Web3 weekly: Facebook NFTs, digital identity and web3 phones

Transcript

what's up friends welcome to web3 academy a place for entrepreneurs creators and marketers to explore and learn how to use web 3 to transform business models and create thriving communities enjoy this next episode gm gm what's up web three doers it is web 3 academy and the weekly roll up i'm jay bird coming at you from whistler canada this week and as always i'm joined by my co-host kai what's up kai what's going on friends jaybird i like that we got the jaybird nickname going on today all right we got a jam jam-packed i mean

every week is jam-packed i don't know i should stop saying it's jam-packed because i sound redundant but web 3 is building things are happening they are shipping launches are happening lots going on uh we've got a bunch of news around um facebook meta nfts uh a little bit of news around what's going on with uh celsius and voyager uh some not so great news there but uh i think on the whole good things are happening as we push towards a safer space uh lots happening in nfts we're going to dive into uh some various use cases in where we think nfts are going in the future we're going to talk about phones phones

and phones because everybody's building a phone right now and we're also going to talk about identity and some things happening in that space we're going to talk about a couple of exciting launches and new projects uh some new dows and some new uh some other new projects in the space we're gonna wrap up with what's going on with the ones and twos the blockchains and then we've got our web3 person of the week to finish the episode today it's going to be a good one it's going to be a banger before we start let's share some gratitude kai how you doing man what are you grateful for today

oh i am uh i am grateful for um for long time friends i have a group of friends that i have uh have known since grade two and we are still really close today which i don't think many people can say and whenever i come back to canada it's um it's just it's amazing to come back and see them and we go out and we act like we're in high school again and it's a great time and it's so much fun and um i got to see them over the weekend uh in addition to seeing my boy jay bird on the weekend as well so uh yeah it was it was really cool to be to be back home and and to just to see so many people again nice i love it what about you

i'm grateful for antihistamines my allergies have been savage recently and i i am blown away by the effectiveness of antihistamines uh i'm not not that i'm marketing for claritin but i take a claritin pill and i can go from rubbing my eyes out and sneezing like non-stop to being able to survive and live my day so that's the funniest gratitude ever i love it all right uh kai what's what's the web 3 word of the week the word of the week has to be identity

um it's just i feel like it's all we hear it's all we talk about um we just had evan um on the podcast this week from disco and we talked about this whole new world of identity uh if you have not seen that podcast uh or listen to that podcast go check it out it's um basically we always talk about identity and credentials and how these are going to be non-transferable nfts are sold out of teas and she makes the case that that's not how we're going to do it and we're actually going to do it all off chain and i was mind blown i think jay was mind-blown we were we were disco-pilled from this um she's also just she's crazy smart so check out that that um that episode uh and speaking of credentials uh

we have a credential for you as well um so we launched the web three rabbit hole course last week um this is a free course it's about an hour and a half long basically teaching you the foundational components of web3 so that you can build you can create you can invest you can use this space you can do it confidently and understand what's going on um and what's going to be around in the future and kind of where this is all going um and so it's free and at the end you get to um mint your own proof of completion nft on the polygon network which is super cool um so yeah if you want to play around with uh with credentials there's a great way to practice and do it and learn while you are so um yeah identity is our is our web 3 word of the week and we'll get

more into identity throughout this show as well all right well let's uh let's jump in the news i want to talk more about identity but let's let's get into the news otherwise we'll spend 30 minutes talking about identity well i think the biggest news of the week uh is facebook has announced that they are launching nfts um honestly it's not that big of a deal to be completely completely honest it's the exact same thing as what they're doing with instagram but they're now also going to be testing it on on facebook all it means basically is um a select group of people which i think is very small at the moment can basically do a post and show off one of their nfts and it it basically has some um some shine to it

and they can click on it see who created it who owns it um and that kind of thing so basically it's facebook and instagram are reading the blockchain which is super cool they're doing this on both ethereum and polygon uh we talked about this thing last month or whatever whenever they announced with instagram but now they're moving on to facebook so i don't know if that means good things are happening over on instagram or if it just means like they were already doing it and they just need to launch this as well uh but either way cool i like it i want to see big tech in here and and i think it's a big deal because two reasons why i think it's a big deal one is facebook is the largest social media platform in the world over two billion users so you're talking about a huge

reach i don't necessarily think that most people are gonna see this uh like most people won't even notice this but the fact that facebook is playing and experimenting in the sandbox is setting them up to be a big player in the space and i think the other thing that's really notable here is we keep talking about facebook and instagram what they're doing we're not talking much about what apple is doing in web3 we're not talking much about what google is doing in web3 uh you know netflix we're not talking about what they're doing web3 because we don't i mean whether they are they aren't we don't know so you know i think it there's there's definitely something going on over facebook that they're leaning heavily in and you know and when they decide to when they decide to flip

that switch whatever it is like right now they're playing like you said playing the sandbox when they decide to do it holy [ __ ] hold on to your seats kids it's gonna be wild like you said two billion people oh man now there is some some danger around this though uh as facebook launches their their nfts and and launches their way into the space they're going to do it their way they're not going to do it the web three-way because they're a centralized company uh that's aiming to get profits and protect themselves so one of our friends actually one of our good friends uh jeff kaufman over at jump had a great take on

what the way facebook is setting this up and and this is important to know kyle let you you you take this one what is what was he sharing about their setup of this yeah so jeff was just looking at the terms and service he was actually reading the terms of service which good on you jeff i love that you do that uh and so here's what it says so given that a digital collectible this is what they call nfts at instagram uh is associated with an nft that has been minted on a blockchain once committed to the blockchain such nft is not designed to be edited or changed and then in brackets although we make no guarantees or warranties as to the foregoing so basically it's just kind of saying like and i don't really know how they could change anything because like it says it

is on the blockchain so they to be clear they can't do anything with that what they can do is change how that looks or interacts or whatever they build on top of that inside of their app they could do something with like maybe people can start following i don't know that nft or something right like maybe they create groups around it or whatever they could rug that at any time and the point that jeff makes i think if you go to the next um the next picture here um what he's talking about is back in i think it was 2011 or something like that um when facebook pages was a thing everything you posted on facebook pages used to be like it would show to everyone and so people were building businesses off of facebook pages it was amazing and then all of a sudden one day

