What I Found Interesting: Week of 12/20
Jack Dorsey lets loose, Solana NFT Hack,Starting DAOs, Big Tech Exodus
A collection of content that caught my attention last week.
Jack Dorsey says VCs really own Web3 (and Web3 boosters are pretty mad about it)
Since departing as Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey has started to freely share his opinions on both Web3 and venture capitalists. In multiple tweets and replies to prominent Web3 VCs, like a16z, Dorsey downplayed Web3 and its impact on the internet. While his comments are directed towards the VC disruption of Web3’s pure nature, I think the comments are a bit rash. Sure there has been a flood of VC money into Web3 companies, but a lot of prominent L1 and L2 companies were crowd-raised and do not have any traditional VC fundraising. I also think that these kinds of comments can create a negative narrative for Web3 that can harm its progression. It is fair for him to raise a concern about the VC money flowing into Web3, but his words could have been more carefully selected to leave less room for interpretation of who and what he was targeting.
Monkey Kingdom Hack. Over 7,000 SOL ($1.2 million) got lost on Solana NFT mint due to a hack that happened on the Discord channel
Web3 has not yet reached the user experience level that makes it accessible to all users on the internet. There hasn’t been any impactful invention like the web browser had on Web2 and because of that, there are many mistakes that can be made in interacting with Web3 products. The recent hack of a Solana NFT drop is a good example of what is unfortunately common in this space at the moment. What happened was that a malicious chatbot released a link to the NFT community’s Discord, a popular community communication tool for Web3 businesses, that users thought were a link to the actual NFT drop. It turns out that a hacker copied the NFT drops website design and when users thought they were buying NFTs, they were actually transferring SOL to the hackers wallet. This type of hacking, called phishing, is typically found with email, but now appears to be common in the crypto space. Be safe out there and watch the video attached to the article!
DAOs are an evolving part of the Web3 ecosystem that I, like many, believe will be the exponential lever of widespread adoption when communities are scaled. They are designed to be governed by the most passionate members of the community rather than a select few. While we are still in the early stages of understanding how DAOs should be architected and operated, I found this tweet thread by Lucas Campbell, founder of BanklessDAO, to be a great summary of what to consider based on his experiences running his own DAO.
The New Get-Rich-Faster Job in Silicon Valley: Crypto Start-Ups
It is no surprise that top tech talent is starting to ride the web3 wave since the rise of DAOs, Dapps, and technologies supporting blockchain in the past year. More than $28 billion flowed into crypto and blockchain start-ups, 4x the investment in 2020. A large part of that is the surge in NFT interest that the article attributes to a lot of exodus from Big Tech.