t cause bigger collateral damage as expected which showed the resilience of the blockchain ecosystem
Today’s Global Economy and Investment Climate, by Charles Elkan, Professor at UCSD, Founder of Ficc.ai, Ex-Managing Director of Goldman Sachs and Distinguished Fellow at Fellows Fund
We are not in a recession right now, but a recession will happen sometime. Surprise events trigger recessions. Expected events do not.
Larry Summers was right about inflation.
The so-called supply chain crisis has been caused mainly by increased demand. Personal savings peak in 2020 then people start to spend more in 2021.
The long-time climate is favorable because savings are still reaching for yield
Early-stage investments have a long time horizon
Cryptocurrencies still have no major uses except speculation, a long way to go.
The Fiat financial system runs on human discretion, which smart contracts can’t handle now.
We also enjoyed our hike in Edgewood Park with no sight of rattlesnakes!
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