facebook decided to change the game and they made it where 30 of your content was actually shown to anyone unless you paid for ads to get that content out there so they basically just rugged everyone who had a business who was doing anything on facebook pages and what jeff is saying is like look this is all cool what they're doing um but inside of their terms and services um both on like what they're allowed to do and then on the data side is what he has up here he's like they can change things at any point if they want to because again they are a centralized company this is not like using lens protocol or something where everything is on chain they're just reading the blockchain and then showing it in their own app but they control whatever is shown or whatever interactions happen with that nft specifically in facebook

because yes you can buy and trade and sell things like on the blockchain itself and there's no one that can control that but if facebook decided to make a like feature for an nft or a comment feature or a follow feature or whatever like they could change things with that and so he's just making sure that people are aware like this is cool and they're doing ninja collectibles we love it but just be careful we don't know what will happen with it and they do still have all the power now they can't take your nft or anything like that so like you still have your ownership um it's just the experience could change that's the main thing that's the key takeaway shout out to everyone who reads terms and conditions because we need more of you on twitter breaking this stuff down for us thanks

jeff also another another news from meta facebook meta has announced that they will shut down their wallet that they were building called novi uh as of september 1st uh so interesting to see that they're shutting that down not exactly sure they didn't release any information as to why they are shutting it down one uh hypothesis that i saw was that um the the head of novi has now gone to um a startup that's focused on extending bitcoin uh utility so uh which we won't get into the conversation of whether

bitcoin utility should be extended um i know kyle is sitting there ready to jump on that um but but one hypothesis is that with meta's push into nfts and they're so focused on ethereum and polygon as their blockchain for this push that maybe their entire wallet strategy has shifted uh and they're no longer focused on trying to build a cryptocurrency wallet that they're more focused on this nft marketplace and being part of the nft space so uh yeah interesting news and we'll see we'll see where that goes but it's funny meta had the token that they were going to build libra i guess and they shut that down last year and now they have the wallet i'm very surprised at shutting down the wall to me i mean we

talk about all the time while it's like the most important infrastructure of the space um so you know what i wonder if maybe they're gonna buy a wallet there's no way they don't go the route of a wallet like if they have two billion users all they need to do is like give a wallet to the ball and boom right you now have control over not control but you now have all the data and stuff over like two billion people using the future of the internet like how could they not go with this i wonder if they buy one maybe they buy metamask start rumors see what they do but they're i mean what's cool though is they're like you said they're experimenting right they were trying to build their own token they try to build their own wallet they're now like reading the the

blockchain they're doing things um so that's cool i like it yeah that's the i think that's the the big thing that and we we had a conversation earlier this week for an upcoming podcast uh with uh grant from one of the founders of gm and that was one of the biggest things he said was he was like your road map changes constantly he's like you just gotta build and keep trying and experimenting and not be afraid to be wrong because you will be wrong and what you thought two months ago will be different one honda okay so we got some news out of europe so with some regulation so uh we always talk about the u.s regulation and kind of where that's going and that's just as slow as can be and i'm sure europe is is very similar

but we do have some news coming out of europe now um and so after two to three years of discussion um they have what's called is it mika m-i-c-a what does it stand for i don't even know what that stands for i don't know um capital m lowercase i capital c capital a what is that uh anyway whatever it is some governing body in the european government etc um basically has some regulators and what they're trying to do here is um trying to regulate issuers and service providers so like exchanges and things of crypto assets and then it also introduces rules against market abuse and so its main goal is to harmonize the eu market so to get standards across all of europe which makes sense create regulatory certainty which is

amazing for companies trying to build in space improve consumer protection and prevent fraud and strengthen financial stability this is basically the same thing that the u.s came out with in their was it earlier this year i forget what it was called but what they're trying to do as well so um to be clear what they're really doing here is they are regulating the centralized companies which honestly this is needed the centralized companies that are building on top of crypto not crypto assets themselves so all of this has to do with exchanges has to do with things like circle which would be like you know um the the company that has usdc and now the us uh or not us or what did you call it your your your rock your rock yeah

the euro coin um so basically any centralized company that is holding on to assets or doing things and facilitating the use of of crypto assets that's what they're trying to regulate they have no regulation on nfts they have no regulation on defy truly decentralized d5 protocols is how they call it it's not in their scope though they look to potentially have some regulation on that uh by 2023 same with potentially nfts by 2023. um good luck i don't know what they're going to do that's going to be a tough one to figure out one of the big things that came out of this is the proof-of-work ban that europa that europe had been talking about for the longest time that's off the table that's no longer going to be a thing um so that is really

good news for the bitcoin world um what else did we have nfts were exempt uh and there's a few other things oh stable coins is the big one so stable coins um basically what they're doing here is that issues issuers of stable coins um need to have an eu presence so i think that's just they want to get some taxes maybe and they want to get the businesses in there they need to have reserve protected in case of insolvency uh they need to um what's the other one there's caps on how much they can issue on like a daily basis uh which is kind of weird but sure and then there's no exemptions for algostable coins so although stable coins need to be protected with reserves

it cannot be based off of an algorithm which um i fully support at least right now i don't know like maybe algorithm algorithms become a thing in the future i i don't really understand how uh but so that's good and then they just have some other stuff that we're not gonna get into on like aml kyc all that kind of stuff all they're doing is is basically just making sure that centralized companies have their ducks in order so we don't have things that happen like celsius voyager which we're going to get into soon maybe next i don't know but good job and actually so everyone who's i've seen comment on this is like this is actually really good this is going to push the industry forward this is going to allow big companies to start building in the space because they have some certainty now it doesn't answer everything but it

answers a lot and um and that's that's good we want this we want more of that to be honest yeah great regulation headed in a good direction for all of us and the reason it's headed to give directions because we need it because celsius has cut 150 jobs amid their restructuring so we we have some we've caught some failings happening and the reason we have failing is because there's people that are running these companies that you know quite frankly we think they know what they're doing but they don't right and they're not taking the time and the care to do this the right way and at the same time yeah we have voyager which um which has filed for bankruptcy so you have celsius

