Web3 weekly rollup: Tornado Cash sanctions, Reddit tokens and the Merge

Transcript

what's up friends welcome to web3 academy a place for entrepreneurs creators and marketers to explore and learn how to use web3 to transform business models and create thriving communities enjoy this next episode gmgm welcome to web3 academy it is the weekly roll-up i'm jay bird coming at you from tuscany italy today and as always joined by my co-host what's up kai what's going on i feel like we should have a glass of wine you're in tuscany i'm in portugal like it seems like the perfect opportunity for a little glass of wine on the roll-up maybe next week maybe maybe what we should do uh that makes me think of the um

the kevin rose and tim ferriss random show where they both get drunk and do a podcast together that sounds fun be quick what's on the podcast quick we're waiting too long the algorithms aren't going to like this all right today on the show we've got the first u.s treasury sanction of a crypto protocol what's going on everyone's probably heard about tornado cash we're going to break it down and give you everything you need to know second up reddit has launched community tokens on the blockchain on ethereum their community tokens are now on chain uh using arbitron nova and partnered with ftx we're going to tell you all

about that third moon birds moves to cc0 what the heck is cc0 we're going to talk about that and what this means and why it's really important for the nft space as a whole as we figure out ip we're going to talk about the eth merge final test net is completed it happened today actually earlier today before this recording super stoked about that and there's unfortunately a little bit of east merge fud happening but that's all good we're going to explain that we're going to break that down and yeah before we jump in though kai what's the uh oh we're going to do i was going to say what's the web three or the

work week but first i always forget gratitude gratitude uh what is my gratitude today i said what we can't do for gratitude and now i need to figure out what my gratitude ever thought about it but my gratitude is uh good coffee so where we were uh for the last week we didn't have the greatest coffee our boy raul our our tweet our tweet tour as people would call our threador uh he was he's a he's a coffee um what do you call that coffee snob and uh connoisseur sure and he was just saying how bad the coffee was we were last week and then um we all flew out left eddie sadder where we were and back in lisbon and you have a beautiful flat white this

morning and yesterday actually and um and it's good it just hits so nice doesn't it once it hits your lips it just tastes so good what about you what are you grateful for uh i'm grateful for road trips uh and i guess i gotta give a shout out to uh i'm grateful for the fiat uh i've never had it a d fiat said like i'm totally not a noob when it comes to fiats uh i've never driven a fiat before i arrived in florence yesterday rented a fiat and drove from florence to tuscany where i am right now uh for my friends shout out dan and kim for their wedding this weekend and man if you get on the open road and you

got some tunes going and you're in like a new country where you don't visit literally it's the most magical thing like i it's so incredible sam and i were laughing because we're like like oh my gosh look at that that tree over there is so beautiful look at that hill oh my gosh it's just spectacular you know and you're thinking like if if if an italian person saw that they'd be like yeah so what it's a tree on a hill what's the big deal but you know when you're on the road trip it's new it's exciting uh so it was a good reminder you know see things with new eyes appreciate everything as if it's new and you're seeing it for the first time and uh that'll make you make you pretty happy about everything i love it i love it road chips are the best

all right web 3 word of the week what do you got for us kai i don't even know how to say this word so does it count as the web 3 word of the week but the website of the week is is girly go early girly go early i don't know what it is whatever it is it's the test net of ethereum and it is now a proof of stake test net as it was merged um last night for those of you in est this morning early morning for us in europe at the moment um it had uh and yeah it's merged and it's good and um we're on to the next and we're gonna talk more about this at the end of the show or nearing the end of the show but um gore early

is the web 3 word of the week and then basically we're never going to have to say this word again once we actually do the full merge because he talks about test all right all right so let's jump into the news what do we got well we'll start with the biggest one of the week um if you've probably heard that tornado cash has been sanctioned by the u.s department of the treasury um so this is pretty crazy and still a developing story somewhat um let me break it down a little bit though tornado cache is basically it's a protocol on ethereum it's on a few of the layer twos as well um but basically what you can do with it is you can send in eth um and it sort of mixes it up with everyone else's if that's in there

and then you can send it out to another address and basically all it is is um allowing you to send a transaction in a private manner so in case you want to donate and you don't want anyone to know that you're donating or that it's from you specifically you can use tornado cash to do this now um one of the big issues that has arose from this of course this is a way where you can um you can sort of launder money right so there's um you know the ronin hack which happened i think it was like 600 million dollars was hacked from the ronin bridge um they put like hundreds of millions through tornado cash and that's how they could get their their eth out and no one knew who like what wallet it was going to there's like six at least six big

hacks that have happened in the last like six months that have all gone through tornado cash um i think it's something close to 37 of all transactions on tornado castle volume on tornado cash i guess is from these illicit sources from hackers so i mean kind of a big deal um now this sanction basically from the u.s treasury what this is it's technically a sanction on the company that built tornado cache but then they've stepped it up further of anyone who actually uses this tornado cache now they can't just like shut down the protocol it's a decentralized protocol so there's not really anything they can do in terms of that tornado cache can't even shut it down um because it just lives on ethereum on a decentralized

platform what they can do however is shut down the front end of tornado cache which is the ux like the the page that we actually would all use um anyone can still go interact uh with turning to catch the protocol you just can't do it on the front end of the website now the way that they've worded this sanction is like basically anything that ties into it is sanctioned um so it would have to go through some uh some courting procedure and stuff but basically they have their bases covered here um but you know what's interesting is they can shut down the front-end site because well that's basically hosted on aws probably so they just tell amazon hey you got to shut that down right um and but they can't again can't do anything

to the protocol but what they can do that kind of is screwing up the ecosystem a little bit is for example usdc you people use that to um to sort of mix up the usdc and send donations or whatever and so usdc is a centralized company so they can go to usdc and say hey you have to basically blacklist every address that's ever used tornado cache with the usdc specifically so they've done that um they went to microsoft who owns uh github which is github is how a lot of the devs and um and projects um have their like repository and stuff for all their code their source code um so again they can tell microsoft to shut down any addresses that have interacted with

