What is up good folks of web3? For those who already know all about this, welcome back and for those who are new welcome to this weekly wrap-up of my world in web3 (you can read my bio at the end).
Events
So last week in events we didn’t host any, but we did announce how busy the 2nd half of the month is going to be with 7 events involving the Aus DeFi Association. You can learn more about them in this tweet thread
News
Off to the news and it’s not been great with some local moves making the headlines. After Zipmex made local staff redundant, there was also Immutable, the gaming company sacked 18 staff members from the Gods Unchained gaming project with legal proceedings underway from those sacked staff - https://www.afr.com/technology/sacked-crypto-unicorn-staff-plan-legal-challenge-to-redundancies-20220801-p5b677
These moves aren’t isolated to local companies either with well-known trading firm Robinhood also making staff moves with 23% of employees laid off https://theverge.com/2022/8/2/23289369/robinhood-fires-23-percent-staff-second-round-layoffs
This is on the back of Coinbase layoffs of 18% of their workforce recently - https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/07/21/crypto-layoffs-opensea-blockchaincom-coinbase-gemini-among-firms-forced-to-make-mass-job-cuts/
Let’s put this into context though, it’s not just crypto-related firms suffering but many more in the non-crypto world too
- US biotech Invitae - 1000 workers laid off
- Trading app Robinhood - 1000 workers laid off
- Ride-sharing app Ola - 1000 workers laid off
- Retail platform Shopify - 1000 workers laid off
It seems that not only have crypto firms been seeing share prices correlated to tech and growth-related companies, but the cutbacks are also following suit as well.
We have seen more hacks come out and this week it’s been the Solana ecosystem feeling the pain. Twitter user 0xFoobar lays it out here in this thread -
Elsewhere, we see Michael Saylor was also on the move, out of the CEO office but still at MicroStrategy. He’ll stay on as chairman and focus on buying bitcoin for the firm - https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/08/02/microstrategy-replaces-saylor-as-ceo-with-companys-president-saylor-to-become-executive-chairman/
Meetings-wise and putting my NotCentralised hat on, it’s been quite interesting. A lot of news looks at the dip in prices but what’s been steadily rising is the adoption of firms of people from web2 looking into web3. At the ground level, we see it with the meetups we’ve held which are still packed out as well as in the continued (but slowed) growth of DeFi users https://dune.com/rchen8/defi-users-over-time
A positive of the market downturn is that we’re expunging the crypto space of projects that are only in it to ride the bull markets and can only offer price appreciation as something of value to its user. These projects only do well when more people jump into them and its no wonder the system they run on is called Ponzinomics. It’s a positive because the corollary is that the focus has shifted to seeing more folks building projects that have utility and whilst they were there before, it’s like we can now see the stars because the city lights are being turned off.
With my NotCentralised hat on, we are also helping projects, whether early or mature and showing them ways they can either add or enhance their utility or pivot towards a business model that’s got better longevity to it. This sort of structured projects service is essential in a bear market so feel free to hit up the NotCentralised team here: https://www.notcentralised.com/contact-us
Announcements
Another big thing happened this week and that’s my announcement of coming on board with Hackmakers as an Adviser. They’re a group of well-known folks who come from the world of data science and AI and have grown into a successful web2 business running hackathons for companies like Oracle or the United Nations. They also have an amazing community which saw 4,000 to 5,000 participants in their Innovation Day Hackathon with the UN recently. My role will be to help them navigate the world of web3 and I look forward to seeing them bring their already massive community to web3. It’s interesting as they’re the sort of company that comes in with a massive brand (of the founders and the project) so it’s going to be fun.
My Bio
As mentioned at the start, a bit of bio about me. Real name is Mark Monfort and I’m a TradFi native turned DeFi advocate. Background is in data analytics and research and I’ve applied that to equities, macroeconomics, superannuation and ETFs. Along with co-founders, we created NotCentralised, a web3 venture studio helping folks turn their web3 ideas into reality. We also co-founded the Australian DeFi Association, our community project which now boasts nearly 1,000 members on Discord, 1,500 followers on Twitter and has run events in 5 states. One more hat I wear (because why not, is as co-founder of TradeFlows Labs, a company building various tools to improve how we do commerce (see TradeFlows) as well as how we game (see GameFlows).
Anyway, off to another week of meetings, networking and building. It’s non-stop in this space!