This is the last newsletter before The Merge and it’s been a week full of awesome talks and events and quite a few things in the news. We also have the Aus Crypto Convention on the Gold Coast this week and more big events next week which you'll see below.
Events
Light on the events this week (which is a good thing) but we did get back on the weekly Twitter Spaces which you can access here
There was also another event I did to follow up on the awesome State of Play event we did at Immutable the other week. If you missed the State of Play event you can check out the following LinkedIn post where I shared some insights of things I learnt from the evening - https://www.linkedin.com/in/markmonfort/recent-activity/shares/ and a reshare on Twitter
In this follow up, I spoke with @comeandzee @friendlyjamison and @lowercaseboot about what it’s been like to build communities in this space and where we are headed. We spoke about how myself and my co-founders got into the web3 space, how we’re building the community, more about the merge and the future of blockchain tech for NFTs and real-world usage.
Later in the week, I also got to listen in to the latest LawFi DAO community discussion where I caught the tail-end of it. What is clear is the need to get connected across the community when it comes to discussing regulation whether its across academics, corporates, regulators, builders and devs and degens and more. This is especially important given the nature of the rapidly changing possibilities of what blockchain can provide. We also spoke about whether we can enforce things without centralised authorities. Personally, I think we can with collaboration/reputation layers which give protocols, through the use of technology, an ability to better police itself.
Also last week, we saw members in the media with @0xCam (Cam Crossley) on the Tapping into Crypto podcast (with Swyftx) talking about the Ethereum Merge. Big brain stuff so check it out here
Upcoming events
As mentioned at the start, we have the Aus Crypto Convention on the Gold Coast. We have a panel at the end of the first day talking about how we can do better in DeFi.
Also next week, there's a tonne of events on all on Wednesday. This includes:
Chainalysis event brought to you by Aus DeFi / NotCentralised
NotCentralised is helping a new NFT launch that night too
Hit us up if you want more details on all of this.
News
Over to the news and it was interesting to see calls for more crackdowns from ASIC over what some in TradFi (in this case Saxo Bank) have called out over its financial stability (even though traditional markets have also taken massive hits). Whilst critiques will always be levelled at the web3 space, they are not always without merit. There’s been much to improve in web3 and hopefully we get the kind of regulation that is accommodative to the space (lest we stifle innovation). Full article here: https://www.afr.com/markets/equity-markets/regulators-too-slow-to-kill-the-crypto-beast-saxo-bank-ceo-20220902-p5bewv
Further on ASIC, its not just crypto because we saw a crackdown on many other things receiving crackdown notices such as binary options (https://www.afr.com/companies/financial-services/government-grants-asic-wish-to-ban-binary-options-20220905-p5bfg5) and low-cost brokerages (https://www.afr.com/markets/equity-markets/asic-takes-aim-at-robinhood-style-brokers-20220831-p5be7m) as well as insurers.
On another local note, Commonwealth Treasury released draft legislation (up for public consultation) to avoid treating Bitcoin as foreign currency for tax purposes. Details can be found here https://treasury.gov.au/consultation/c2022-314572
As we see more need for crypto on-ramps to be created and help make this space mainstream, we saw the startup Slide raise $12.3m from Polychain Capital and Framework Ventures - https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/09/08/slide-raises-123m-to-connect-new-crypto-users-to-web3-apps/
Ratings are getting ever more important in crypto as without a centralised authority, the ability to trust has been dispersed. There are projects like Rated Labs which are looking to solve the validation process on blockchains to understand the trustworthiness of validators on a system. They raised $2.5m in seed funding recently. More here https://thedefiant.io/rated-labs-validator-rep
An interesting conundrum is being driven in the NFT markets with X2Y2 offering optional royalties for NFTs you purchase. Whilst NFTs were seen as a godsend to artists who had to fight to get paid in web2, many argue that making tips optional just recreates the existing system we have right now. On the other hand, we can see why lowering fees or making them optional is a way to help guarantee more volumes as the NFT marketplace wars play out, especially in a bear market. What is interesting is that this gives people (in this case buyers) more options. In an ecosystem where optionality is a feature, it calls into question whether creators who embraced the optionality given here, will continue now that its options that may work against them. More here https://thedefiant.io/nft-markets-betray-web3-royalties
Since it is Merge week, there’s been a tonne of great videos out there including this one from the crew at Bankless
Data
We saw a bit of positive movement as we head towards the Ethereum merge with data from CoinGecko showing green across most of the top 10 cryptos.
Next, we go to Dune Analytics to see how DeFi users have grown over time. They show the overall growth across DeFi protocols in aggregate
as well as how this looks for individual protocols.
You can see which ones have kept steady pace and which ones are slowing down in usage. More details here https://dune.com/rchen8/defi-users-over-time
Next time we catch up, we’ll have seen the merge completed and the Gold Coast Crypto Convention will have been completed. No doubt, plenty of photos and videos will come out from that. If you’re heading up, it would be great to see you at our meetup at the end of day 1 (https://www.meetup.com/australian-defi-association/events/288240706/ and the full agenda here https://auscryptocon.com/agenda/) or during other events going on that weekend.
Have a great week!