Sequoia Capital has lowered management fees in its two recently-launched venture funds as it braces for a slower investment environment

Must read: Concise visual summary of the Web3 Ecosystem and the current state of play across L1s, L2s, NFTs, DeFi, Metaverse and much more

There’s a lot of pessimism and FUD around Web3 and Blockchain at the moment. But there really shouldn’t be…

Although market caps and token prices are the common reference for ‘success’ in our industry, there are many other metrics and health indicators that tell a more objective story.

So here is a nice report from web3 studios that brings 47 pages of analysis, graphics and comparison in the following areas:
- Blockchain protocols (Layer 1, Layer 2)
- Metaverse projects
- NFTs and Tokenisation
- Decentralised Finance (DeFi)
- Funding
- M&A
- Notable Hacks

Consider this as one, not ‘the’, report to inform your perspective on Web3. Every analyst or outlet takes a different perspective, has access to different data, or may have an agenda.

Keep reading, keep questioning, keep exploring!

If you find the channel useful please share it with your frens ❤️

ETH supply deflation again to pre-merge levels after 47 days

Opensea (consuming 1517 ETH) ranked first in terms of ETH consumption of GAS fees in the past 7 days, followed by Uniswap V3, ETH transfers, Tether, and Uniswap V2.

3AC founders Zhu and Davies pitch to raise $25 million for new crypto exchange

Su Zhu and Kyle Davies, the founders of collapsed crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital (3AC), are hoping to raise $25 million to start a new crypto exchange called GTX.

The pair are partnering with CoinFlex's Mark Lamb and Sudhu Arumugam to launch the new venture, which aims to start offering trading in crypto bankruptcy claims.

Samsung AM launches bitcoin futures ETF in Hong Kong

The Samsung Bitcoin Futures Active ETF has been listed on the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong in Hong Kong dollars.

The fund enables access for both retail and institutional investors to the world’s largest cryptocurrency. It invests in bitcoin futures contracts and micro bitcoin futures contracts traded on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME).

The ETF comes with estimated ongoing charges over a year of 0.95%, less than half the cost of the actively managed CSOP Bitcoin Futures ETF (3066 HK) which is priced at 2.00%.

Despite a major rout in crypto asset prices last year, Hong Kong has pushed ahead with plans to become Asia’s central hub for the digital assets industry. Following an announcement from the Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) near the end of 2022, the city is currently the only jurisdiction in Asia to permit the trading of retail-facing crypto investment products.
That announcement led to a flurry of interest from prospective ETF issuers with Mirae Asset Global Investments also currently in the process of bringing futures-based crypto asset ETFs to market.
Directly replicating crypto asset ETFs, however, have not yet passed muster with the SFC, perhaps reflecting concerns regarding validating the ownership of these funds’ underlying tokens.

A 6 point checklist will allow you to quickly evaluate any crypto project.

It can't tell the full story, but consistently applying a process checklist will make (or save) you a fortune - or years of your career.

The 6 point checklist:

*1) Pick your paradigm*

Is the project a:

a) L1/L2 Blockchain
b) Payment Rail
c) DeFi DApp
d) Gaming or Other DApp

The nature of the project will dictate the KPIs to evaluate.

Projects can fall into more than one bucket, but it's key to be explicit about what buckets the project falls into.


*2) Evaluate your operating KPIs vs. peers*

- For L1s/L2s: users, user growth/churn, TVL, gas, and gross value transacted
- For Payment rails: users, user growth/churn, and gross value transacted
- For DeFi DApps: users, trading volumes, TVL, fee rates, and revenue
- For Gaming or other DApps: users, revenue, and app specific metrics


*3) Understand your trading/positioning KPIs (if you're investing)*

- Retail vs. institutional flows
- 'Sophisticated trader' (DEX traders, large wallets) holdings & flows
- Long/short positioning


*4) Understand comparative multiples / summary stats*

- Price to TVL (for the L1s/DeFi DApps)
- Market cap per developer
- Market cap per user
- Price to revenue (for the DApps)


*5) Understand the TAM*

- Transaction value TAM (vs. pre-existing templates or otherwise)
- User TAM (vs. what baseline?)
- Structural network effects / CAC


*6) Understand the team & ecosystem around the projects*

- Active developers (and growth / comparison to peers)
- Distribution between full-time / part-time / one-time devs; commits/dev
- Core org developers
- Developer churn
- Founding team & funding

More detail on the checklist items here https://news.1rj.ru/str/alwebbci/585

A process checklist can never tell the full story, but it can prevent you from "thesis creep" and inconsistency, the greatest killers of investment or career success over time.

The key is the discipline to develop a checklist you trust and run through your checklist before investing (or investing your career) in a project, with no exceptions.

The final judgments are up to you.

But process is the only way to keep yourself honest.