which did not go bankruptcy but they're pretty much bankrupt uh they've actually just paid off i think it was this morning they paid off their um they had a loan out in maker dial for like i don't even know hundreds of millions of dollars of wrapped bitcoin which everyone was afraid if that got um liquidated like that would really take the markets they had been paying that off paying that off and it's fully paid off now so that's all free and that bitcoins theirs now and in their hands which is is good for um for the industry i think so celsius can they survive i have no idea what their liquidity is and how much they have i don't think anyone will trust them again i'm sure that the moment they they still have withdrawals closed so anyone once they open that up like who's

not going to move their money off of off of celsius so i don't see a future for celsius but let's see voyager is another one they're similar to celsius where they do lending and things like that they're also an exchange and they have their own token um they filed for bankruptcy so they're out they almost got bought by ftx but i think uh they just couldn't even salvage it um the reason wh what actually happened with a lot of these so one was they were like they were over leveraged in d5 a lot of these companies celsius whatever the other big thing that happened here there was three arrows capital which is a trading firm um the biggest in the space in crypto and everyone thought these guys were the legends of suzu and kyle davies like these guys were like

man they were everyone thought they were so smart they kind of ran the markets and so what happened was all these big centralized companies lended them a [ __ ] ton of money so voyager lended them 650 million dollars to just go and like make like basically the idea is give them 650 million 3ac goes and trades it and makes money with it and then um voyager can skim off the top to make profits and then also use that to pay the um the the yield that they're giving to their clients so um celsius did this with your ac voyager it was like a ton of companies in the space and um in 3ac lost it all so they couldn't pay back any of these loans and basically just

yeah seriously is kind of the reason that most of this happened um so voyager out three rows capital out celsius hanging on for dear life but had to let go of 150 people um let's go to the to the next one there um unless you got something you want to add yeah i just i think the the the obvious thing to add is if if somebody is offering you yields that seem too good to be true they probably are too good to be true right right and honestly it's like do you really need a five percent or a six percent or a ten percent yield on an asset that like goes up 200 per year on average like [ __ ]

how greedy are we but anyway hayden adams who's the uh the founder of uniswap he um put out a nice take today or the other day on twitter she says tldr of crypto this past month um check mark green check mark transparent automated real d5 protocols function flawlessly and we're highly effective at protecting users and then the the red x opaque human operated centralized platforms gambled with users funds and lost it all hurting their users it's basically the exact wrap-up of what's happened here um and yeah it's crazy what's happening but i think it seems as though we are getting through it all and um i think the worst has happened in terms of the liquidations and that stuff but i mean

maybe someone else implodes but let's move on to nfts because i think that's a happier space what do you think jay i think so too let's start next week with nfts it's much much much better news uh well i hate the news like to be honest i'm at home about my parents right now and they watch the six o'clock news every single day and every time i come upstairs afternoon work and go up there and it's just like negative news just talking about all the bad things happening like guys turn this [ __ ] off but i guess we do it but our news isn't so bad it's very different but that that's that's that's what sells right you know the controversy and the conflict that's what sells uh the the

the building stuff isn't as exciting except for the doers on web3 academy podcast and if you're listening health tip for this podcast episode i think we gave one last episode as well is to consume positive and optimistic uh uh information on a daily basis especially in the morning the first thing you can do is don't turn on the news or open up your social media instead read a self development book or something good uh and that'll get you a nice mindset to start the day it's gonna be a new thing health tips i like that i like that let's let's make that a thing okay we got a great thread here from cantino dot eth one of the founders of consumer packaged goods uh nft project which is great ift project uh developing a great community

in the space and basically he has created this threat of where do nfts go from here and we're just going to walk through this thread because there's so many great points and i think a lot of us need to understand more about the use cases for nfts so to date the value of nfts has been expressed primarily in speculative short-term gains the resulting collapse of the market and its dependencies on milking ip through derivatives and airdrops is not shocking but what comes next is more inspired and creative than anything we have seen so first tokenized hobbyism every past time from cooking to sports to wellness to woodworking will

establish high-value tokenized networks the token value will not be derived by how much one can flip it for airdrops for staking but through engagement learning and networking like i think this is an obvious one we all we all value communities where we can find people that love the same thing as us can give us feedback can talk about the same thing can curate we all really appreciate curation uh so tokenized hobbyism makes a lot of sense being able to access tokenized communities where you can share with people that love the same thing as you right professionalized networks uh kind of similar but just a different type of community but you can pay member dues to join your local chapter

of builders or you can buy nfts granting access to seminars and 24 7 global chats with people exploring web3 and then of course the benefit here is because of course you can do this in web 2 world signing up for a subscription or whatever but in this world is you own your membership right um so tokenized networks will be key to building in a bear market i think there's just so much utility that happens around something because it can be used as your means to buy and unlock something but it's also owned and you can use it to program other things and give access here and you can just do so many more things with it minimum viable communities many projects forged promising utility but struggled to create sustainable models

rather than call it quits they will decentralize minimizing expenditure and passing off operations to contributors in an effort to create minimum viable communities i think this is a natural one that's going to happen because a lot of projects made a lot of money had a road map and had no idea how to execute on it but you still have a community right you still have nft holders a lot of these communities are still pretty excited and active so it'll be interesting to see where where they take that yeah that is interesting what happens when a product fails or something fails but people still own those nfts which are still um scarce right and still have a community around it it's like they can go create a new product or

or they can do an m a right they can merge an acquisition as nfc project funding and resources dry up whether due to crypto winter mismanagement or failure to compete communities will strategically unite to pool capital access and tooling to combine resources and member benefits from profile picture mergers to holding dows i mean we already saw this with you labs buying crypto punks um i'm sure this is going to be the norm and what's crazy is like it's so much easier to do mergers and acquisitions in web 3 because it's just all through tokens and nfcs uh than in the web 2 world where you got to go through a million different legal infrastructures and whatever so you can have them just flying around just buying up whatever and selling whatever yeah it can be crazy

retail retailers from 7-eleven to gamestop will use nfts to incentivize in real life transactions leveraging creators to drive traffic to storefronts for example easy nfts that airdrop with purchases from gap stores or nfts that unlock exclusive features for tesla vehicles i think this one's fairly fairly straightforward i'm not even going to expand on it but there's a ton that you can do with the crossover and i think we're talking a lot about how do you cross over digital products to in real life products and there's retail is a big part of that for nfts research and development so brands and creators will exchange nfts for insights on product development pain points marketing claims road maps and more the

