Jan 16, 2022

Web 3.0 and crazy NFT valuations 💸

By Niall Maher • Issue #2 • View online

“It may seem difficult at first, but all things are difficult at first.” ― Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings

OpenSea, a peer-to-peer marketplace for crypto collectables and non-fungible tokens (NFT’s), just got a jaw-dropping valuation of $13.3 billion after raising $300 million in Series C funding.

As a collector of Star Wars merch, growing up playing Pokémon and way too much money spent on League of Legends skins, I see immense value in things like NFT’s.

It’s not just big crypto companies making crazy money…

The artist Mike “Beeple” Winklemann sold the most expensive NFT so far for $69.3 million at an auction in March 2021.

Beeple’s collage, Everydays: The First 5000 Days

So why the heck are people spending so much money?

It’s not the digital art piece (which can be copied and pasted like anything else on the internet) it is the “ownership”.

Since the blockchain is a distributed ledger at its core, you get an unalterable authentication record with the current owner of an artwork.

Replicas of paintings (no matter how expertly crafted or copied) are close to worthless unless they were original. Now, think of the countless copies of the Mona Lisa we see, or the fact that we can look at it online and yet the Lourve has had to house the painting in its largest room because it draws so many people.

We have all seen crazy prices for autographs from celebrities, trading cards and art.

NFT’s take this ownership to the digital realm.

Wait what the f*ck is Web3? 😐

I got you, check out this fun video by Firebase below.

Is Web3 all Hype? Top 10 Web 3.0 Questions & Answers

This week’s articles are from people much more educated on the Web3 and the Crypto space and some of the few pieces that I found that were great on the topics.

🎯 Blog Picks

What Problem Blockchains Actually Solve

15 minutes | The Solution Space

Instead of blindly criticizing the hype, let us look at the actual promises that this technology holds, where it might be useful going forward, and which problems it does not solve by itself.

→ Read the post

An Engineer’s Hype-Free Observations on Web3 (and its Possibilities)

29 minutes | Dave Peck & the PSL Team

The Web3 ecosystem has been variously described as a collective hallucination, a massive grift, an environmental disaster, a decentralized renaissance, and the future of the Internet.

That’s a lot to live up (and down) to.

→ Read the post

Web3 ELI5: What is Web3?

9 mins | Mason Nystrom

In a one-liner – it’s the next era of the Internet. Web 3.0 (commonly called Web3) is a paradigm shift towards a more democratized Internet.

→ Read the post

📚 Resources

Interested in learning how to build this stuff?

#1 Solidity Tutorial & Ethereum Blockchain Programming Course | CryptoZombies

CryptoZombies is The Most Popular, Interactive Solidity Tutorial That Will Help You Learn Blockchain Programming on Ethereum by Building Your Own Fun Game with Zombies — Master Blockchain Development with Web3, Infura, Metamask & Ethereum Smart Contracts and Become a Blockchain Developer in Record Time!

cryptozombies.io • Share

👋 End

A good portion of what I invest in is crypto so I am a fan of the technology but I am cautiously optimistic.

I’ll continue HODLing but I am concerned with the amount of money that is carelessly being invested into projects with no value and by people that have no idea what it all means.

“Hodling” - A misspelling of “holding.” Hodling means “holding a cryptocurrency” for future profits and not selling. The term came from the misspelled “I am hodling” in an early Bitcoin forum when the crypto’s price was dropping. To “hodl” evolved into “hang on for dear life.” The Twitter hashtag #HODLGANG was created for hodlers of cryptocurrencies. - PC Mag

That’s all for now, have a great week my beautiful friends! 👋

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By Niall Maher

A curation of great articles, thoughts on running a tech startup, personal growth and building stuff that people love to use.

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