Here are the top web3 stories from this week.
Market Update
The Hits Keep Coming
📉 Voyager Digital is the most recent bankruptcy in the Crypto sector. The DeFi lender had big exposure to Three Arrow Capital. From the look of it way too much of Voyager’s balance sheet was concentrated with the failed hedge fund. Another struggling Crypto lender Vauld seems to have found a white knight with Nexo buying the firm. I expect a ton more of these announcements as many DeFi projects were poorly designed to make nonrecourse loans against risky assets. Lastly, a great quick read on how North Korean hackers scammed an Axie Infinity engineer with a fake job offer to gain access to his computer and steal $600MM.
New Products
NFT Gaming Continues to Attract Capital
🕹️ NFT gaming is on a hot streak with significant venture capital money flowing in. Planetarium Labs closed a $32MM Series A for their fantasy game, led by web3 gaming leader Animoca Brands. London-based game developer Cauldron added $6.6MM for Pixar of web3 gaming. Konvoy Ventures raised $150MM for their new gaming fund with a big focus on blockchain gaming.
Reddit to Add NFTs
🌐 Social media giant Reddit announced they will be rolling out NFT avatars. The company has partnered with Ethereum layer 2 Polygon on this project, which will allow users to purchase new profile pictures from a Reddit marketplace. Reddit has brought in independent artists to create the NFT avatars, as opposed to allowing existing NFTs to be used on their platform.
Content to Check Out
Balaji on the Network State
🎙️ One of my favorite futurist thinkers is Balaji S. Srinivasan was on the Tim Ferriss podcast this week. Balaji was CTO at Coinbase and then General Partner at A16Z. Now he’s a VC investor with a big focus on web3. He just published a book The Network State, where he talks about Crypto communities forming a new type of country. I always feel smarter after listening to Balaji speak.
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