nfts will unlock early access to product releases and potential profit sharing brands will track and maintain these key relationships this is what adidas did right they dropped a bunch of nfts for anyone who came to their first event in the metaverse uh and then as a result they got a bunch of bonuses with other nfts and things like that um yeah why would you not do that you create kind of a a footprint on the blockchain with your with your top users and then you can reward them and and do different things with them so cool unlock with nfts there i particularly like this one because i like giving feedback to products that i enjoy right i think we all we all have those moments you know you uh you buy a new like suitcase and you're like oh man wouldn't it be cool

if there was a pocket for my sunglasses here right like or a pocket for this you know and you want to give that feedback and incentivizing the users to give that feedback makes huge sense and it develops super fans who are capable to elevate your products so yeah huge potential loyalty exchanges as brands and creators seek to reinforce loyalty community behavior will be rewarded with nfts did the member contribute content nft complete surveys nft make a purchase nft tokens are more liquid and brag worthy than traditional discount codes i mean

as you get as you get loyalty right you can use nfts for for rewarding loyalty and the great thing about that is you can then that's liquid you can sell it right so right now if you the typical loyalty is you get points and then you turn those points into some sort of reward but as we've seen those points can expire the point company can actually shut them down they can rug you from those points and a lot of people don't want the rewards that they're offering right i often find when you have points like the rewards are useless to you so having an nft has more liquid value which is yeah exciting you know it's funny as we go through all

these you could do nfcs you could also do your typical erc20 like your your social token as well with these right you can go either way with them and i think both have have great utility depending on just how you want to how you want things to work multiplayer what's this one nfts will create hive activity by incentivizing group behavior uh mmorpgs this is a gaming term multi multi something role player games yeah right right that unlock levels once 10k users have ape-in airdrops of rare nfts to collector cohorts that have signed contracts to merge their base layer nfts collecting is going to become a team sport right so

collecting obviously we love collecting humans that's the thing we've always done uh now you can do it digitally and you can gamify it inside of games right so having them collect certain i mean we already do gamify collecting all the time um pokemon for example and now you can do it in games you can do digitally you can a business can do it easily um so super cool content submission users will submit content like short form videos reviews and tutorials in exchange for loyalty nfts it's a marketing flywheel rights can be programmed into contracts so that the use of the contributors content in advertising could yield future profits this one's amazing uh we we've talked about this at web3 academy we've had a few people contribute articles uh that

we have then produced on our newsletter and filmed podcasts over top and we want to reward those people so we're trying to figure out how to do that currently and we're looking into actually using uh toke a token rather than an nft in this case but the point here is it is it's a marketing flywheel when you can reward your users for submitting content and let's be honest users user-generated content is often the best content it's so authentic it's so real you know most advertising companies out there actually make user-generated content so that it looks like a user made it but it was just made by an advertising company and then you tack on top the ability to program into the contract that if that

if like i made that content and then nike uses that content in an ad in the future that i get future profit from that that's that's huge everybody becomes a freelancer contributor i feel like in web 3 world right because you can just start getting yields and rewards and whatever from everything you do it's crazy services nfts will unlock access to services and hobbyist communities q and a's and tutorials with influencer chefs photographers doctors and niche enthusiastic communities will boom this will also extend into in real life services like transportation hotels and spas i mean you can do anything with entities right it's just it's just digital ownership that is programmable and you can i mean i went to a um a restaurant in colombia and the only way

you could get into this restaurant was by scanning a code like look at this like scanner and you had to have an nft in your wallet and i was like oh that's crazy it automatically opened the door and i could just go in i was like whoa this is cool um so yeah you can program anything in these things all right tell me where we got here jay he was gonna say maybe we should skip some of these uh and they're so easy there's so many holy [ __ ] okay we're gonna check it out there's a bunch boring platforms collateralization that's cool oh this one's cool let's read this last one let's finish up all right okay borrowing platforms and there's been a lot of talk around boring platforms on the nft side we talked about nftx a couple weeks ago i think and there's

some other boring platforms coming up but so because nfts can unlock temporary access just like kyle said you need nft to access a restaurant or to access a conference v-con you needed the um the friends nft to access the you get air drop the vcon ticket so there's going to be a market for short-term lending right so for example um cantino here gives an example of where he has personally lent his fwb his friends with benefit token so that his friends can attend a local event so you can imagine a marketplace for this where you you don't want to sell your nft but there's some event happening in la you don't live in la

well i can loan access to my nft to somebody in order to attend that event so you can really see the potential potential there of uh of lending basically boring and lending nfts oh that's interesting that's actually super cool super cool yeah okay let's continue along with the nfts we'll put the link to that continue thread in the show notes uh so ethereum scalar arbitron had to hit pause on their nft campaign their odyssey campaign so they released this campaign which was a super cool we talked about a few weeks in the podcast super cool marketing campaign whereby essentially they would reward you with nfts and

tokens for participating in using arbitron and using other protocols thank you uh so they would reward you with nfts for using the protocol for bridging your assets uh which was a great idea you know you encourage people to use um use your protocol and play with it and then you reward them with nfts the problem is it actually really worked it was so effective that they brought so much traffic onto arbitram that one day i saw this great photo here on one day arbitrary gas fees actually were

higher than ethereum gas fees now arbor trump is a lair two people so their entire mission is low gas fees or no gas fees as a way to exist so obviously when this started to happen they decided to pause the campaign until and until their uh new product i'll call it nitro comes out uh because once nitro comes out that should lower transaction fees and allow more uh flow through across the network uh so yeah great yeah so a lot of these things happen happen i guess

a lot of these layers a lot of these layer twos have like training wheels on so i mean they only launched in september of last year so they're not even a year old um and so they still have like um you can call them throttlers or whatever is what some people call them but basically it's like they don't want it to work at its max capacity yet because they're still working through kinks and bugs and things like that and so they're still on fire arbitrary nitro is when they take a lot of those off and they start to rev it up and that's when the fees are gonna go down significantly and it could probably we'll see handle this kind of um this kind of traffic uh so pause it because they have a bunch of other like communities and apps and things on there that are already like