tornado cache um via github so a lot of people's wallets have been blacklisted their assets have been basically frozen their code is even frozen um so that's pretty crazy um but i mean i guess it is what it is now the interesting thing from this is like sanctions are fairly normal we've seen that happen this year of course with what happened in russia but sanctions are usually to a specific person to a country or to a corporation this is the first time there's ever been a sanction on a piece of code which is just language and so like most people think of code as speech it's just a language it just happens to be in

type form rather than like me speaking and so this is a sanction on speech which is very odd um and so there's a lot of people unhappy about this and we're not really sure what's going to go on with this but a lot of the big lawyers in the space are saying this is going to go to court this is actually something they can't do infringes on americans rights um i guess by the way this is only for people who are american uh and american companies um now um what's interesting is i just want everyone to understand what else you can do with tornado cash other than you know laundering money okay right it's not just used illegally right it's exactly also used legitimately in a lot of ways there's there's good use cases

for it right you think about a public transparent blockchain it means that you get to see every single transaction that ever happens right that's as good as that is for like businesses so we can keep them accountable blah blah blah there's probably things you want to do that you don't want everyone to know you did right and so just here's a list of them some of these things that are completely legal they should have no issues doing them but now they are legal illegal if you use tornado cash so getting paid in crypto and you don't want your employer knowing all your financial details meaning how much you have how much money you have you pay for a service and eath and don't want them to be able to see everything you've ever done on chain right you're worried they might not let you join that super secret chat if they

know your wealth came from aping into this person says ass rocket 69. um you've been uh this is rizza jaffrey you've been doxxed and are being harassed online right you want to donate to a polarizing cause maybe you want to donate to something but you don't necessarily want everyone to see this is big for like politicians and things of course um you want to anonymously gift me one thousand eat which you could also do to me kyriehood.ed i think i showed on every episode i haven't got anything yet though you got anything again nothing yet no uh what else do we have you're bothered by the thought that everyone who knows your address knows more about your wealth than most of your close friends and family members um so basically there's a bunch of reasons why you might

want to send money um yeah and you don't necessarily want everyone to know it and so of course you should have something like tornado cash that allows you to do that now unfortunately there are people who use it and for bad things but like okay so we're gonna sanction um tornado cache well in order for the native cache to work we need the protocol smtp and http and imtp to work right these are the protocols of the internet those protocols are required for changing the cache should we sanction those two there are people using smtp in the internet to launder money so let's sanction that right it just kind of doesn't really make any sense so what's really funny of what's kind of happened from this now is someone and we don't know who where is

this i have it up here someone is moving from tornado cash um so these banned addresses and stuff to people uh that are like big people in the space so brian armstrong the ceo of coinbase someone sent him uh tainted eath to his wall address now technically he should and i guess the the punishment if you do interact with this stuff or have ever done it is 30 years in jail so like are they really going to go and take brian armstrong the ceo of coinbase to jail they've sent it to jimmy fallon shaquille o'neal puma randy zuckerberg brian armstrong steve aoki ukraine crypto donation dave chappelle beeple so someone just had like a heyday and started sending it to everyone and it's

like they're not going to be able to handle all this and really you know um what i think is going to happen is first of all it's probably going to court it's going to take years and years and years for them to figure anything out here um hopefully in the meantime like hopefully in the meantime this stops hackers because like now what do hackers do if they steal money they have less chance to like get away with it i guess um but i mean anyone could fork this tomorrow and then boom you have a new one there will probably be like 20 30 forks in the next year that's my guess we'll see what happens there um but the other thing is wait until regulators learn about zk proofs we just had polygon on uh on our podcast i think

that now that actually came out just this week which is all about making blockchains private right zero knowledge proving things without proving the rest of it so this is a regulator's worst nightmare and it's about to become mainstream across all blockchains and so i think they just haven't really figured out what's going on yet they're just not fully down the rabbit hole but once everything goes zk they're done you know um so i don't think this is a big deal in the long run to be honest like yes it sucks for any of the developers that can't access their code and people can't access their funds um that's not ideal but i think one thing we're learning here is we need to decentralize everything right the front ends need to be decentralized we need to decentralize cloud we need to

decentralize the code source like tools that we're using we need to decentralize everything uh and it's it's happening i mean there already are you know um a cache for example is a decentralized cloud service a provider it's a protocol um so like they're all coming it's just i mean we're still so early it's taking time but once everything's decentralized there's nothing they can do about it so we'll see where this goes crazy yeah i think that uh it's a it's a first step that had to happen and as you said long term it's it's probably not gonna stick it's gonna get caught up in courts and it'll probably end up and i'll bet you they even know that this will not let this will not pass in the court system but

you know i think they had a clear objective to stop the fraud and hacking side which as you said was what 30 40 of tornado cash something like yeah somewhere between there we don't actually know but yeah so i mean they were targeting that 30 to 40 percent and you know they aimed to take that down and that 30 or 40 alone is what like uh 200 million dollars more than that seven billion dollars of total volume has gone through tornado cash in the last i think i think it launched in 2019 um which is insane so um right so i mean you're stuck you're stopping you know well you're actually not impacting that that money that money's already gone through right but you're you're stopping you know

those all those wallets from doing future transactions and doing it in a fraudulent way and you know and also it's funny because we talk about dipping our toes into web three so much we talk about it from the business sense this is kind of what the government is doing they're just dipping their toes this is one that they could do without you know yeah they're getting a lot of backlash in the in the fact that this is freedom of speech and that but like also they get some support because it is tornado cash and there is some negative act there's some bad actors in there and so they're dipping their toes and they're going to see what happens right you know same idea and also this happens with every new industry it's not even just crypto or blockchain this happened with the internet it happens with healthcare

