Issue #3 🕸️ These apes be taxing

gm frens and welcome to spinning the web3, a newsletter woven together with web3 news, breakdowns, and chatter from this burgeoning space.

Yes, I know. It’s been a while. I’m realizing consistency is not my best suit. I’ve also been BUSY. This tweet says it all.

Anyway, I’m back, y'all! In the spirit of Women’s Month ending (I can’t believe it’s already April) and the toxic male-masculinity hell hole the crypto space can sometimes feel like, here’s a short and sweet guide to how you can treat your female and non-men counterparts better:

Pay us equally and fairly. We know when you’re skimping on the paychecks!

Give us equity. We deserve some skin in the game we’re helping to build.

Seek us out instead of waiting for us to come to you. One of my biggest pet peeves is seeing all these supposedly woke crypto men complaining on Twitter about the lack of women in the space or asking where we are. We’re here doing some cool shit. You just gotta start paying attention.

Don’t underestimate us. I think this one is pretty self-explanatory.

Ask us for our opinions. And when we share, listen to us! Nothing worse than pretending you care about our opinions because it makes you look good. That’s performative AF.

These taxes are mighty taxing. It’s not a great time to be a tax-payer in India if you’re a blockchain enthusiast. In a major blow to India’s crypto community, the Indian government has implemented new tax rules for all sorts of cryptocurrency trading.

Under the controversial new regulations, Indians will begin paying a capital gains tax of 30% on crypto transactions. In addition to this, Indians buying or selling crypto will also have to pay a 1% Tax Deduced at Source (TDS), as well as taxes on crypto gifts with no ability to take deductions for losses.

The tax laws come into effect on April 1 (tomorrow!) and the TDS measures will begin on July 1.

The Indian crypto community expressed outrage and disappointment, with many claiming the new tax regulations would prompt people to move out of India and set up camp in more tax-friendly territory to continue building.

There is, in fact, already a massive crypto brain drain happening in India, primarily to neighboring tax haven Dubai. Polygon and ZepPay have already set up bases in the city, and this appears to only be the beginning.

As a fellow Indian myself, I’ve got quite a few thoughts on these regulations. I think it’s tragic that the Indian government is passing laws that are disregarding a market worth over $3 trillion. There is an insane amount of innovation happening in India, but the pioneers developing the space now have all the more incentive to leave India and build elsewhere.

I might just follow suit.

Aping into a monopoly. Last week, Yuga Labs raised $450 million with a $4 billion valuation in a funding round led by VC giant a16z. What is Yuga Labs and why can’t people stop talking about it?

Yuga Labs is the company behind the $3 billion Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) collection, which consists of 10,000 ape-themed NFTs, or non-fungible tokens. The apes each have different traits and characteristics.

The collection, like most PFP-based (profile picture) projects, was inspired by CryptoPunks, one of the first NFT projects ever created.

At the time of writing, BAYC’s floor price sits at a cool $362,000. Kinda wild to think about how less than a year ago, these apes were selling for a couple of thousand bucks apiece.

Here’s a great explainer of BAYC’s backstory, if you want to know more about the project.

Anyway, Yuga Labs has introduced ApeCoin ($APE), an ERC-20 token that will be used for utility and governance to further democratize the BAYC community.

So why does all of this matter?

If you’re an NFT enthusiast, it’s likely you’d heard of Yuga Labs even before I launched into that long AF explanation. It’s because Yuga Labs is EVERYWHERE. Just take a look at this graphic from Novum Insights that lists NFT collections by market cap:

I mean, wow. If ever there was a non-fungible monopoly, this would be it.

But is Yuga Lab’s growing control over high-value NFT collections a good thing?

I’d say it’s definitely not a poster-child move towards decentralization when one company controls such a huge share of valuable NFTs. But it’s also worth noting that Yuga Labs has shown some regard for the autonomy of users that own NFTs from their collections. For instance, Yuga Labs announced pretty early on that the intellectual property rights of tokens in the CryptoPunks and Meebits collections will be given to individual token owners as opposed to the creators of the collections.

