Unchained - 65% of Active Developers Joined Web3 in 2021 - Ep.306

Episode Date: January 7, 2022

Electric Capital’s Maria Shen dives into her company’s recently published research report about Web3 open-source development in 2021 and shares her thoughts and insights on how developers are floc...king to Web3 in a manner that goes far beyond just Bitcoin and Ethereum. Show topics: Maria’s biggest takeaways from the Electric Capital Developer Report how developer growth is affected by asset price which ecosystems are growing fastest why Maria thinks the growth in Bitcoin development has slowed down why Maria is so impressed by Ethereum’s performance in terms of retaining developers how closed-source development on, for example, Solana or Flow could affect the report’s findings the significance of Polkadot, Solana, NEAR, Binance Smart Chain, Avalanche, and Terra growing faster than Ethereum did at similar points in its history developer growth in DeFi during 2021 why Electric Capital did not study developer growth for NFTs, DAOs, or gaming why Maria is so interested in studying community growth going forward what Maria will be watching for in 2022 Thank you to our sponsors! Avado: ava.do Crypto.com: https://crypto.onelink.me/J9Lg/unconfirmedcardearnfeb2021    Episode Links   Maria Shen https://twitter.com/MariaShen  Previous Unchained appearance: https://unchainedpodcast.com/electric-capital-on-the-coins-punching-below-their-weight/    Electric Capital https://www.electriccapital.com/   Electric Capital Developer Report (2021) https://medium.com/electric-capital/electric-capital-developer-report-2021-f37874efea6d  Previous reports: https://medium.com/electric-capital  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Hey all, before we begin, a couple of announcements. First, Unchained has a new logo and website. You may have noticed the new podcast thumbnail in your podcast player or on YouTube. This change has been a long time coming, and I think the new redesign looks awesome. As we've done on YouTube and on the podcast platforms, we've also now retired the unconfirmed brand on the site. So now the Friday shows will also be branded Unchained. Be sure to check at the beautiful new redesign at Unchained Podcast. com. Second, my book publishes in less than two months. I've been sending it to a few early readers
Starting point is 00:00:37 to get blurbs and also for ideas for NFTs. And I just wanted to share with you one early reader's reaction. This person, quote, absolutely devoured the book in two days, which is pretty crazy because I wrote a really fat book. They also said they were enthralled, their word, and that they felt the book really brought to life the various players included in it. This is someone who's been involved in the space for years, but was not right in the middle of the action, and they could not put it down. So if you're looking for a good read that's all about crypto, pre-order the Cryptopians, idealism, greed, lies, and the making of the first big cryptocurrency craze today at Bitley slash Cryptopians. That's B-I-T-L-Y-S-C-R-Y-P-T-O-P-I-N-S. The book comes out to 22-22, and so you'll have it just in time for
Starting point is 00:01:33 spring break. Again, pre-order the Cryptopians at Bitley slash Cryptopians. And now, on to the show. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Unchained, your no-hype resource for all things crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin, a journalist with over two decades of experience. I started covering crypto six years ago, and as a senior editor at Forbes was the first mainstream media reporter to cover cryptocurrency full-time. This is the January 7th, 2022 episode of Unchained. With the Crypto.com app, you can buy, earn, and spend crypto in one place. Download and get $25 with the code, Laura, link in the description. Tired of your exchange taking 25% of your staking profits? The
Starting point is 00:02:19 The Avato blockchain computer allows you to stake Ethereum and other crypto at home and keep 100% of the rewards. Go to aVA.do. Today's guest is Maria Shen, partner at Electric Capital. Welcome, Maria. Thank you. It's so nice to be here. Electric Capital released its annual developer report on developer ecosystems in crypto this week. What are the big takeaways about the current state of open source development in crypto and Web3?