it happens with insurance it happened with financial services it happens with every single new industry because it's just what regulars have to do to try to like figure things out and then they've got to go too far and then they got to back up and go too far and back that's just how it works so i mean it's not a big deal in the long run um it is what it is who cares let's keep moving along what's next okay okay next up we've got uh reddit is tokenizing they're putting their community points on chain they're doing this with arbitrom nova trump i always say arbitrary arbitrary nova which is a layer two and they're doing it in partnership with ftx

and so they i believe they launched community points a few years ago and essentially community points was a way for them to reward and recognize the key contributors in the community so if you're in a reddit community then you can gain community points for being one of the best contributors which there's a ranking board and then it shows you rise to the top and it shows hey here's who the best contributors are to this community which is super valuable right and the other problem with it is because it's not on chain it's not interoperable it's not you can't transfer it anywhere else so you can earn all these community points in one community in reddit and you can't take that with you anywhere you can't prove that you had this great

contribution but with this move on chain you will now be able to move this with you across the chain and into other communities and into potentially other places in the future that recognize and value reddit community points uh which so you know big news and exciting to see i think it will onboard a lot more people into web 3. yeah so what reddit is doing basically is it's only with two of their communities to start so it's with um the cryptocurrency community our cryptocurrency is called and our slash fortnight something um so it's fortnite which is huge but they did this they launched this like a few years ago and i think

they did it on ethereum but i'm not sure it was like exactly on chain i don't i don't exactly know how they did it um but they started it as a test and then back in 2021 they announced that they were gonna build on a layer two um and they finally have chosen arbitrarily nova which is one we talked about just a couple weeks ago and explained the difference between that and arbitrarily um arbitrary one and so um this is big because social tokens are huge as you said they're gonna onboard a bunch of new people in the space i mean social tokens are you know in this way anyway are similar to nfts right so nfts especially community-based ones are basically a social token but they're fungible or non-fungible these are just non these are fungible tokens

for communities and i think this is going to be massive um and i mean we already sort of see it with dows uh but this is going to be really big and reddit is obviously huge they have 400 and what 50 50 million people i think using reddit um and so when you can tokenize those communities it's going to be crazy um what the partnership they have with ftx though is actually interesting and this is about kind of ux is in order for people to use these tokens of course they have to pay gas right and so a lot of people though who are not in the crypto space already are gonna have no idea what that is right they're gonna be able to get a wallet with one click via um reddit's wallet i forget what that's called it's called vault fault yeah um and then what they can do is

instead of having to go like use coinbase or whatever and like buy some eth and do kyc and all these things uh and then like transfer it over and all that kind of stuff inside of reddit you can uh and inside that wallet you can just click to this it's called ftxpay and it'll immediately just buy the eth for you um i do think that you need an ftx account so you still probably have to do some kyc actually um but anyway it just does it right in the app and it like buys like five dollars worth of eth for you and then now you have uh the gas to do whatever the heck it is that you are gonna do with these tokens um so it just kind of makes it seamless and sort of walks them through it which is really nice so you know a power power team here

we have arbitram ftx and reddit all working together to create social communities with tokens and um that's gonna be a really really big so i don't know when yeah okay question here so uh when you say use these tokens are these transfer transferable tokens i believe so i didn't really say that but i think so i feel like they shouldn't be right like if it's a this is based upon your contribution to a community then true i would assume that you have to earn these points like if you can just go buy these right right so they might not be available on like let's say uniswap or something but

what it is is you can because it's in your wallet you can go and interact with other things and prove that you have x amount of tokens and do things outside of reddit that's i think the unlock here right so the unboxing is yeah so like nike is like oh we want to allow certain you know members of a community access to something that we build well you have to have this many community tokens community points from reddit in order to access this nike uh shoe that we did in partnership with reddit correct or reddit wants to host some big conference or event for all their top contributors amongst all communities and you got to prove you have x amount of

tokens you can token gate it based upon the number of tokens right yeah yeah so these are valueless this isn't about like because once i saw ftx and i didn't quite understand but i said well i don't know if it's valueless because if you go on coingecko right now you can see these tokens the old versions they have they had value so i don't know we're gonna have to look further into this and if anyone knows feel free to reach out to us um it doesn't show it in any of the articles that i saw no i didn't see it either i was playing but i know the old ones um i know the old ones did have a value so um i don't know we'll see but uh if you want to talk about value check this out um blackrock which is the largest um i

don't know what you call them investment firm or whatever um in the world i think it's like they have like trillions of dollars of assets under management um they're launching a private trust offering direct bitcoin exposure to their clients um via a partnership with coinbase and what's cool about this is this is a spot bitcoin um so it is not like a futures and stuff and we don't even have a spot bitcoin etf in the us but what's great is all the richest people in the world which is who blackrock partners with and who their clients are they can now buy bitcoin spot through this trust explain what that is so it means you actually can buy the bitcoin so bitcoin i like call it that so instead

of like when it's a futures you're not actually buying any bitcoin there's a bunch of like middlemen in between um you're just kind of betting on the future price of it and so it doesn't actually like it does impact the price but to a lesser extent a much lesser extent than if you're actually just buying the bitcoin and holding on to it and so that's what you're doing here is you can buy the bitcoin and then uh blackrock holds on to it for you essentially what i love about this was a a year ago blackrock said that they that crypto wasn't the future and they weren't going to put bitcoin on their balance sheet and they weren't going to offer it to their clients and here we are we should keep a list of all of the like major corporations that have said

like no to crypto or no to web3 and then and then we should tweet at them the moment and just you know remind them right make sure they know i'm sure someone has that list to be honest i would bet somebody does keep in tabs even tabs uh okay email marketing platform mailchimp uh has been cracking down on crypto content publishers this week uh including decrypt missouri and edge wallet uh what what what is going on here is is mailchimp trying to be the boomer of web 2 yeah basically well here's the interesting thing is we have a client that was moving off of sub stack and they were looking to oh actually it was