The BIS Innovation Summit 2023 is coming up

On 21-22 March, join global policymakers, senior executives from the financial and technology industries, and academics to discuss how technological innovation could help central banks and financial markets to navigate uncertain times and, at the same time, disrupt the landscape in which central banks and financial intermediaries operate.

ChatGPT is coming to Azure OpenAI cloud service "soon," says Microsoft in a blog post

And thus Google becomes free to offer LaMDA, flan-PaLM and more through GCP on its TPUs.

Going to be a hard road for LLM companies to convince investors they can compete against Google and Microsoft when both are focusing here.

Unless…

Reddit is integrating "Community Points" AKA tokens/crypto into subreddit communities. With over 50m daily active users, this is going to be an enormous boost for global crypto adoption

Here are some of the benefits they list for Redditors:

1. Own your online reputation: Community Points are a measure of reputation in your community. In the subreddit, they are displayed next to usernames, so the biggest contributors stand out from the crowd. Because your Points are on the blockchain, you can take your reputation anywhere you want on the Internet. Embed them in your own site or app.

2. Create Special Memberships: which users in your community can purchase with Points for badges, GIFs or special emojis.

3. Create and invest in native digital economies: You can use your Community Points to buy Reddit Coins that only work in the subreddit.

4. Community rewards: Moderators and content creators earn Points by contributing to the community or tip content creators that have a crypto vault (= crypto wallet).

5. Unlock special features: Community Points can be used to purchase Special Memberships which give users access to community-themed badges or highlighted usernames.

6. Incentivise better content: Want to see more long-form text posts and comments? Reward this kind of content more. Want to see fewer low-effort memes? Give out fewer Points for them. 

7. Voting & Polls: Subreddits can create polls where votes are weighted according to how many Points users have earned in the community. Instead of seeing only the loudest comments, measure how long-term members actually feel and use this mechanism to evolve how your community makes decisions.

8. Prizes: Community Points can be prizes for community events, such as a trivia thread or to thank Special Members when they make a post.

9. Tokenised communities: Each subreddit creates its own Community Points token, with a custom name and symbol. These tokens live on the blockchain, which means they are owned and controlled fully by the community.

Community Points are the first step towards a different future for online communities. These tokens live on the blockchain, which means they are truly owned by the community. Over time, your community will benefit from even greater control and independence — on and off of Reddit.

Reddit reportedly filed for an IPO in December 2021 with a valuation of USD 15 billion. Will be interesting to see how tokenised communities reconcile with traditional IPOs on national stock exchanges in the future... Reddit shareholders include:

- Conde Nast's parent company Advance Publications
- Sam Altman (CEO of Open AI)
- Marc Andreessen
- Peter Thiel
- Snoop Dog
- Tencent
- Fidelity Investments

USDC is less speculative than the US-Dollar (M2) - the State of the USDC Economy

Hackers are using ChatGPT now

like any other tool, in the wrong hands it could be used for nefarious purposes; and cybersecurity researchers at Check Point say the users of underground hacking communities are already experimenting with how ChatGPT might be used to help facilitate cyber attacks and support malicious operations. 

OpenAI's terms of service specifically ban the generation of malware, which it defines as "content that attempts to generate ransomware, keyloggers, viruses, or other software intended to impose some level of harm". It also bans attempts to create spam, as well as use cases aimed at cybercrime.
However, analysis of activity in several major underground hacking forums suggests that cyber criminals are already using ChatGPT to develop malicious tools – and in some cases, it's already allowing low-level cyber criminals with no development or coding skills to create malware. 

Elon Musk wants to get to Mars as soon as possible. One of his first employees at SpaceX, Tom Mueller, is focused on another destination: the moon.

Mueller—who founded his own startup, Impulse Space, in 2021 after retiring from SpaceX—recently announced that Impulse’s first ever vehicle, the Mira, will head into outer space this October by hitching a ride on one of SpaceX’s Falcon rockets. Mueller knows the Falcon well: In his 20 years at SpaceX, he developed the Merlin engine that still hurls SpaceX rockets into the sky.

Now Mueller heads one of a budding group of startups hoping to follow in the footsteps of SpaceX, whose pioneering reusable rockets have made it more affordable to get into space.

Must Read: another comprehensive summary of the current state of Web3, Blockchain & Crypto across a number of domains (NFTs, Exchanges, Enterprise, DeFi, and much more)

Rejolut a have created another banger of a report, covering almost every possible corner of Web3 - although if any were missed, please let us know and we'll add them in for next time.

If you're looking to set your 2023 Web3 strategy, or just catching up on the current state of the art, this is a great resource to go through, with 184 pages of content.

The report includes a review and/or forecast for:
- The Web3 market globally
- Leading Web3 projects, L1s and L2s
- NFTs
- Tokenisation
- Marketplaces
- Metaverse
- Enterprise Use Cases
- Notable Hacks in 2022

...and a forecast for 2023 across a number of areas...

Several leaders write about their hopes for AI in 2023, including finding key missing pieces that will enable algorithms to reason, building a personal data timeline, improving AI processes, discovering new principles for explainability, and using generative AI for active learning. 