Starting point is 00:02:49 Yeah, I think, first of all, 2021 was just a year of so many all-time highs. First of all, there's an all-time high in monthly developers. Right now, we're standing at over 18,000 monthly developers across all of Web3. And that's up 75% from last year. And the other really amazing all-time high that was so good to see was that many developers are now joining, like there are more developers that joined in. 2021 than any prior year in in this industry's history of really more than 10 years. So in 2021, 34,391.
Starting point is 00:03:34 So over 34,000 developers joined the sector last year, which is up from about 20,000 newcomers in 2020. And right now we're averaging about 3,000 new developers that contribute to to something in Web 3 each month. And I think a really important caveat here is all the data we look at is open source developers. And so this obviously doesn't include closed source developers. A lot of this means that, you know, for people working at Coinbase or for a lot of the exchanges for a lot of games that are closed sourced, it's really, that's not counted in these numbers.
Starting point is 00:04:18 So these numbers really are an undercounting of the number of developers that are in the Web 3 space now. Yeah, you know, something that was fascinating to me about the report is you have a graph, the increase in new monthly active developers. And since January 2021, it's been a 75% increase. It's, yeah, been almost 8,000 new monthly active developers. And so when you look at that graph, it almost looks like a ball that bounced up into the right. And I was just wondering, what do you think was the catalyst in January 2021 that brought in so many new developers this past year? Yeah, one of the things that we've seen is that developers, if you look at kind of price charts and the way that developers move,
Starting point is 00:05:04 prices will, once prices start spiking, you'll see more developers coming into the space. And so that's definitely part of what we've seen, especially for new developers that come in, the number of new developers that come in, the number of new developers that come in closely follows kind of the total crypto price charts. And so as prices go up, more new developers join. But what's really, really surprising and amazing to see is that when prices do come down, developers actually stick around. So you saw that in the last cycle in 2017 and 2018, where by 2018, you know, you had prices fall more than 80%, but developers really stayed flat through 2018, 2019, 2020, and in 2021, you have this huge influx of new developers coming in and that's really driving a lot of the group. Yeah, something that was so remarkable
Starting point is 00:05:58 was more than 60% of monthly active developers started in 2021. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And yeah, and about 45% full-time developers. So full-time developers are the ones who commit 10 days or more in a month. So these are developers that are really very regularly contributing and working in Web 3. And they really count for most of the commits as well. So there's definitely a lot of growth there too. A lot of the growth also, back to your other question is through the new developers joining through DFI. Ethereum has garnered a lot of growth as well.
Starting point is 00:06:41 They've gained more than 1,000 monthly active developers over 2021. And what's been really interesting to see this time around is that there are very healthy new emerging platforms beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum that are emerging as well. I'm just glancing at my notes here. And it looks like for Pocodot, Solana, near Binance Smart Chain, Avalanche, and Terra, they're growing faster than Ethereum at that same stage in. history and so you're definitely seeing a lot of fast-growing layer ones emerging as well and our developers working at those ecosystems. Yeah, before we actually dive further into that competition, let's actually just talk a little bit about Ethereum because when you look at the charts of all these developer ecosystems,
Starting point is 00:07:31 Ethereum really stands out like literally it's this dot that's kind of far away from everything else. Yes. Yeah. So explain what it is that that signifies. Yeah, so Ethereum has almost three times the number of developers in their ecosystem as the next competitor, as kind of the next leading ecosystem. And what's really remarkable is the growth that it's still seeing, given that it already has more than 4,000 monthly active developers in its ecosystem, that it's still really growing at that fast rate. one of the really fascinating things we saw this time around is we usually like to track the top 200 projects by network value and look at developers working within that.
