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Fellow Talks on The State of Web3, from Fellows Fund

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:

The whole playlist on YouTube

TLDR

  1. The State of NFT Market, by Shiva Rajaraman, CPO of OpenSea, Distinguished Fellow at Fellows Fund

  2. 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.

  3. Gaming brings in most new wallets, but, socially-oriented collections correlate with repeat buying.

  4. The focus of OpenSea is to provide liquidity to the NFT market.

  5. Composability is more important for the gaming NFT space.

  6. Metaverse and GameFi, by Stefano Corazza, VP and Fellow at Adobe, Distinguished Fellow at Fellows Fund

  7. One way to look at a map of the metaverse is basically what level of abstraction and how connected to the world they are.

  8. Another way to look at it is to really look at the stack: Experiences, Devices, Commerce, Engines & delivery, and Creative ecosystem.

  9. Chicken and egg problem in the content space: Awesome Content ->Consumer Join Platform -> More Content Developers Get Involved.

  10. Two kinds of possibilities Blockchain enables: Technical Probability of the Experience and Portability of the IP

  11. Because of GameFi, Metaverse can be a space for people to live and work

  12. The Path to Defi 3.0, by Kyle Bailey, VP Eng at dYdX

  13. Defi 1.0: Token farming, Defi 2.0: Liquidity ownership, Defi 3.0: Farming as a service

  14. Main problems we are facing: Trust(low trustworthiness and high centralization) and Risk(Correlated financial and technical risk)

  15. The pathway forward: Infrastructure(more liquidity and participants in the space) and more utility(more businesses solving real user problems needed)

  16. Web3 Security Issues, by Huagang Xie, Founder of Ancilia.xyz and ex-SVP at Palo Alto Networks

  17. YTD $1.7B loss due to hacks in the crypto space

  18. Audits are necessary, but not enough.

  19. The future of Web3 is to build an end-to-end solution from audit, to monitoring and prevention.

  20. Blockchain Analytics & NFT Recommendations, by Haixun Wang, VP of Instacart, Distinguished Fellow at Fellows Fund

  21. To build NFT recommendations, we need: Features about on-chain activities, Features about customers and Features about market value predictions

  22. How we get the data: OpenSea APIs, Blockchain APIs, Centralizing the data from Blockchains and The “OLTP” vs “OLAP” analogy for the blockchain world

  23. The motivations to build decentralized recommendations: Trustworthiness, Private&Secure and Crowdsourcing

  24. The solutions of decentralized recommendations: Blockchain-based recommendation as a service, Private computation over decentralized data

  25. 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

  26. Terra/UST was using a two-token mechanism, which only works in a small price range of Luna and UST

  27. UST/Luna market cap ratio was not big enough. It should be at least 10x+

  28. 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.

  29. The collapse of Terra/UST didn’t cause bigger collateral damage as expected which showed the resilience of the blockchain ecosystem

  30. 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

  31. We are not in a recession right now, but a recession will happen sometime. Surprise events trigger recessions. Expected events do not.

  32. Larry Summers was right about inflation.

  33. 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.

  34. The long-time climate is favorable because savings are still reaching for yield

  35. Early-stage investments have a long time horizon

  36. Cryptocurrencies still have no major uses except speculation, a long way to go.

  37. 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!


Fellows Fund aims to build the next generation of Web3 and AI companies. We support the best entrepreneurs with a customer network, talent community, and unique insights from our selected fellows from the leading tech companies and top universities. Learn more: fellowsfundvc.com

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