an nft project that we were working with with our agency first and um we actually used mailchimp this is about i don't know half a year ago or something and we set up mailchimp and the first email we went to send out as a test had nft or crypto in it and mailchimp restricted us and blocked us and we're like wait what and we asked why and they're like yeah we uh we don't we don't allow crypto stuff on our platform it's like what is wrong with you um and so we had to go away from them and we use like i think activecampaign or something and we had a client who was a newsletter gonna switch off they were gonna use mailchimp like no no don't do that they won't they won't allow it their excuse is that um it's bad for the email algorithm to

put these words because they're like not they're frowned upon words and so they don't want your deliverability to be bad is what they're saying and i was like is it them protecting themselves because it maybe it impacts all of mailchimp's deliverability well it's none of that so what i end up looking at is who owns mailchimp is the first thing i googled okay guess who owns mailchimp um i gotta remember the name now but i don't know it's microsoft no no no no they're they own uh intuit into it that's it yeah into it who owns they like own a bunch of big uh fintech companies and then yeah yeah

do you know who owns into it no a bunch of bankers in a bunch of banks so what do you think's happening here it has nothing to do with mailchimp there's nothing to do with email deliverability it has everything to do with bankers who are scared and they're just trying to pull whatever they can to slow this stuff down so mailchimp if you can see this video i'm giving you the finger right now because you are so anyway everyone listening to this get rid of your mailchimp accounts go over to uh which is way better anyway mailchimp is trash um hubspot uh what else is there do you know any other ones jay i just want a name on every competitor of mailchimp every um uh

what's the one that i i can't think of right now i'm blanking okay there's there's another one it's blue mail jet i have no idea if any of those ones are good action campaign is the one i really like but anyway uh mailchimp you suck all right we're on nfts there was some big news though a couple big ones that's all it was but there was there was there was some yeah there was some big news this week nfts okay let's talk about what happened with moon birds and cc0 so it was about a week ago august 4th yeah exactly a week ago that moon birds announced uh that they were going cc0 so

let's break this down first what is cc0 well first actually before i say what is cc0 let's just talk about what the previous ip rights were of moon birds so when you launch a nft project the create creator of that nft whoever created that art they own the ip of that art so in this case moon birds was created by proof so proof owns the ip of all moon birds same way yugo labs who owns 48 yacht clubs owns the ip of all apes what happens is a lot of these

nfts popularized by board api club have licensed the ip to the nft holders so what they've said is okay we are going to give you a commercial license where if you own the nft you have full commercial rights to then go and commercialize that nft so you can go and you can take your ape uh or your moon bird and you can put it on a t-shirt you can sell it you can put it in a movie you can open a restaurant and use it as the logo whatever you want you can commercialize it but only you own that ipv no one else can do that so

moon birds was that type of project the holders myself included owned the ip of our project of our nft and then somewhat out of nowhere kevin rose and the proof team came out and said that is no longer the case we are moving to cc0 public license cc0 is creative common zero essentially what cc0 does is it puts it into the public domain meaning that anyone can now use moon birds branding in any way they please anybody can put it on a t-shirt and sell it anybody can put it in a movie anybody can make a

video game and put it in a video game it's just open season uh and there was a really negative reaction as a result of this the moonburst community was quite upset um i think there's a there's a few takes on this first is this really sucks for anybody that was planning they had active plans to commercialize their moon bird however that is a very i believe that is a very small percentage of holders i do not think that many were planning to do that now at the same time when you take something away from somebody they don't like it they don't like they don't like that being taken away from so

naturally a lot of people are upset about this personally i think this was an overreaction i think there's a lot of irony in here that a they what what moon birds did was fully decentralize their brand which is great for web3 that's what we're trying to do here cc0 is the ultimate way of decentralizing art it's the ultimate way of decentralizing a brand they're saying hey we're going to open it up to public domain anyone can use it and great but they did it in a centralized way so that was where there was a lot of pushback was they didn't ask the community for their involvement in this they didn't even ask the community if they would be okay with this they just went and did it there was nothing kind of discord

no nothing nothing so it was like very very like great irony it's like the most centralized decision to decentralize something just i mean yeah you try and wrap your head around that um some other takes here though let's just talk for a second about like why you would go cc0 okay so why would you go cc0 well you would go cc0 if you believe that what you are building is something that the rest of the world wants to participate in and wants to proliferate one of the biggest examples of this being the mona lisa so the mona lisa is so old that it is now in public domain it is cc0 right so

anybody can reprint the mona lisa all right i can reprint the motor lease on a t-shirt i can reprint it i can do prints of it i could literally sell prints of the mona lisa right does that mean that the mona lisa is less valuable because i go out and reprint the mona lisa no actually the opposite is happening in this case right all that does is increase the value of the mona lisa you get more eyeballs on it more people see it they desire it more so the original actually becomes more valuable and that is certainly what proof and moon birds believe is going to happen here is by doing this there is more value also proof and moon bird's long-term play has always been metaverse and so i think that there's a part of

their plan here and we talked about this a few weeks ago i believe when we talked about how everyone's building their own metaverse when really that's just a bunch of mini verses and what we need is one metaverse and that it will be what there is is one that we can all play in and so by doing this they built they're i think they're taking steps to building that one metaverse by opening up the art maybe anybody can use their art in any metaverse really and the other thing is i think kevin rose is a bit of beef because kevin rose built reddit before reddit he built digs but his didn't take off reddit took off and in the beginning a lot of the features that he created on diggs were just stolen basically by other web two companies so i think his belief is that