Starting point is 00:08:21 And so you can see that every single year, the top 200 developers are kind of increasing. They're more developers joining, but over time, a lot of them do drop off versus something like Ethereum that does continue to grow. or Bitcoin that has been really holding steady and now they have over 600 monthly active developers. I think it really speaks to the persistence and the sustained and healthy growth of Ethereum and Bitcoin. Yeah. One of the stats that jumped out at me was that Ethereum draws 20 to 25% of all developers that come to Web3. So clearly it's still got stank. power. And the other thing is kind of that point that you made earlier, that even when there are these like long bear markets that the developers who started during those bull runs, at least for
Starting point is 00:09:20 Ethereum, they really stick around for quite a long time. So, you know, you brought up Bitcoin that for a long time was the second largest ecosystem. This was the first year that it no longer is. So what do you think that shift signifies? Yeah. Well, it, actually it turns out that as we gathered more data, that I think Pocodot was above Bitcoin last year as well. But generally, so this is the first year where Bitcoin has kind of fallen to the fifth largest ecosystem. And you see a lot of, you know, you see Pocod and Cosmos and obviously Ethereum and some others surpassing it. You know, I do wonder how important that is. Bitcoin is you know, Bitcoin, the network itself is extremely mature at this point. I think the number of
Starting point is 00:10:15 adjustments or code changes that need to change are minimal. And I think it's like a very robust and very mature chain. And so that rate of growth is going to be a little bit slower than some of these smart contract layer one platforms that you see. That being said, you do see something like stacks, which is a smart contract platform built on top of Bitcoin, still gaining quite a bit of developers as well, because more developers are joining and building applications on these chains. And do you think that's just because when it comes to smart contracts, it's just basically more complex and there's, you know, kind of like a bigger, quote unquote, design space, as they call it. And so that would be a reason why there would be more developers that are trying to build on
Starting point is 00:11:01 smart contract platforms rather than on something like Ethereum on Bitcoin, which is more focused in one area? I think it's really, it speaks to the applications that are being built. You know, Ethereum, when it was first envisioned, was seen as this amazing touring complete platform where you can start building applications much, much easier than you could before. And you do see the effects of that in the number of developers as well, where a lot of developers are building defy applications. A lot of developers are building games and NFT platforms. A lot of DAOs are forming up on these smart contract platforms.
Starting point is 00:11:43 And so as a result, there are just more developers working on them. Okay, great. So in a moment, we're going to talk a little bit more about the coins that are in that top tier, as well as the ones in the level below competing at that level. But first, a quick word from the sponsors who make this show possible. With Amex Platinum, $400 in annual credits for travel and dining means you not only satisfy your travel bug, but your taste buds too. That's the powerful backing of Amex.
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Starting point is 00:13:34 Plus 100% rebates for your Netflix, Spotify, and Amazon Prime subscriptions. Download the crypto.com app now and get $25 with the code Laura. Link in the description. Back to my conversation with Maria. So as we mentioned, the list does not go, you know, Ethereum, then Bitcoin. And I guess it didn't last year either. But one thing that stuck out at me was, is that Pocodot and Cosmos were in that top five,
Starting point is 00:14:05 and they're both kind of these interoperability chains. I was curious for your thoughts and, you know, if that fact of like, you know, what kind of chain they're trying to be, what kind of network they're trying to be is a factor in drawing in new developers. Yeah, absolutely. I think for Cosmos and for Pocodot, a lot of projects are launching to be interoperable with other projects that are in that ecosystem. Actually, same with Ethereum as well. I think this year we looked at developers in terms of primary
Starting point is 00:14:36 developers and also cross-chain developers. And that was specifically really for the EPM compatible chain. So this would be Ethereum virtual machine compatible chains where you can actually take the code that you have on Ethereum existing solidity code and be able to deploy that on another chain and have that be able to work very well. And so you do see that ecosystems that are are EVM-compatible have a lot of traction as well because of the ease with which developers can switch over and can start deploying code. And a lot of these EVM-compatible chains also you see start bootstrapping where they have a lot of cross-chain developers in the beginning, but then eventually have their own primary
Starting point is 00:15:21 developers overtake that. And so that's one of the things that we've seen this year as well. And so one other chain I want to call out from that top five is, Salana, because as far as I'm aware, at least not that long ago, a significant portion of its ecosystem did work in closed source. And so I wondered if you thought maybe that ecosystem in particular maybe was slightly more undercounted than some of the others? Or do you feel that that's just the case for all of them? That's going to be the case for Salana, for Avalanche, for Tara, really for a lot of this layer one ecosystems for flow especially as well,
Starting point is 00:16:04 there's going to be a lot of close source development happening on these chains that are not reflected in these numbers. I think overall, though, looking at open source development is a very good way to seeing where the trend lines are happening. And of course, a lot of very important projects are open source and have huge communities contributing to them as well. So now let's talk about that next tier below the top five. I noticed here we've got some popular chains, but yeah, maybe not obviously amongst that top tier. The ones I've noticed here are near, which I think is a former sponsor of my show, Cardano, Binance Smart Chain, Polygon, and Kusama.