they have a strong ecosystem even without this like big marketing campaign so they didn't want to ruin the experience for the existing communities that are on there um so i actually think it's a smart move shut her down for a bit let's get nitro out and then and then we'll take it from there blockbuster dao uh failed to buy the blockbuster ip i don't know if you guys heard about it but there was a blockbuster dow that was spun up uh sort of similar to constitution dao their objective being uh to buy vip to blockbuster and then to resurface the uh the brand uh and there's there's a lot of brand uh association and brand

love around blockbuster uh now dish network which owns blockbuster's rights even though there is only one blockbuster left in america and they're not using the rights like there is no as far as i know there's nothing happening with the blockbuster brand but dish network would not sell the ip to blockbuster apparently specifically to the dow um they were they were pretty clear that they won't sell it to a dao so i don't know if that's uh if that's like web 2 fud or like i don't even know pre-web it's like bug brother's web zero fud uh of them being like screw dows we don't want anything to do with you we're not selling it to you

um so anyways but blockbuster dao is now pivoting and they are gonna create uh some some form of a video uh i don't know if it's video retail or online video service um called rewind so it's not dead in the water but tough go we shot the shot though at least man these ens domains have you seen what's going on here these things are nuts it's the one like bull market in the middle of this bear market uh there was an enos domain zero zero zero dot e sold for 300 eth uh was this yesterday two days ago thousand dollars is the second largest sale ever for an ens domain um insane i don't know why people want that

but they want it so it's crazy though makes yeah it makes no sense to me i mean i guess it's short and easy to spell and we'll come up first on a directory because zeros zeros comes up before letters i don't know right right i don't know what directory all right phones so we talked about salona phone was called saga or something like that a couple weeks ago and um all of a sudden we got like our next three or four uh news uh articles here are all about phones i don't know what's going on but web3 phones is like all of a sudden just a thing i kind of feel it's all a little bit of a hoax i don't think anyone's actually close to it but let's see so this one

says htc launches a metaverse phone um on top of ethereum and polygon so go down a little bit basically um what is it that they get so it's pre-loaded with i believe a wallet and then pre-loaded with some apps and things that so here it is with vivi vivers apps and vv wallets built into the phone users can create virtual avatars and manage crypto assets including nfts and crypto on ethereum and polygon natively in the phone so that's cool says it's actually launched already and it's their expansion into web 3.

it's an 8 gig ram and 128 gig storage device 403 wow that's cheap um i guess it's htc yeah i don't know so i it's weird it's kind of all coming at the same time um but uh looks like we're about to start having web3 [ __ ] on phones and that's cool then we have another one um polygon to enable web3 functionality and smartphones with nothing collaboration so there's a company called nothing and basically uh paulie has announced a partnership with nothing the creator of of a phone i don't know what exact kind of phone it is but the ethereum scaling protocols tech will be integrating nothing's first smartphone but polygon won't be manufacturing its own smartphone the partnership aims to bring crypto nfts to

a large audience by enabling access to web3 functionality to such users so again i think what it does basically is like connecting in wallets and that and so it all becomes sort of native right now when we use our phone we have to like download let's say metamask and then when we want to use i don't know like whatever app on our phone and i mean most of us not it's actually browser-based we have to jump out of that app go over to the metamask wallet sign that transaction go back over to that app it's a bit of a pain and so these sort of native web 3 phones and or the next one we see is actually not a phone but it is a an operating system um these just allow it to be sort of like native within there and so this is

eth os which is announced um they have news we've launched the first build of ethe os or eth operating system um it's easy install updates ota whatever that is and it has features uh to onboard light node and it can install on a pixel 3 or a pixel 5a so basically this is your ability to um install an ethereum based operating system um right onto your existing phones you don't actually need a new phone now you can just use your own if you have a pixel 3 or pixel 5a um and again this just brings sort of native apps and things to your phone as well um so very interesting i had never even heard of this until a couple weeks ago or even thought that this was going to

be the case but i think it makes sense and i think it's going to improve that ux for for a lot of people um as this gets built out yeah i think the the key takeaway here is we all talk about the ux problem in three and apple solved the ux problem in web 2 by creating great hardware right and so hardware is directly tied to the ability to have great ux and so a lot of these web three companies are like well the problem is apple and google aren't really playing ball right now with with web three because they're they have high take rates and they want they want high percentages if they're

going to play in the game and web3 doesn't want that so there's just sort of this like standoff happening so yeah so screw it go around them we're going to make our own phones and our own operating systems i think both both kai and i probably believe and i think many believe i don't know if these phones are going to take off and all of a sudden you know take over apple uh for having you know the most market share of phones worldwide but it's going to force apple and google to do more and to allow us to use more web3 natively in the phone so there was a chart i was trying to find it for this for the show but it was showing the pre-sales for the solana the saga phone and um basically they reached i think 2500 pre-sales that's it um and

the chart went like parabolic right off the start and then just quick uh curve and then just leveled right out and now the last like however many weeks or whatever it's basically like just slowly climbing and people who are in the space were just like yeah that's you can't build a phone a profitable business with that amount you need like i think it was like 10x or 20x whatever they they had um so i think there's not enough people in the space right especially if it's just solana you have like one community in a small web 3 is already small as it is like i don't think you're getting that traction yet most people don't understand the need for web3 they're not going to go buy a new phone like of course they're going to say i don't even have a wallet like why do i

need a new phone exactly they don't get it most people still hate nfts and now we're already trying to launch phones where you can use your nfts like come on that makes some sense now this is a kick-ass app though so dialects um i can't remember if we talked about them before or not but they were launching um basically a way to like sms on um inside of your wallet so you can message people from wallet to wallet but what they've done is now built almost like whatsapp where you can um scroll down i think it's on the second second tweet there um but now they have like group chats where you can uh message like group wallet chats from one wallet to another and have a bunch of them kind of in so that's really cool it has notifications and um not sure if there's anything else in

there i just really like the group chat idea with wallets i think that's really cool um and uh yeah i'm excited for that stuff to play out because i think we need we need more interactions um on our here it is you'll be able to dm and have group chats um it right inside your wallet and i think that's just super cool because we again we need more things to do on the wallet because then i think it makes it more right now people are scared to use their wallets because every time you do it you got to sign these weird transactions you don't know what's going on so people don't really get familiar with the the intricacies of the wallet but if we're in there because we're messaging and we're doing other things like you start to just get really familiar with what that wallet is and how it all works so

