#Web3 Weekly: March 21–27, 2021
Down in Miami, a handy reminder of who the pandemic economy’s winners and losers have been.
Re-sharing below the latest edition of #Web3 Weekly, my regular newsletter about decentralization. If you’d like to get it in your inbox every Sunday, subscribe here.
Out with airlines, in with crypto. Could there be a better thumbnail summary of the pandemic era economy than that?
Behold the home court of the Miami Heat, currently known as AmericanAirlines Arena. However, pending final approval from the National Basketball Association, the building will soon be re-christened FTX Arena, in honor of a crypto exchange that just agreed to buy its naming rights for a cool $135 million.
Of course, since the outbreak of COVID, air travel has tanked, with passenger traffic still down 50% among U.S. airlines compared to pre-crisis levels.
Meanwhile, global crypto trading volume is up over 50% since the start of 2020, recently topping $108 billion a day, according to data from CoinMarketCap.
Guess which of these industries has more cash lying around to spend on marketing (or anything else it wants) right now?
The week’s other headlines:
- Uniswap unveiled an ambitious plan for its v3. The upgrade of the popular lending platform should improve capital efficiency for investors by 4,000 times when it launches in May, Uniswap said in its official announcement.
- Tesla is now accepting bitcoin as payment for its cars. CEO Elon Musk announced the move, which has been expected for some time, on Twitter.
- Ethereum still dominates distributed applications. Not a huge surprise, I know, but hat’s off to Bitcoinist nevertheless for doing some deft number crunching on Etherscan to quantify Ethereum’s dominance in greater detail. Bitcoinist reports there are currently over 830 projects based on the ERC-20 token standard, with over 350,000 token contracts. Next time you hear of a would-be “Ethereum killer,” see if it can measure up to those metrics.
- Crypto.com launched a new platform for non-fungible tokens. The site has already signed up several famous creators to issue NFTs, including Snoop Dogg and Lionel Richie.
- Wall Street keeps adding new ways for clients to buy crypto exposure. Goldman Sachs filed a proposal with regulators to offer new debt instruments pegged to the performance of ARK Investment Management. Separately, Fidelity is looking to offer an exchange-traded bitcoin fund that will trade like a traditional stock.
- Ripple published a whitepaper about its potential use in creating central bank digital currencies.
- Serena Williams led a $5 million investment round in Lolli. The bitcoin rewards startup allows users to earn up to 30% back in bitcoin rewards when they shop with merchants such as Sephora, Nike, Staples, and Microsoft. The tennis star invested in Lolli through her firm Serena Ventures.
- Looks like remote work is here to stay. More than one-fifth of executives expect to cut office space for their companies in the coming year, according to a new survey by the American Institute of CPAs survey.
That’s it for now. Thanks for spending some time with the newsletter today! A full revision history of it, including earlier drafts, is available here if you’re interested. If you’d like to get updates like this in your inbox every Sunday, please join our email list here.