Starting point is 00:16:49 What takeaways do you see kind of in that segment of those ecosystems? Yeah, I think one of the really interesting things that you see there is for a lot of these layer one ecosystems that are really breaking out and gaining a lot of growth, that it took them a long time to develop that growth. And it was really a slow and steady effort. So if you look at across, you know, really across all of these, right, across Avalanche, Tara and Flow and Near, Polygon and Agrand, Cardano, Tezos, ICP, fans. Phantom, stacks, a lot of them took, I'm just glancing at this chart over here, they took, you know, close to two years or sometimes more than two years to attract more than 100 developers into their ecosystem. And so what we're seeing is really that slow and steady development that's been happening, you know, in prior years in 2018 and 2019 and in 2020, really paying off as more people are joining these communities today. And so earlier when you were talking about how some chains are growing faster than Ethereum was at a similar stage in its life, what do you think is the significance of that?
Starting point is 00:18:03 Well, I think there's two things that are very significant here. One is that it really does, again, speak to how remarkable Ethereum is. Because when you think about Ethereum, you know, five years back, the whole, the entire size of the crypto industry and the number of developers we had, We're just much, much smaller than what we have today. Of course, on the flip side, there are fewer choices for developers and fewer places they could go. But that being said, the fact that Ethereum was able to command so many developers early on is really incredible. And of course, now we are seeing the chains that have more at least full-time developers than Ethereum at the same point in time include Pocod and Finance Smart Chain, Solana, NIR, Avalanche, and Terra. And so these chains, A, are just showing remarkable growth than B, are also operating
Starting point is 00:18:58 in a much larger developer ecosystem than Ethereum had at that same point in time as well. And so, you know, I think not to discount their growth because not every chain is exceeding in that way, but definitely it really speaks to how far we've come, I think, as a whole crypto community or as a Web3 community to see the number of developers that are joining and how quickly people are joining today. And so one other segment you looked at was defy developer activity. What are you seeing there? Yeah. So defy grew quite a bit predictably. Right now there's about 2.5,000, so 2,500 developers, monthly active developers in DFI, and about 500 new developers contribute to a project in DFI every single month. So extremely healthy development there as well. And so one thing that you kind of
Starting point is 00:20:00 had a little notice about in your report was that you did not assess NFTs, gaming, or DOWs. Why not? Yeah, yeah, that's a really important point to touch on. And part of it is because if you look at an NFT collection, you know, a lot of it is deploying a contract and that's really most of the code. And so the amount of code that's written is is sometimes very minimal. For something like gaming, a lot of the code is actually going to be close source because the gaming mechanics themselves, you know, may not actually be crypto-related, but the economics within the game maybe. And so in a lot of these cases,
Starting point is 00:20:47 developer activity may not actually be the right lens through which to look at growth and to look at traction in these ecosystems. And so one of the things that we're really excited about is gathering community signals and really thinking of kind of novel ways that we can measure the traction and the progress of the community growth
Starting point is 00:21:09 for DFI and NFI and NACs. or for NFTs for gaming and for DAOs. And so that's another report that we're hoping to publish later in 2022. And so will that be looking at things like social media? Is that what you mean by community or like the Discord? Yeah, I think Discord will be a huge part of it. But if you think about, you know, for example, anecdotally, the growth of 4-Day Biot Club or any of these NFT collections