Axie Infinity’s Ronin Network suffers $625M exploit, making it the largest DeFi attack ever. OpenSea confirms it will start listing Solana NFTs in April. Ukraine legalizes crypto amidst a devastating humanitarian crisis. Trading giant Jane Street backs NEAR-based lending protocol Bastion. Avalanche launches $100 million creator fund with Grimes and web3 platform Op3n. Crypto investor Katie Haun raises $1.5 billion, the largest debut fund ever by a female VC. Former presidential candidate Andrew Yang launches a new DAO dedicated to AAPI issues. Thailand bans crypto as a means of payment.

Every week, I feature cool people from the ecosystem. If you’d like to be featured or know someone awesome to spotlight, send me a DM!

Surprisingly, even after “being in web3” for some time now, I still find it challenging to define what web3 truly is. 

To some people, it is solely about technology such as peer-to-peer networks, distributed ledger technology (blockchain), or smart contracts. Some add the sentiment of using this technology towards privacy, transparency, and decentralization. I have even heard arguments from skeptics that “web3” is a marketing term for blockchain or cryptocurrency. 

To me, web3 is a movement towards building community-owned/operated entities (protocols, DAOs) or utilities (cryptocurrencies, NFTs, tokens, etc.). 

Unfortunately, web3 has a bunch of new terminology and technologies attached to it, such as decentralization, tokens, NFTs, blockchain, wallets, etc. Due to the amount of technical jargon and new ideas, it makes it hard for most people to understand the big picture of web3.

I joined the crypto space by accident in August 2021. I was approached by Decentology CEO and founder, Nik Kalyani, to attend a boot camp to learn Cadence or the programming language of the Flow blockchain. These three weeks would be my first formal introduction to crypto and blockchain development. After the boot camp, I worked briefly as a developer advocate at his company, where I spent time documenting my journey from web2 to web3 development. Currently, I am working as a developer advocate at thirdweb where I help in areas of community and product to help developers build in web3. 

The advice I have for people entering the space personally and professionally would be to keep an open mind to both the positives and criticisms. Let your curiosity guide your research and question absolutely everything- good and bad. 

Shortly, I see many startups and protocols surfacing that will tackle building new platforms, providing developer tooling, and creating efficient & scalable protocols. In the distant future, I think organizations such as DAOs will surface more frequently, cryptocurrency will be widely adopted, and the overall digital and commerce landscape will change in favor of the consumer.

In its current state, web3 faces challenges primarily in mainstream user adoption. Utilities such as NFTs and cryptocurrency are either misunderstood or dismissed. Crypto scams and malicious actors hog the spotlight in the media. The user experience and interfaces for non-technical users are often sub-par. Web3 education is still grass-roots and not widespread in our current educational institutions. There is a mixed vegetable soup of new terminologies that are hard to digest. The list goes on.

I have hopes that over the next decade, we will be able to provide a better experience for both builders and users of web3 technologies.

Being part of a DAO is currently a euphoric experience. If you are part of a DAO at this very point in time, you are shaping a potential option for the way we organize communities. In other words, you are part of history. Currently, my favorite DAO I am involved in is Developer DAO which is led by some incredibly passionate leaders in the Web3 space.

The best part about DAOs is seeing how enthusiastic people are when aligned around a common goal. Having a voice in your DAOs decisions is very empowering. In addition, the unintended networking effect of simply joining a DAO and finding others to build with or recruit is refreshing. 

The worst part of DAOs, I put it very bluntly, is that a lot of DAOs are poorly organized, making it challenging to stay up to date. One of the biggest problems I see with DAOs is efforts to keep up with transparency result in an unintended side effect of information overload. One way to solve this is with improved DAO tooling. I stand by the idea that using Discord and other tools in conjunction should only be a temporary solution till we create better platforms to accommodate DAOs. 

Follow Samina on Twitter (she’s dope).

A few days ago, my sister asked me where she could access all my crypto writing. The truth is I write for a LOT of projects in the space, so the only place I can really gather them all is here or on my website. This section’s for you, Saloni.

That’s it for this week frens! Thanks for tuning in, we’ll see when I publish the next issue 🤡