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We looked at web 3 without winners. We are looking at a meme investing show.
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A dispatch from the desk of an editor.
When a meme asset class collides, what happens? Each investor hopes that the result will be a wave of real money.
A marketplace was launched this week. The marketplace raked in $2 million in sales volume on the first day, which equates to less than $50,000 in transaction fee revenue. Even though daily volumes have trended downward in subsequent days, it is far from an embarrassing launch.
In order to decrease its reliance on brick-and-mortar sales, GameStop is looking for a revenue generating vertical. The timing could be better for the company as NFT dollar volumes have plummeted, but this is still a vision that has registered with the company's very unique breed of investor. The company's stock is up 50% in the past couple months, but it's still down 40% from its November highs.
It won't be easy to take down OpenSea, but it doesn't seem like the company is aiming for a straight feature-for-feature copycat.
This is vision of modular blocks that Vitalkik Buterin is behind, but it makes things more complicated because there are many options. The problem is that you can only transact on GameStop with NFTs that were earned on Loopring, meaning that you can't buy popular collections like Bored Apes on the store's website.
This is a risky choice for GameStop which will probably add support for other chains down the road, but for now is left on a different set of rails. If this was a pure cash grab they could have grabbed the cash more effectively by playing it straight.
Having pure-ish intentions only takes you so far in the coin world and GameStop realizing success here remains a vertical uphill climb, but meme stock buyers have realized more challenging odds over the years so their appetite for risk remains hard to satisfy.
Lucas andAnita were back in action this week and immediately got into the news. After posting a $381 million loss last fiscal year, the news lineup had them talking about the stock and its bold move into the NFT marketplace. They talked about the disappearance of the founder of a firm that lost billions of dollars of other people's money, as well as the numerous venture fund launches they've seen in the last week.
The founder and CEO of Yat was on the show with them. Jain spoke with them about the concept of identity in both web2 and web3 and she was able to get him on board with the cause of lobbying for a long-awaited biriyani emoji. All are welcomed.
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The place where startup money is moving.
Online donation platform Change helps charities fundraise in crypto
There is a weekly window into the thoughts of a reporter.
They like to hold onto their coin in the hope that it will appreciate over time. There is one exception that has motivated many U.S. coin holders to give up their token for charity.
People who give money are more generous than people who give money in the form of coins. The optimist believes that web3's sense of community could influence this. The cynic in me knows that it is a smart financial move for these donors because of the tax benefits of donating, and that it is treated like an asset under the U.S. tax code. Regardless of the motivation behind it, charities looking for new ways to raise money could benefit from usingcryptocurrencies.
The Giving Block and Endaoment saw their donation volumes increase during the year due to the bull market. Change is trying to help companies and charities process donations with an application programming interface. They just closed a $5 million seed round and I talked to them about it. They have historically focused on online donations, but believe that theBlockchain can provide transparency donors want, but not always.
It is interesting to see a startup that is using this time to invest more deeply into its web3 capabilities instead of running for the hills. Only time will tell if Change can bring transparency to the opaque world of nonprofits or if they will end up running into intractable challenges. The latter is a topic for another day, but I think it's worth giving some thought to how it could evolve as a force for good.
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The US government is looking into the impact of NFTs.
After NFTs exploded over the past year, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and U.S. Copyright Office are launching a joint study to investigate the digital assets’ impact on intellectual property rights. The study comes about a month after Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy, a Democrat, and North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis, a Republican, wrote to the offices asking them to look into NFTs given their exponential growth in a short period of time.
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