okay let's do it differently in web3 let's just not own anything because if you don't own it then you don't have to police it and you don't have to worry about that that whole side of your business right you can just like let it go which obviously policing uses your brand like other than disney nobody has the money to go and chase people who are proliferating their brand right so it's uh yeah it's big the second moon birds collection come out and just took off or what happened with that like that was the quick thing with it was quick yeah so within like minutes of this happening somebody launched moonbirds v2 and uh and i think basically a bunch of people made a lot of money i saw it get up to like point

i think it got up to like point one eighth or something like that but now it's gone so i mean that's fine but that's it okay you know so like it's it's not like and that's interesting right because you would have thought i think that's prove proof that like if if somebody can just go and launch a moon birds v2 which they did so you could literally own the exact same moon bird right uh well if that if that took off then it would have really devalued the original move birds but it didn't take off right it only did for a hot second and then disappeared so well i mean the moon and that's because so has it yeah but the reason the other one doesn't gain any traction there or doesn't have any values because there's

no community behind the other one there is no big team and money behind the other one that's going to build this big metaverse like again nfts are just a form of equity or form of brand or form of whatever it is for a business and so it would be stupid to just join a business of some random person who's just copying some other one that has nothing behind it no road map no plan no anything they just made it in seconds like it just of course it's not gonna hold any value totally totally in a bull market you know that thing would have went to like 20 guaranteed every single one of those in a bull market bear market though you get the real you get the real numbers which is nice and in the same week x copy who is one of the most well-known and famous nft

artists he also went cc0 and applied it to all of his existing art along with um i think those are the two main ones that happened last week but there's some other i mean nouns down nouns is the biggest example of cc0 uh one take i just want to share here was um dom hoff on twitter said uh opening up ip rights to a world is analogous to protoclasing it that is opening it up for others to build upon but that permission doesn't have to carry into every derivative in other words an eyepiece l1 can be cc0 but it's l2s do not need to be right and the the best example of this is sherlock holmes

which sherlock holmes was not was was privately owned there's something around like uh death of like a career when a creator dies within a certain period um afterwards it's no longer it becomes public domain and about 10 years ago uh sherlock holmes became public domain and a whole bunch of like spin-off tv shows started coming out and they started creating it shakespeare is another example that is public domain right now when all these shakes when all these sherlock holmes spin-offs came out they are pri they own the ip that layer 2 version is you cannot that's not cc0 it's the original that's cc0

interesting very i like the layer 1 layer 2 um yeah example there kind of a lot it makes much more sense actually and if you want to learn more about this we actually have a podcast coming out and i think another week maybe two weeks um with zenika from zen academy uh where we did a deep dive in nfts and oh man this was an amazing discussion um and we we do dive into some of this as well um but uh definitely look forward to that it's coming soon um what's this you can skip this one kai you can skip this uh just i think what point to make is uh who else is cc0 uh crypto crypto cc0 blipmap i think was like the original cc0 along with nouns nouns is definitely worth checking out if you haven't checked that out but

there are some good examples of cc0 we're just so early who knows what it does for the value of the nft but who knows if nft should be valued at 100 300 000 anyways maybe maybe not right so we talked about reddit and now back to instagram and facebook we've already talked about this announcement before of them introducing digital collectibles um inside of instagram they were only doing it with a select few creators but come on august 4th they announced that they are expanding which means good things are happening but they're expanding to a hundred countries in africa asia pacific the middle east and the americas uh additionally we now support wallet connections with the coinbase wallet and dapper as well as the ability to post

digital collectibles minted on the flow blockchain so now they have ethereum polygon and flow and they are integrated into wallets like rainbow metamask trust wallet coinbase wallet dapper wallet um so like instagram and i assume facebook uh very soon just like what happened last time they did this is really starting to integrate into ethereum and i actually just tweeted about this schedule i don't even know if it's out yet um but we now have reddit instagram facebook and who is the other twitter who are all building on top of ethereum right and theorem minutes layer twos how amazing is that right this technology's six years old and you have the biggest companies in the world that

are all building on top of it um that is really really cool and then you have youtube and snapchat who have announced already this year that they are doing the same and they're not competing against it right they're not competing with our existing blockchains like ethereum and polygon they are integrating into it and when you integrate into something it becomes extremely valuable because what's happening here is if this feature takes off instagram relies on ethereum for its service right instagram relies on polygon for its service and that makes that makes that protocol extremely extremely valuable um so that is just super super cool hey listeners do you do you think that

kyle's bullish on ethereum it's not even a theorem i meant just web 3 in general but ethereum is just where they're all doing it um for good reason wait till we get to the merge talk actually oh yeah coming out next week too this guy's going to be jumping through the screen and out of the podcast watch out rentable nfts what are these erc49s yeah yeah yeah this is exciting i think this is really this is i mean a big unlock for um for the power of nfts i actually talked about how we needed to figure this out about a month ago so right now when you when if you own an

nft right you might not want to use that nft so like we talk so much about the utility of nfts right notice provides so much utility provides you access to a discord access to a community might provide you access to an event to tickets it might get you access to merge um you know token gating is such a big part of nfts but let's say that you buy an nft and you don't actually care about that access right you don't actually want that access like or maybe you maybe you're not even in new york and that's where the event is happening well now what you can do with this new smart contract erc 4907 is you can rent your nft so you could rent it out to somebody

on chain and basically the way this this smart contract works is it just puts a time on your on your rental so you just you basically assign okay i'm going to give my nft i'm going to say i'm going to give my nft to kylereadhead.edu for five days and in five days the smart contract uh instantly sends the nft back to its original owner and they need to make a transaction or payment in order for that to happen right right they can build that in a smart contract um this so this is sort of a version of this exists on uh in action infinity where you can rent out your um uh your nft but it's not via like a