Yoshua Bengio wants to develop new architectures that can discover and reason with high-level concepts, rather than just brute force the learning process by scaling up existing models’ data and compute. 

Alon Halevy envisions AI capturing massive amounts of data from your daily life -- photos, browsing, purchases -- and fusing it into a personal timeline that helps you track and achieve your goals, while preserving privacy. 

Douwe Kiela points out key directions: Multimodality, grounding, and interaction so AI understands us better; alignment, attribution, and uncertainty to make models safer; data-centric AI to improve scaling; and better ways to evaluate AI models. 

Been Kim discusses AI explainability. AI has taken an engineering-centric approach, where researchers devise techniques via trial and error, and she urges developing fundamental scientific principles that make explanations more trustworthy and accurate. 

Reza Zadeh sees generative AI bringing progress to active learning, where a system picks its own examples to be labeled to improve the data. With generative AI, he sees a potential revolution in algorithms generating new data to request to be labeled.

⚡️ The road to the open metaverse is becoming a highway. Linux Foundation launches Open Metaverse Foundation to move the metaverse to reality

Linux Foundation has established the Open Metaverse Foundation (OMF) to create the open source software and standards for an open metaverse.

The goal is to provide a collaboration space for diverse industries to work on developing open source software and standards for an inclusive, global, vendor-neutral, and scalable metaverse, said Royal O’Brien, executive director of the OMF.

Many thought-leading organizations and open-source communities have joined as founding members to support the effort to bring this vision to life.

These include the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Futurewei, GenXP, Hyperledger Foundation, LF Edge & Networking, Open Voice Network and Veriken, among others. These constituents bring years of knowledge and experience to address initiatives spanning artificial intelligence (AI), cloud and edge computing, digital assets, transactions, identity, networking, simulations, security, and more.
“We’re still in the early days of the vision for an open Metaverse, and we recognize that many open source communities and foundations are working on vital pieces of this iterative puzzle,” said O’Brien. “While the challenges may seem daunting, I’m energized by the opportunities to collaborate with a broad, global community to bring these pieces together as we transform this vision into reality.”

The mission of OMF is to foster a strong community of developers, engineers, academics and thought leaders who will solve the difficult challenges of building the open metaverse through open source software and open specifications that enable portability and interoperability for an open, global, scalable world, which supports interactive and immersive experiences for the benefit of any individual or industry.

There are a lot of things to work out. And so it’s not clear when the work will be done or how many versions of it will be built. Will the chipmakers agree on common formats so that the standard software will run across all hardware platforms? That’s an example of work to be done.

Has Uniswap Labs turned into a derivatives exchange/MTF in its V3 release ?

From a taker standpoint, Uniswap V3 has brought more liquidity, and expectation of concentrated liquidity at market price, hence less slippage. The Uniswap V3 liquidity data confirms the achievement on that intent.

However, many have compared UniV3 position to the liquidity pool microstructure an equivalent of a limit order, with the ability to concentrate the liquidity a market maker provides to the pool.

The data shows another story when one deciphers the liquidity mechanics of Uniswap V3 :

👉 when a maker creates a position, defined by an upper and lower tick, they provide both tokens as per the constant AMM. This dual sided constituants makes it that they know ahead of time that if market price goes at or below lower tick, the position will shift towards being 100% token A and vice versa if market price shifts towards upper tick, the position will shift to 100% token B. The position is never filled per se or partially field, it's a perpetual one until decision is made to close it.

🤔 so basically, if market goes down, you'll end up holding A, if it goes up you end up holding B. The initial balance is calculated based on both your limit vs market price. In other words, the market maker is long B, short A respectively at two strike prices.

🧐 the initial balance of the position is calculated based on the above. And then it will be rebalanced depending on market price movements towards the limits (strikes). So ... the initial balance is nothing else than a bilateral initial margin call (100%) and the atomic rebalancing events ar each market price movements, atomic margin calls at each position level between the underlying long/short positions.

😯 In other words, from a market maker standpoint, UniV3 is an cleared options market, with clearing being done atomicly at each position level automatically as market moves. Clearing rules enforce a 100% initial margin call.

🤯 when market price falls below lower strike or above upper strike, the position is "out of range" and not exposed to swaps any longer. Basically... the position is out of the money (remember, option market). This allows also to create one sided positions (short only, long only) - since if market price is below lower tick, initial balance of the position will be 100% token A (resp. token B on the upper tick side).

🤓 Conclusion : UniswapV3 is a spot market from taker standpoint, but a collateralized long strangle option market from maker standpoint.

Takers and Makers are not exposed to the same risks. Uniswap achieves this by making Takers swaps tap into the collateral of the Makers options positions. In turn margin calls are triggered, to match the imbalance in hedge. What defi calls Impermanent Loss on Univ3 is actually the Delta1 position hedging cost on the LP side, since they are Options LPs.