Starting point is 00:21:37 where seemingly overnight you can have 30,000 people, people, 50,000 people, you know, in a Discord chat together, that's a really remarkable statement that you can make around the community and how fast that it grows. And so there are some questions there around, you know, exactly how fast is that growth, right? How long does it take for them to attain those kinds of numbers? It could be something like how many messages are being sent per day, what are people talking about. I think the kind of amazing thing with Web 3 is so much of this data is out here in the open. And we're looking at an industry that has almost, has more than $2 trillion in network value at this point. And a lot of it is open source. A lot of it is communities
Starting point is 00:22:26 that are building together out in the open, you know, on Discord, making governance decisions together. And so all of those signals are things that we want to look at to, to better represent NFTs and gaming than just looking at developer data. In general, across all of crypto, defy, NFTs, gaming, et cetera, et cetera, what trends or ecosystems or developer activity or whatever metrics it is that you are interested in? What will you be watching for this coming year? Yeah, I think the really interesting data point that we started looking at this year is around retention. It's really great when these new developers join, but there's also a question of how long
Starting point is 00:23:11 they stay and how sticky they are and whether they are going to stay through these different market cycles that we're likely going to see. And again, for an ecosystem like Ethereum, you see full-time developers with more than 30% retention, even three years in, which is really, really remarkable. And so how does that look across different layer ones that are seeing a lot of growth right now when the market is doing really well and what kind of retention numbers are we going to see going forward? I think that's definitely one thing that's interesting to look at. And I think community is really going to increasingly become an important metric as well. you know, one of the dreams of Web3 is that everything can be more democratic and can be community
Starting point is 00:24:01 owned with more transparent decisions and more transparent building. And so, you know, that's almost baked, the community aspect is baked into the DNA of Web 3. And so to make data and metrics around that, to measure how healthy that is, to measure how distributed things may be. So, you know, geographically, how distributed are you? How distributed is your community? How distributed are your voting decisions. I think all of these are really interesting metrics that we're going to take a look at next. Perfect. All right. Well, where can people learn more about you and your work? Well, I am on Twitter at Maria Shen, and the developer report can be found either there are, of course, you should take a look at electriccapital.com. For anyone who wants to reach
Starting point is 00:24:52 out to us directly. You can email info, I-N-F-O at electriccapital.com, and everyone on the team. We'll be able to see that and answer all your questions. Great. Thanks so much for coming on Unchained. Of course. Thank you so much for having me. Don't forget. Next up is the weekly news recap. Thanks for tuning in to this week's news recap. Bet mode activated. The scorebed app here with trusted stats and real-time sports news. Yeah, hey, who should I take in the Boston game? Well, statistically speaking.
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Starting point is 00:25:41 19 plus, Ontario only. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or the gambling of someone close to you, please go to conixontario.ca. Bitcoin dropped to 42K. Here are two reasons why. Bitcoin filled by roughly 10% on Wednesday, dropping from a high of just over $47,000 to below $42,500, before settling in around the mid-43,000s for the rest of the week.
Starting point is 00:26:07 The crash led to $322.82.86 million in Bitcoin liquidations between Wednesday and Thursday afternoon, the largest such liquidation event by over $100 million since December 3rd, when over $615 million was washed away in 24 hours. The slump coincided with two negative events for Bitcoin. First, the network's hash rate, or the amount of computing power securing it, took a hit on Wednesday when Kazakhstan shut down Internet access across the country, due to unrest over spiking energy prices.