smart contract where it comes back or like you need a transaction it's basically you get to split anything earned um via that nft it's a little bit different but i mean i'll tell you what's going to happen with this erc 4907 is what disrupts airbnb 100 because real estate is all gonna be tokenized via nft and now you can just rent out your your house um via an nft buy buy airbnb we don't need you to do the payments anymore uh we're good so i was just gonna say bye bye blockbuster but they already sorry guys ngmi [Laughter] oh coca-cola i mean big brands i'm assuming this is an nft launch yes it is

give us the rundown here yeah yeah so coca-cola launched a generative uh and shareable again collectible we're using language very carefully here we're not calling them nfts anymore well i shouldn't say that but calling them collectible um for international friendship day it was actually a year ago for international friendship day that coca-cola launched their first nft and they've basically done i want to say like five to ten nft collections over the last year all around large international days that fit their brand friendship is a big part of coca-cola's brand and so they launched this nft what is unique about this one i believe i i actually haven't seen it other than i've seen a lot of coca-cola ads for it

but is it it's a generative piece uh and it was made by an artist and they were aired oh they're airdropped to currently oh they're dropped into the previous people from last year the ones you were just talking about they just airdropped into them in a spirit of friendship uh which is actually really interesting so good good job coca-cola of not trying to make some money off these nfts but instead doing it to show something cool that you can do with nfts no digital collectibles isn't the title of this section nft utility do we have to change that the thing is like utilities but nfcs are so much more than collectibles that's just a section of it which by the way we have a framework coming out for nfts we need to turn that into like an infographic um hopefully we

can do it before that episode comes out yeah yeah we also mentioned that that nft that coca-cola did was on polygon just want to mention that because again to your point kai more and more being built on top of ethereum and polygons obviously part of the ethereum ecosystem solutions um which by the way on polygon did i already we already say we just launched a new episode on polygon uh where we interviewed polygon id and polygon uh hermes uh which is basically the team that built the first polygon zk evm um first dk evm actually and um it was a we tried our hardest to explain zero knowledge proofs and what that

unlocks in the sense of using identity we tried our hardest to explain this in a very simple way so check it out um there are definitely some technical components it's very difficult to explain zk um but uh thank you to those from polygon that both came on and did their best to explain it in a very simple way uh or as simple as possible so um guild guild.xyz which is a tool we're using in web3 academy dao um basically what it is the tool where you can connect your wallet and you can give roles inside of discord that was like it's a uh i believe that was its first like function that it wanted to do and what they have just launched now is platform list membership so they have

now integrated not just into discord but telegram twitter google workspace github steam and uh and across 17 chains um as well as web 3 protocols like poap mirror and snapshot except snapshot etc and basically what this does is you can create a membership so in the web 2 world you have a membership and it's basically typically tied to like one um one application right it's kind of as far as it goes and this does allow you to integrate your membership seamlessly across any platform because they also have a what do you call it sdk or something where you can put it on like any site so like you can basically integrate it into

wordpress and all that kind of stuff as well um if you get what they call that uh and so now you can have memberships that just like move around with you across the internet right which is really really cool you can start getting access of stuff here you can let people join this community here or receive these tweets or you can gate like google docs now and like certain sheets inside of a google sheet so just so many cool things you can do based off of what's in your wallet so tokens nfts all that kind of stuff um unlock protocol also is building something similar to this but i actually saw guild and unlock we're looking to partner up so i'm not sure exactly what that means um but there's something going on there as well

so that is i don't think people yet realize the magnitude of this this is huge the problem is the ux of this is so right now that setting this up and using this is so difficult that nobody's really using it but like we are i i just imagine you're you have a membership which like most businesses and creators do and your membership is i don't know maybe it's who knows what platform is on maybe it's on google using you know an email address or maybe it's on discord or maybe it's uh you know on another platform well you can't you can't track those members

across platforms right but now you have one way to connect access across all your membership so you can have you can people log in once using a wallet and then they can ask your discord they can access your website they can access your events they can access you know however you can access your articles they can access your music they can access your video content right like this is this is massive i just don't think people see the use cases yet or and also again the ux is so it's difficult to use this i mean so the ux is but it's not terrible with guild so like for example you can join our discord um like

webster academy dave discord and the last step of the onboarding experience is just connect your wallet all you do is connect your wallet and when you click on certain emojis of the like the guild or the section or the department you want to be a part of um it just adds it as a role into your sort of guild profile which is connected to your wallet and now you have these roles right and it's fairly easy to do that and then now if i want to go to another site i can just again connect my wall and it just auto reads it totally um which is which i mean in the web 2 world you can the way you have to do is using zapier right or zappier yeah and that's a pain in the ass too right you have to pay for that and whatever so like it's

it's not far off of what's possible web 2 already but it also has so many more um features and things and possibilities once it's got that good ux that you're you're kind of talking about do you think gourley's harder to say zapier or zapier or however these the heck you say that one oh my gosh oh somebody next [Laughter] we are on to the ones and twos and uh and yeah so here's the announcement is um proof of stake was finalized on gourley go early whatever you want to call it last night um there was some confusion so when it first happened it actually didn't happen immediately and some people were very very scared um you could watch it like

live stream you know bankless was live streaming it um and uh it didn't finalize it right away it actually took some time and that's because um there were some um some blocks essentially some terminal blocks that were not updated and some nodes that were not updated so it was nothing to do with the blockchain itself so with like the girly um gorilla test net what it was was the the the applications and the the nodes which are like the validators and the verifiers that are kind of on top of it and that are using gourley they needed to update their software and some of them had either updated it wrong or didn't update it at all and so when it's not updated those can't connect in and you need a certain amount in order for

it to get like finalized um so this will like even when the the real merge comes which by the way now um is is going to be happening september 19th throughout that week um uh basically what happens here is it's not just like the merge goes from proof of work or sorry ethereum main that goes from proof of work to proof of stake it's everyone verifying it and then all the applications and the wallet providers like all these kind of things they have to update their code for this as well and so um there's gonna be potentially some confusion when it happens uh as the user you won't notice anything so don't worry there's just other people at play here and that's why like when it looks like oh there are some issues and stuff it's not necessarily the blockchain that had it

