Chain Reaction - 29th August 2022
The education train keeps rolling
Howdy folks, your Captain here for another weekly update and this one fall’s right on my birthday so no doubt I’ll be out and about right now enjoying some time with the family. So, luckily I wrote this earlier and scheduled it. I'll be celebrating with family today and counting a certain number of candles (more than 30 and less than 50 haha). It's important to take time to be with loved ones even if web3 can seem all encompassing so make sure to rest and take breaks whenever you can.
It’s been an amazing past week we’ve had with some awesome events around the country and a lot to learn from the ones I was witness to.
Events
Adelaide kicked things off on Wednesday with a fantastic networking session at our first ever Aus DeFi event there. It was led by Simon and Jason, our chapter leads there and whilst small to begin with, we know that from little things, big things grow and that is exactly how Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane started out.
It was back to Sydney with 2 events on Thursday that our members attended with State of Play at Immutable and the 7th Annual Fintech Awards.
For the former, we had Liya Dashkina and I host a few of the panels and it was thanks to the team at Paprika for bringing this together. There were some amazing learnings which I shared on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6968733718429519872/ (and if you’re not on LinkedIn then please scroll to the end for a repeat of the list).
For the Fintech Awards, the winners of the crypto portion ended up being Zerocap and we had Pras from their team show up to accept the award with Katrina Ali from our association awarding it and Leo Luk (an OG of this group also there to support the evening).
It was also a busy week of events across the board with 5 events (not even including the Fintech Awards) going on around Australia on Thursday and DAO Under having an event on the Friday (which we sadly didn’t have in the calendar - next time!).
Full calendar is here for those who want to check it out: https://tinyurl.com/web3calendarAU
Finally, we also put out 2 of the videos from our events from the previous week with the Melbourne Aus DeFi event recording here (thanks to Sensand):
and some highlights from the Female Leaders in Web3 event in Brisbane here:
and a quick little gallery run through from our Creative Open event with Northern Beaches Council that was on that week too.
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It was a massive week of flights going Sydney —> Melbourne —> Sydney —> Brisbane —> Sydney in 3 days, but all well worth it to spread the word on what we’re doing.
Check out the end of this newsletter for our events next week.
News
This week we saw more discussions post Tornado Cash. Some interesting points posed during the week such as the corollary of showing what it takes to bring down a protocol (full Bankless video in the tweet below).
And an argument that the dumb regulation might not have really been that dumb
Back home and we saw positive news with Treasury announcement of a token mapping exercise:
https://coingeek.com/australia-to-carry-out-token-mapping-ahead-of-digital-assets-consultation/
and somewhat parallel to that is this piece from the US showing GameFi developers could face jail time and fines if they don’t build their protocols in accordance to legal restrictions. The rules being drafted for the Responsible Financial Innovation Act would see many cryptocurrencies as securities (ETH would be a commodity though and under lighter CFTC purview). Important over there that the web3 developer community speaks up and offer their views about this otherwise the industry gets legislated to death.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/gamefi-investors-should-get-ready-for-a-big-us-crackdown
That’s why over here we’ve put our hat in the ring to collate responses from our community to then see what we can do to pull it all together into a cohesive piece back to Treasury and help provide a voice to the community of builders and others interested in web3. If you’re interested, the form is here in this Google Doc https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScXxlO5NJw4SWU3OlQMkEbgBlaLQvyt8znFSI6yZRLO1Vq1cw/viewform
In other news there was a Galaxy Digital report on NFTs and how they don’t convey the ownership qualities that owners might expect them to and the only one that seems to be giving some semblance of actual rights (amongst the top NFT projects) is the World of Women one - more here:
Finally, we saw further centralisation risk highlighted by CoinTelegraph with Hetzner, a major provider of infrastructure announcing it would no longer support crypto related activities. As long as AWS stay around we should be okay but let’s see.
Data
DeFi protocols took a slight step back over the 7 days to Friday 26th August (7:44pm AEST) according to data on https://defillama.com/. This adds to the further need for us to continue building and asking the tough questions about projects we’re reviewing or working on.
Further lessons from the State of Play event
Please note, am not attributing these to any individuals, these are a mix of conversations before, during and after as well as some of my own thoughts. Think of it as an ideas mixer not too dissimilar to Tornado Cash (ha!):
✅ DAOs are not much different to coops we’ve had for hundreds of years and we still have a lot of issues with how we coordinate with each other.
✅Democracy - it’s a crappy tool at times - but it’s the best we’ve got
✅Many things can be put on a blockchain but the question is, should they? Blockchain and tokens for the sake of it is not good
enough
✅DAOs can be a bad idea for startups because if the goal is to grow and have an exit strategy, DAOs are not necessarily built for
that
✅DAOs can be useful though - just need to make sure that the goal is fit for purpose with a more community owned organisation
✅Developers and organisations in web3 should see The Merge as positive - it pushes the line of continued innovation forward and
whilst this brings competition, it makes the space more mainstream
✅Whilst folks may complain that policy struggles to keep up with innovation - perhaps this need to be looked at as a feature not a
bug
✅Making laws through enforcement actions can lead to more negative outcomes in future - rather than punishing bad actors we inhibit the good ones even more
✅NFTs as lauded as they are may likely be the gateway drug that makes web3 more mainstream
✅Token mapping and other government initiatives are
more important than you think and the community voice is needed here
✅We need better coordination of community view to go back to regulators with as opposed to a scatter-gun / disorganised approach
Events next week
A big week for us with the StarkNet event we’re sponsoring as NotCentralised at the hub on Tuesday 30th August - https://www.meetup.com/australian-defi-association/events/287416963/
and on the 31st August, it’s the last Wednesday of the month so that means it’s the Aus DeFi meetup too - invite is here: https://www.meetup.com/australian-defi-association/events/287586868/
Anyway, that’s it for this newsletter. Hope you’re staying safe (and warm) out there. Until next week!
Hey cap, quite a good summary as usual. Wow, so many happening’s and ADA is rolling on majestically 🎊🎉