Starting point is 00:26:43 According to Cambridge Center for Ultramers, turn into finance, as of July 2021, Kazakhstan accounted for roughly 18.1% of mining power in the world. With the internet off, in Kazakhstan, data compiled by the bloc's Larry Sermak shows that Bitcoin's hash rate fell approximately 12% after Kazakhstan's internet went down. Data from BTC.com shows similar results, with major pools like F2 pool, antpull, and via BTC, each losing hash rate between 12 to 19%. As of recording time, it remains unclear when or if Kazakhstan's internet access will return. The second negative event for Bitcoin was that on January 4th, Bitcoin's dominance, a statistic that tracks Bitcoin's market share compared to the entire crypto industry,
Starting point is 00:27:35 reached 39.3%, marking just a three percentage point difference between the all-time low of BTC dominance, that occurred back in early 2018. With Bitcoin's latest dip, Ethereum is roughly 50% away from flippinging BTC as the largest crypto asset on the market. Despite the bearish outlook for Bitcoin in terms of liquidations, hash rate and dominance,
Starting point is 00:28:00 not every headline was negative. A recent Goldman Sachs client note, dated January 4th, expressed optimism for the largest cryptocurrency and cited the possibility that Bitcoin could hit $100,000 if it were to command a healthy percentage of the store of value market. The Goldman Sachs note comes just after the firm reported that BTC was among the best-performing assets of 2021.
Starting point is 00:28:25 Speaking of Bitcoin, the block reports that a congressional subcommittee is preparing a hearing on Bitcoin's environmental impact. The block cites three sources with knowledge of the matter, who say that the oversight and investigation subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee is starting to build a group of witnesses to speak on the energy usage of proof-of-work crypto-validation. Crypto-crime hit an all-time high in 2021. According to Chainalysis, a leading blockchain analytics firm, cryptocrime spiked to an all-time high of $14 billion in 2021. This is a 79% increase upon 2020,
Starting point is 00:29:04 when only $7.8 billion worth of transactions were deemed illicit. However, as Chain Alasis is careful to point out, an all-time high in crime value is a bit of a misnomer. Crucially, chain analysis reports that total cryptocurrency transaction volume grew by 567% in the last year, while illicit transactions only grew by 79%. This discrepancy in growth led to an all-time low of 0.15% of all cryptocurrency transactions deemed illicit. In years past, this number has been between 0.62 and 3.3.3%. 37%. The CFTC brings enforcement action against Polymarket. On January 3rd, the Commodities Futures
Starting point is 00:29:48 Trading Commission announced a settlement with Polymarket, a DFI predictions protocol, and disclosure, a previous sponsor of my shows, and ordered them to pay a $1.4 million penalty. Polymarket is a predictions market built on Polygon that allows users to bet yes or no on certain events via smart contracts using USC. According to the CFTC, Polymarket has run over 900 such events since its inception, including markets on whether Donald Trump would be elected president in 2020, or whether ETH would be over $2,500 by July 2021. In its order, the CFTC said that Polymarket offered, quote, off-exchange event-based binary options
Starting point is 00:30:32 contracts while failing to obtain designation as a designated contract market or DCM, or registration as a swap execution facility. In addition to the fine, Polymarket will also begin to wind down non-compliant operations by late January. Collins Belton, founding partner at Brookwood PC, called the CFTC order the most relevant and telling regulatory actions for DFI founders and investors yet. Belton says the order is significant because it highlights the importance of having a decentralized front end. Wrote Belton, CFTC highlights how Polymarket users, are functionally entirely dependent on their front end to access the smart contracts, despite non-custodial wallets. He added, if your front end is the only means of accessing your
Starting point is 00:31:20 platform, regulators have a strong incentive to bring you under their regulatory ambit. OpenC is worth more than a quarter of eBay. OpenC, the largest NFT marketplace by volume, by a factor of 3.7, announced a C-funding round of $300 million valuing the company at $13.3 billion. KOTU and Paradigm led the latest round. The announcement comes roughly six months after OpenC's Series B, which valued the company at $1.5 billion, meaning OpenC's value increased nine times in less than a year. In addition, OpenC is in talks to acquire Dharma, a digital wallet provider and an all-stock
Starting point is 00:32:02 deal worth between 110 million and 130 million, according to Axios. OpenC's busy week comes as the marketplaces sales are booming. For example, daily NFT sales volume across all NFT marketplaces crossed $200 million, only 10 times in history. Data from Richard Chen's June analytics page shows that OpenC breached $200 million four times in a row this week. Speaking of NFT sales, the Board Apeaat Club project had an incredibly noteworthy week. Data from CryptoSlam, an NFT data provider that raised $9.million this week in a seed round backed by Mark Cuban and Anamoka, shows that this week, the Board Ape Yacht Club became the fourth NFT collection to generate $1 billion in sales. Even more impressively, Board Ape Yacht Club and
Starting point is 00:32:57 Mutant Ape Yacht Club, a derivative of the Board Ape Collection, accounted for roughly 20% of all NFT sales over the past seven days. while no other project even crossed 6%. The massive spike in B-A-Y-C NFTs occurred during a week when the N-FT project generated a number of headlines. For example, the rapper Eminem became a B-Ape Holder or Hodler, a rare serum, which essentially acts as an upgrade for a B-A-Y-C-N-FT, sold for $5.8 million in ETH.