the more functionality we can include in there i think it's gonna be better for for wallets overall yeah i think messaging is another big area of of of web3 that is and we're actually having uh jaff one of the founders of epns which is ethereum protocol messaging service notification service on the podcast in a few weeks so if anybody listening uh has any questions or is involved in messaging reach out to us we'd love to chat with you uh and get you involved in the upcoming podcast or uh you know bring in your questions because there's a lot in the space of messaging around token gated messaging anyways won't go too far down that

rabbit hole today but we will soon all right we got here we go back to identity which was the word of the week um this is uh this is matrix so they have just launched a decentralized web 3 credential protocol matrix is built on a layer 2 of ethereum called metas fun fact i learned from our community from ian thanks for this ian medes was hermetas dao was created by vitalik's mom i don't know if this is actually true but this is what i was told and i thought that was very interesting i never knew that before um but yeah so what matrix is building is just a way to have credentials tied to your identity um and we've talked about this a lot we think that this is kind of the future

of where things are going so it's your soul-bound nfts and when you do certain things or achieve certain things whether that's education or doing things in communities or whatever you get like these these nfts that are non-transferable it helps to build your reputation so that's really what matrix is building um which is great i think there's tons we have polygon id coming on the the podcast in a few weeks um similar thing this is identity this is using zero that one's using zero knowledge proofs this one's just using a layer two not zero knowledge then we have evan on the podcast this week who is doing the same thing but now it's off chain rather than on chain if you wanna learn why that matters go listen that podcast i'm telling you it's the best podcast you're gonna listen to

like [ __ ] this identity here's the two things phones like hardware seems to be a hot topic right now i don't know that that sticks around i feel like that fizzles out for a bit and comes back like maybe than the next bull run i don't know but identity seems to be something that everyone is focusing on i see credential stuff like daily new protocols and new apps that are trying to do something with a with credentials um and with identity i think this is the big next unlock that comes out in web three is is um is on chain slash off chain identity it's just a it's it just makes so much sense right um and so yeah we'll see how it all plays out i mean matrix is one of the tools that's building and uh and there are many many

others yeah excited to see how that plays out for sure and it's gonna be it'll only be a good thing for so many of us because uh our identity and our reputation is so convoluted right now and so much is based upon it's all offline and it's easy to fake and easy to fraud and there's so many issues that come with that um and it's segmented across every single app you ever use your airbnb app you have a reputation your uber app you have one amazon you have one like depending on what your google reviews like your linkedin they're everywhere but you can't connect any of them and so that's what this is going to do is going to connect what's happening in the real world connect everything happening online uh all into one right and i think that's freaking amazing yeah totally

uh okay another another launch this week lowe's uh the um what we call renovation home home hardware style uh a company and uh retail store uh launched has announced their metaverse plans uh it's called open builder and i actually think this is pretty cool i mean lowe's isn't necessarily the most exciting uh retailer uh but they're a massive american company and what they are doing is they're creating this open builder this metaverse where you can go in and you can build your home and so you can move furniture around you can use uh you know this this 3d or this 2d metaverse ideally hopefully this

involves uh vr at some point uh and you'll be able to you know do a a home walkthrough or see how your renovation project will come to life uh i think there's a lot of use cases with this that'll be really really cool for people like me who are currently renovating their homes i just can't stop laughing at it includes an nft hard hat like that you know this reminds me of that's actually really cool about this is i was trying to buy a safe i think it was on amazon like last year two years ago and i there was an option to use a i think it's ai augmented reality and i could like if i click the button it would show on my phone it would like it just showed

like a camera view of my house that i was in and it showed the safe not like well i don't know why it mattered for a safe it's not like like that's like a decoration or something but it had it i could like put it on my like tv stand or put it on my kitchen table and i was in an airbnb i was like this is so useless i'm not even going to use this here i was hilarious but it was cool i was like oh this would be sick if you were going to buy i don't know like a a voz or something or a picture frame right like you could put it on your wall uh and this kind of takes that i guess to another level it's pretty sweet yeah yeah another another announcement reddit is launching a new nft avatar marketplace

so reddit obviously you know a big player in web 2 and has been experimenting with different things in web 3. uh they talked about launching a social token previously we haven't really seen anything come out about that and then they also talked about doing what twitter was doing and allowing you to use any nft as your profile picture or your avatar but now they've they're launching their own nft avatar marketplace uh basically they've they're releasing 90 different designs and i think the main takeaway here is you can buy an nft through reddit uh on their marketplace with fiat you can use your credit card or your

debit card you don't have to have crypto so they're clearly focused at onboarding their current user base uh in a simple way and also you do it using their wallet i'm trying to remember the name of their wallet uh camera member did it have a name i didn't even know it did yeah i think it does uh some of the v i can't remember but you do it using using their wallet uh and yeah and then you have you know your avatar i mean this is this connects strongly to identity as well you know our avatars and our profile pictures are such a big part of our identity and in web 3 we have this like this anonymous identity combined with

our real life identity and how does that play in uh so but but great to see reddit really launching something that i think is going to onboard more people to web3 and allow people to play around and buy their first it's only their own nfts they're not like integrating or allowing you to show or use other nfts which is kind of weird but again yes it's education i guess for the their users and it i mean i'm sure they just want to experiment and play around i guess um and do it in a way where they can make some revenue um but what so they weren't going to watch a social token what they were doing is they're actually building they announced like i think it was in 2020 maybe it was early 2021 that they are building it must have been 2021 because they're

building on arbitrage not arbitrage and and they are building the ability for any community on reddit any subreddit to launch their own token and they already have two of them um i forget which ones they are i think one was fortnite and something else but anyway um they yeah they were gonna do this in a lot for all communities which would be crazy i assume the reason they have not done it or update anyone is because of regulation right they can't just go allow every community to launch all these tokens and so i bet you they're waiting for that which is again why we need regulation because the moment they do that holy [ __ ] they have like 600 million users i think um something like that and if they could all just all