it's just the things that are built on top of it so just be aware of that so there's been some thud around the ethereum merge and talk about forks and is it going to fork and what does that mean what's what's going on for that break it break that down for a sky yeah so what's happening here is this actually happened with bitcoin a while ago too so i forget what year it was but um there was a bunch of people who thought that bitcoin needed to i think it was like increase their block size so that it would have lower fees and um and basically what happened was the community forked bitcoin into bitcoin cash um and you had a bunch of people that went over there to that and then you continued to have the people that were on the normal bitcoin um but what

happens when you fork is um whatever assets you have right so bitcoin let's say you had two bitcoin you also then had two bitcoin over on bitcoin cash and they're worth the same thing at that moment and whoever sells it first on whichever one it depends on which one makes it maybe bitcoin cash could have made it it did i mean it's still around but like no one uses it um but you get to sell those tokens and it's basically free money a lot of people made a lot of money from that and so there's talk of this happening with ethereum because we're basically getting rid of miners and there's a lot of miners out there right now and that equipment is expensive and they're about to lose a revenue stream and so they're not super happy about that and so what they're saying they're

going to do is they're going to fork ethereum when this happens and continue to have eth pows what it's called okay um so basically just a fork of eth and i just want to make sure everyone's aware that the miners are not doing this because they think it's better and that you know they're going to build a brand new ecosystem here on ethereum where everyone's going to move over like that's not going to happen they know it but what they're going to do is dump on retail and so there's going to be a lot of people because we'll talk about the merchants of the time but a lot of people that are going to come into this they're all excited and they're going to start buying eth pow because it's something new and it's the next it's the next ethereum killer and miners are going to take that and

they're just going to dump all the ether that they're mining and everyone who's buying these tokens is basically going to have this token that ends up going to zero eventually okay this happens with eth classic as well there's still people that are mining that and still dumping on people so first of all if this does happen it's not for sure it's going to but do not get caught in this trap if this happens be grateful because you might get double your eth and just sell it right away on the pow because i don't want to see you get wrecked now the interesting thing that happens here with ethereum is when i explain what happened with bitcoin the only asset on bitcoin is btc so it was very easy right you just sell your your btc and where you go there's no apps built on bitcoin there's no other assets

well ethereum's a little bit different there's tens of thousands of protocols and tens of thousands of assets so all your assets will move over to each pow and so let's say you have 100 uni tokens you can sell 100 uni tokens um and where this gets really weird is um when those tokens are backed by something in the real world so if you think of usdc or tether those are also going to get forked over and so now what happens there's going to be a bunch of usdc or a bunch of u.s dt yeah usdt everybody's called or ust whatever their thing is and ust and that is not going to have anything backed and so that is a very

weird um weird scenario that's going to happen so there may be some volatility in a bunch of assets uh immediately and it'll be in the first like a couple minutes probably when this merge happens so now circle usd this is the company that owns usdc and tether have both came out and put out public statements um saying that they support ethereum proof of stake in the merge and so the assets that they back are the assets which are on proof of stake not the ones that are on proof of work so if you have a thousand or ten thousand or whatever you have even twenty dollars of usdc on proof of work get rid of those because they will not they don't have value there's nothing

backing those and then the same with tether they said the same thing so just be careful because what's gonna happen don't start using defy stuff on this proof of work because a lot of defy is backed and collateralized by usdt and usdc and so if as soon as they merge all these stuff over and they fork it d5's are just going to implode on you on uh uh proof of work okay um so again don't start playing around and trying to get whatever just stay off of that and stick with uh pos because that's what all of the centralized companies that are have built on top of ethereum are supporting um so that's the one that's going to be the real chain now maybe something happens and like

everyone all of a sudden goes screw it we're going with the proven work if that happens i'm really sorry but like basically everyone has come out and said we are in support of provenance i don't think so yeah i don't think so there's maybe a point zero zero zero one percent chance if it does so what what will happen to eth there will be eth and then there'll be east pos and then as you said there will be east p o w possibly no no there will just be e there won't be an e okay and then there will be an eth pow i thought you were saying there will also be an epos i was like whoa what no no no no no it's only the one that's being forked uh over they will have to change the names and it'll be whatever they call it probably ethp okay

that's what it seems so the moral of the story here is there's going to be some confusion uh thankfully you listened to the web through academy podcast and so you are no longer confused you know to stick with the proof of stake blockchain uh and if you have any assets over on the proof of work just get rid of them make some money and great you're welcome we're all happy uh it also is a good reason to start stacking eth right now because whatever you have now is going to get duplicated [Laughter] possibly possibly awesome let's see what happens all right you guys updates first jay yeah let's talk about the community uh our community uh web3 academy community lots going on just want to give some shout outs uh first off shout out to anybody who provided news for us today i

think that blue bar gave us some news ian gave us some news uh tim i believe gave us some news anyone else that i missed kai i think that's uh lots of people giving us news keep posting news we can't share it all we greatly appreciate it uh and one great reason to be in the web3 academy community in our discord is you don't have to wait to the weekly roll up to see the news you can read the news throughout the week welcome to the 46 new members who joined us this week if you're listening to this shout out so happy to have you and thanks to the six new members who joined our weekly meet and greet made some sweet new web 3 friends yesterday next meet and greet is next wednesday

at 6 p.m eastern we do a meet and greet in the community every week great way to meet people and to see what's going on and learn about the community we also have some cool upcoming sandbox sessions sandbox sessions are all about what would you build in web 3 it's an opportunity to brainstorm to talk about a focused project and to really learn together uh with like a diverse group so we've got one pro one session about an ai project that's focused on assisting traders to make data back decisions in d5 and they're looking for really some feedback on project management and developing this this product how do you go through those phases how do you take a startup from like vision to reality really interesting to see all these