Starting point is 00:33:32 And lastly, $1.9 million worth of BORAPE NFTs were frozen on open sea, after an owner had his private keys stolen, which garnered quite a few memes on Twitter. 30 institutions asked permission to enter the defy space. On Wednesday, 30 institutions, including coin shares, Celsius, and Wintermute were granted access to AVE Arc, a permission to deployment of Avey 2. Avey Arc was first announced back in June of 2021 by AVE founder Stani Kulachav. Avey ARC allows institutional players to join the crypto fray, where yields range from 0.01% to 8.66% annual percentage yield on digital asset deposits, a far cry from the yield found in the traditional financial world. Defi represents a powerful wave of financial innovation, including transparency,
Starting point is 00:34:27 liquidity, and programmability, and it's been inaccessible to traditional financial institutions were far too long, said Stony Kulachov, founder and CEO of AVE. The launch of AVE-Arc allows these institutions to participate in Defi in a compliant way for the very first time. Each Avey Arc participant must be whitelisted by Fireblocks, a New York-based crypto-custodian, which will require entities to undergo rigorous customer identification processes that will be run per FADF guidelines or Financial Action Task Force Guidelines. Fireblocks was approved by the community in November and is the only entity that can whitelist new entities for entry into AVE Arc. More of white-listers should be coming as evidenced by Siba, a Swiss bank,
Starting point is 00:35:13 recently proposing itself for a whitelister role via Avey's governance forum. Speaking of AVE, founder Stani Kulachov said the DeFi Protocol is developing a mobile wallet. Samsung has entered the Metaverse. Samsung Electronics announced on Sunday that its latest iteration of TV, would offer customers direct integration with NFTs, where users can discover, purchase, and trade digital art through the micro-l-D, Neo-Q-L-D, and the frame TVs. On Thursday, Samsung took an even larger step into the world of Web3.
Starting point is 00:35:50 The electronics company announced that it is opening, a flagship store called 837X in DeCentraland. Time for fun, vits. Links now wants to buy. a golf course. Linksdao successfully sold out a collection of NFTs this week, raising $10.5 million for the express purpose of buying a golf course. Much like Constitution Dow launched its governance token, a Link's Dow token, dubbed Links, is soon to come, according to Mike Judas, a founder of the block and Link's Dow project lead. The NFT sales saw two tiers of NFTs sold, Leisure Membership
Starting point is 00:36:28 and Global Membership. Leisure Membership to NFT left whole. with perks like the right to purchase the membership at the first physical links Dow Club, discounts on T-Times, and Discord access. Global memberships received all the same benefits, plus the right to an extra membership and extra governance rights. Thanks so much for joining us today. To learn more about Maria, Electric Capital, and their developer report, check out of the show notes for this episode.
Starting point is 00:36:56 Unchained is produced by me, Laura Shin, with help from Anthony Yoon, Daniel Ness, Mark Murdoch and Shashank Van Kot. Thanks for listening.

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