of a sudden have a wallet and be able to use tokens within their subreddits geez would be massive um so vault vault that's the name of uh reddit's blockchain wallet would you like to just come to no it's it's it's right here in front of me on this uh on this article and and what's interesting so you'll be able to store and manage these nfts uh using using vault but you can also use vault already to earn blockchain based community points on reddit and then you can spend them on special features like badges and animated emojis so uh again this just kind of comes back to

like that use case we were talking about about nfts there's just so much potential to use whether it be nfts or whether it be erc 720 tokens you can use these tokens in so many ways to incentivize your users to allow them to have more ownership of their stuff on your platform uh and reddit obviously a giant in the web 2 space is you know like everybody jumping in and playing in the sandbox trying to figure it out love it all right this should have been the dow of the month but that's not our what we have this month so we're just going to say it anyway uh but feel free to to take over jay yeah choice dow

uh i'm not exactly sure when this launched but fairly recently uh basically this is a community dao um that is launched to leverage community and capital to combat one of the greatest threats to personal liberty in our lifetime they are essentially raising money to combat the us supreme court when they struck down roe versus wade and basically moved us backwards of 50 years of progression uh erased in an instant and abortion will likely be banned in 26 states as a result of this which is just absolutely

crazy and i can't believe we're having this conversation at this point in 2022 it just like doesn't blow bothers my mind but thankfully uh a group got together and has created choice dao basically what they're doing right now is they're they're aiming to raise one million dollars uh in 26 days for reproductive access they have a discord they've set this up as a dow so there's a multi-sig they have plans of like where the money will go right now what they're saying is the money will go to the most impactful organizations nationwide that support reproductive asset access especially within underserved communities within

one week of raising one million we'll hold the first of our four community town halls to decide uh in partnership with expert advisors how to deploy each 250 000 tranche community voting will help direct the use of subsequent funds this to me is one of the like key unlocks of a dow is a way to just pool a bunch of money and then instead of pulling that much money to some random charity that you don't know if they're actually going to do anything with it or what they're doing it's like you can pool this money with a bunch of people who you know are like-minded and obviously have the same mission and it's like we can all vote together and decide how we want to distribute that money and we don't have to distribute all one million to one thing we can we can slowly do it right we can

have meetings and we can vote and we can like do this in a structured way and just make our decisions and roll with it and i think that's super super cool um and a massive unlock you can't really do that in the web 2 world um yeah like you could crowdfund or kickstarter i guess but like that just goes to one person and now that centralized person or entity decides where that goes whereas in this way we all get to vote and kind of make some decisions so they haven't launched yet but they're launching soon um but check out choicedow.org or head to their discord and you can get in on the conversation if you want to be a part of it and help out yeah yeah shout out to all the uh there's too many there's a name list of their core team on here too many names

to list there's about 20 people here but shout out to these heroes for taking this on we need this right now when yeah when our liberties and our choices are taken away from us in this way all right the ones and twos the ones and twos what's going on in blockchains today kai we did it we were one step closer yesterday uh we had the next test merge um on ethereum and this was the sequoia i believe it's called scroll down let's get the actual name sequoia sepolia that's it sepulia so this is the second test net on ethereum uh they merged it yesterday and

had zero problems basically um now sometimes the problems come a few days or weeks in so we need to wait a couple weeks just to check on it see how it went um and then there's one more test and this is the big one which is uh gourley i believe is how you pronounce it and this is the last uh test net this is like the main test net um if that one goes or once that one goes which should happen in three to four weeks let's say early august then it's basically go time and so we are looking at i mean we the last time we talked about this it was kind of looking at august it's looking like it's going to be a bit later than that now could still be end of august like best case scenario

probably looking more like september um and then like if if something happens then maybe october but it's looking like september is a pretty high chance at this point um but a chance that it could be august which is crazy august is next month um [ __ ] let's go thanks captain obvious well man time is flying like what the hell you lie already what i know this is crazy 2022 like don't even know what happened this year another big one so [ __ ] we talk about immutable every week i'm sorry i don't want to keep talking about a meal they are not a sponsor of ours um i would like that but if you want to be yeah

yeah but i think their their audience is all gamers and we i mean i guess it's builders and uh that could be our audience i just don't know how much uh we didn't even know what mmorpg or whatever that was so tough to get that's a sponsor but uh still a big fan i think honestly i think that they are going to onboard more people in this space than anyone in the next couple years um they're just i mean every week they're launching something that's just huge this week what they did is um they have launched an eth off-ramp um from immutable to like basically your bank so you can go from a layer two of ethereum i don't think this exists anywhere else and you can take your eth and you can just off-ramp it right into your bank account uh and turn it into fiat so you

don't even have to go like typically what you'd have to do is either like send it over well i don't think you can go immutable to like coinbase you'd have to go mutable to ethereum mainnet theorem main net to your coinbase account or your whatever account and then from there to your bank account right that's a fee every step of the way and that's just a pain and most people don't even know how to do that now you can literally go right in um you can go from your banks into uh into immutable and then you can go right out too so what this does is it allows developers um so first of all immutable is also gasless so now you have this sort of like layer two that is completely gasless they have a great set of tools for builders to build their games on to

launch nfts and do things inside of their games and now you have their own built-in wallets in there as well you can fund your wallet directly from um your bank account they have marketplaces where you can just use your mastercard or your v i think it's just mastercard i'm not sure visa's in there yet so you can buy and sell nfts without touching any uh ethereum or sorry any crypto uh and then you can go and play your games do what you want sell your nfts earn your nfts playing games sell them and then take that money put it back in your bank account and you don't have to touch the rest of the ecosystem and that to me is just pretty incredible they're just they're creating an amazing ux specifically for gamers and game developers uh and that's it's just so niche and just such a good experience

and uh it's not there yet but it's close and it's incredible kudos robbie and the crew at immutable speaking of building some sweet stuff speaking of uh very exciting news very very exciting news web3 academy we are spitting out a dow uh weaponry academy dao is going to be a tokenized community which is forming out of our webster academy discord and it's been amazing to see the discord has got over 700 people in it and a core team of about 10 have stepped up and said hey let's build together there's so much happening in the space