startups that are looking for that type of feedback not necessarily like web 3 feedback but like business feedback as well lots of that happening in the sandbox sessions and then we have another sandbox sessions this is a really interesting one that'll be next week or two weeks from now about how to do biz dev in web 3 because of the challenges of talking to somebody a potential customer who doesn't even know what web3 is and so like how do you cross that chasm of like uh giving somebody the education they need to understand web3 while also trying to do some biz dev to possibly sell them your services or sell them your product really interesting excited for that we also launched a writer's playground in our discord this past week i think we've already got about 20 writers in there

we're looking for writers who want to create content and possibly join us in creating more content and onboarding more people to web3 so join the writers playground and there's some in real life meetups we're not just digital we're also starting to do in real life meetups in the community talk about a meetup in toronto vancouver and new york uh and i'm sure that just that channel just started like four days ago so i'm sure there will be many more happening all around the world uh in the coming months uh web3 academy dao also some super super exciting stuff happening there we got uh 98 actually i think i said 98 and then i just looked right before this and there's actually 99. during this podcast we had one more person join the dow um

so if you're a new member and you're joining the dow it can be quite intimidating and you might not know what to do and how to get involved so uh after you onboard and you get into the dow and the channels are open for you if you can't figure out how to do that send myself or kyle a message in discord or just post in our discord chat and we'll help you out but once you're there go to the dow chat channel and we'll help you find your role just raise your hand hey i'm new here introduce yourself we'll help you find a role a couple lots of projects happening one new one that just started this week was the diversity and inclusion project really excited about that and if you haven't already done so follow web3academydale on twitter we've got a new twitter and we could use

some followers just started i think yesterday first tweet went out today all right we got uh we're about to wrap up the episode but we have a funny take a hot take and then we have a web three person of the week is that what it is today jay person of the month person in the month sorry person of the month so this is hilarious i'll try to explain it to uh to those not watching but that are listening so there's some beef between open c magic eden and then looks rare coming in on it so these are the nft marketplaces the biggest in the space and so magic eden puts out this video um where they're basically comparing the differences and similarities between ethereum and solana and i guess in this video they said something about um uh top shot being on ethereum which is

it's not on ethereum at all and so openc just responds and tweets them and says top shot is a notable ethereum project against the joke and says this is what happens when you don't do your own research at magic eden so magic eden responds to them today and says oh right that's why my top shot nfts never got frozen because open c blocked anyone who had been using tornado cash and then looks rare jumps into the conversation and shares the meme of the two girls fighting with the guy kind of watching in the background just uh smoking on smoking a bomb [Laughter] oh my god what a great little conversation here little memes with that with looks rare magic eden and open c

you know what this is going to continue to be a thing because uh they're only going to grow they're going to become beasts uh the three of them in this space and uh yeah it's just gonna be funny to watch this play and i'm glad they're having fun with it over twitter um magic eating well done looks rare well done as well coming in with that that was killer yeah what like 2.7 billion dollars of nfts uh traded or purchased in the last six months and you know no wonder they're fighting right like this yeah and it's just the beginning there's a lot of a lot of money to be had here uh but one thing i just got to give a shout out for web3 is thank you to all of these guys for only charging uh i can't remember their exact take rates 2.5 or

three percent uh 2.5 thank you for not being apple or youtube uh or instagram instagram facebook 100 apple 30 youtube i think also 30 i can't exactly remember thank you thank you for being web 3. lower take rates that's great i bet that take rate goes to zero guaranteed okay hot take hot take hot take um jay who is our web three person of the month our website person month is a lona chev chenko elona shevchenko i think i said that right

i hope so uh we have nominated alona and picked illona because she is just a web 3 rock star but also a diversity and inclusion and the quality rockstar which we need more of in the world and in the web3 space we're really pushing that we're so excited about that uh let me tell you a bit about alona lone is the co-founder of ukraine dao if you haven't heard of ukraine dao you might have been living under a rock but basically ukraine dao has raised 8 million dollars and donated it all to ukraine to organizations that are supporting ukraine in

their fight in this war against russia uh so incredible they've raised eight million dollars uh and they've done it all on chain in all the web three way uh fantastic uh and really just incredible to see somebody so young i don't exactly know how young ailona is but i'm pretty sure she's in her 20s uh and maybe her early 20s you're talking about somebody who is young and has stepped up and done you know just an incredible thing for the world uh for those for fighting for their freedom uh shoutout ilona thanks for everything you do keep crushing it keep rocking it we got your back and one thing i want to

say is you can uh i noticed that you can buy a loan a coffee right now buy me a coffee as a way to donate to her and her cause and we at web3 academy are going to be buying you a coffee elona so shout out keep it up rockstar and if you want to follow on twitter it is at crypto drftng crypto drifting i don't know what that is crypto draft thing whatever short form for something but uh also the link will be below in the show notes that's a wrap jay that's our that's our podcast for this week you good one man thanks so much thanks for listening everybody have a wonderful week can't wait to see

you next week we've got so many so much exciting stuff happening so many things happen at web3 academy system if you're not already following our newsletter please do and if you could take a minute right now and you are still listening i'm guessing you like our podcast so please just give us a rating on spotify or apple podcast uh it's a huge help to us and a huge help to the entire web 3 ecosystem we're trying to onboard millions turn onboard billions we had a long way to go here folks and we need more people to be listening to the podcast and if you give us a rating it's going to bump us up and get us to the top of the charts and we would be much obliged thanks for being you keep spreading good vibes keep smiling you're wonderful i love you guys

thank you for listening to web3 academy we hope this helps you along your web3 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 in price and focus on utility implementation anyway so you should not

take any of this as financial advice thank you friends and see you in the next one