and it's amazing how many people are looking for opportunities to build and they're looking really to find their community and there's a lot of people in the community finding each other and looking for opportunities so the dow aims to further uh the mission of web3 academy by creating resources products and services to better support the wave of entrepreneurs businesses and creators moving into web3 over the coming decade if you would like to be involved if you're interested in being involved in the web 3 academy dow if you want to be part of building something if you're looking for a team to work with or you're looking for a project to be part of uh we would love for you to get involved give us a shout send a dm to myself or to kyle or

just post in the discord in the general chat that you're that you're eager to get involved just raise your hand and uh yeah we'll get you we'll get you we'll get you involved in the doubt because it's going to be exciting stuff to come yeah i think it's it's cool it's like we we started this media platform this podcast the newsletter et cetera to educate right and we weren't really sure that we were going to build anything jay and i don't really want to or have the skills to build a product or some tools or whatever but we noticed like coming in this community there's a bunch of developers there's a bunch of lately there's been a bunch of copywriters there's marketers there's product managers there's kind of everything in there and everyone's like we just want to learn and we want to support web3 and

and they kind of see our mission it was like this wasn't our decision to this token it was like the community was like hey why don't we band together um we started writing like what this uh what this is going to be in the the first sentence is we're starting we're starting a company with strangers that's basically what's happening so when my mom asked what are you doing over there with web through academy like i'm starting a company with strangers she's like what but it's basically it is we like band together we had some calls and we're like hey let's take this idea let's run with it and now the community has a couple ideas of products they're actually going to build to help further the web through ecosystem um so that's really cool uh but we will be announcing some stuff on a potential token uh and

how we're gonna sort of form this dow whether we call it dow or not it doesn't seem we're not really sure uh but where we're gonna form that and we're looking for everyone's looking for contributors right now like jay said we have a core team of about ten uh there's others that are just kind of like watching and seeing what's happening um and uh but we need more people to help out so if you are an expert in let's say discord uh or want to start running the discord or you're a community manager or you can contribute designs or whatever honestly any skill set uh we'll take it um come on in and big thing is join our calls we've got like two or three calls a week right now where we're just sort of in planning stages um jay is running a sandbox actually today so by the time

you guys listen it'll be too late but every thursday we do it where we talk about different projects and kind of brainstorm right now we're doing that on our own because um we want to build out what we're currently looking to to build um so check those out and then mondays we do these sort of community calls where we talk about the podcast uh and answer people's questions and kind of dive into just like specific topics on web3 so whether you want to learn or you want to like contribute and earn and build with us then you can do it just jump in the discord and say hi and we will uh we'll help you figure out where your place is no better time to do it than right now awesome can't wait to uh yeah see where this goes because it's amazing what you can

build when you build with strangers incredible all right and the web 3 person of the week is drum roll please it's a week or month i feel like it's of the month because we only do them it's evan it's evan evan mcmullen evan uh is the ceo of disco uh we've talked about her a couple times um scroll down a little bit there jay but she was on the podcast on wednesday and um she is the reason why identity is the word of the week as well because wow she took us on in a deep deep rabbit hole i feel like uh as we mentioned identity and credentials is kind of the next big

unlock of web three and there's all these people building uh and doing certain things here but evan took us on this journey of you know she talks about it as your personal data backpack right like all these different data points that we have and she says well do we really want all this on chain right we talk about solving fts and all that do we really want this on chain because on chain means public and transparent and do you really want all of your identity all of your data to be available to anyone and everyone right that's the one benefit of a blockchain but like do we really want that um in terms of our data and she says no and i tend to agree with her and so what they've done at disco is they're building sort of this off-chain data backpack which is still

decentralized and uses a wallet etc but it connects into every blockchain and so it doesn't matter if you use solana or ethereum or a layer 2 or whatever you can get all that information and it sort of is this like interconnecting web of um web tool let's call it that brings all of your data everywhere even on web 2 stuff all into this one sort of access point or this backpack and then you can select and choose which data people can see and can't see um and uh so incredible idea uh i love what they're doing there and evan is just like this incredible insane mind she's just so smart i think and uh she takes you down this deep rabbit hole and she's just a really good

storyteller it's one of my favorite podcasts we ever had um it was a lot of fun and you can see her comment here says what a party we had friends thank you for joining the disco let's build the metaverse of fun together um crazy it was just such a good episode uh i highly recommend you you check it out and jay uh what was your what was your big takeaway what was your favorite part of that episode do you have one yeah i think that uh like to be honest my my big takeaway was evan's attitude and personality in in the way that she approaches this in such a fun way yes there was lots of takeaways in terms of the tech and the way that she is building uh

verifiable credentials um and decentralized identity and there's there's a lot to unpack there and the difference between what she's doing versus soul-bound nfts but i think my big takeaway is it's so exciting to see people like evan in the space who they understand the tech but they also understand that in order for us to get the masses onto this we need this to be fun we need to be exciting uh we need to be great storytellers and it's not we can't just be um you know caught up deep in the weeds of the tech because the masses won't understand that evan was just so she's just so fun she just made it such a good time uh her

analogies of making the metaverse like a disco dance floor and let's all party and dance on that together i just love that uh it's very approachable she's she does such a good job making it yeah accessible and approachable absolutely well done evan and everyone go check out that episode it's freaking awesome and uh let's talk about it in our community call that's a wrap thanks so much to everybody what another great week in web 3. as always if you have a chance would greatly appreciate if you could give us a review on apple or on spotify that's really what helps us grow web3 academy which helps us all grow web3 brings more people into the web3 space uh we greatly appreciate your reviews if

you're not already in discord jump into discord join the community we're building some cool stuff we're spinning out of dow you know every week so much more is happening have a fantastic week yourself practice some gratitude be grateful for everything you have in life we are all so lucky and uh until next week have a great time cheers everybody thank you for listening to web3 academy we hope this helps you along your web 3 journey if it does please share this episode and subscribe so you don't miss the next one by the way if you have yet to join the discord community you are missing out this is where all the magic happens this is where we learn where we ask questions where we network uh you want to be in there the link to join is in the

description below and finally a quick disclaimer nothing in this podcast was financial advice crypto and web3 can be risky you can literally lose it all in fact if you invest on account of what we say you probably will lose it all so don't do that in all honesty the point of this podcast is to remove the noise of markets and price and focus on utility and implementation anyway so you should not take any of this as financial advice thank you friends and see you in the next one