The Crypto Super Bowl

NounsDAO, the Bitfinex $3.6bn hack, MrBeast and...

Hey there 👋 ,

I don’t usually feature funding announcements, but I had to talk about Alchemy & Polygon. Also, a couple of great threads on the Bitfinex hack & MrBeast’s 3-step framework for growth.

You don’t have to read everything, just skim through what’s interesting for you and reply back with your feedback.

Living In Beta is a digest of interesting things I find each week, and any new posts from me. If this is your first issue, welcome!

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🗞 Articles of the week:

Bud Light's Super Bowl commercial references the Nouns NFT project. Image: Bud Light

One of the most hotly anticipated events of the year is upon us. No, we’re not talking about the Winter Carnival happening in Brixton this weekend…

It’s 🏈 Super Bowl Sunday 🏈 !

I’m not going to pretend I’m nearly as hyped as probably my friends across the Atlantic, nor have I ever watched a Super Bowl Live (it’s past 11pm in the UK on a Sunday night 😴), but even I can recognize it’s a big deal.

Not just for the game itself, either - a lotaaa people tune in solely for the commercials - and this year, a lotaaa people will see crypto take center stage.

One of the most interesting partnerships recently has been between Bud Light & Nouns DAO - Bud Light, of Budweiser fame. Nouns DAO, is an experimental project started in August 2021 on the Ethereum blockchain. The nouns are NFTs based on people, places and things - only one is generated per day and all the art is open-sourced.

Why we invested in Noun #9 from Nouns DAO — Metaversal

With Bud Light introducing a new zero-carb beer line, they wanted to break traditional convention (kudos!) & combine their NFT momentum (they launched an NFT collection themselves in November 2021) with a standout crypto partnership.

My take: While most people won’t even notice this on the big screen, it shows that big brands and crypto projects can play well together - for a project that’s only 6 months old & prides itself on its open-sourced IP, to be playing with a major hitter on a world stage? Not bad.

💸 Alchemy & Polygon raising $$$

Alchemy Data Shows Explosive Growth of Polygon Developer Ecosystem

🧪 Alchemy:

I wouldn’t usually write about a fundraise (because you can find stuff like this anywhere else), but I wanted to give my take on what this means.

First off, Alchemy provides the infrastructure to developers to build apps easily on the Blockchain. After raising in October at a $3.5bn, it’s now valued at $10bn after raising $200m.

I believe the “API economy” is thriving and will continue to grow as we move towards a more software-driven world. I’m very bullish that API-first companies will thrive and even more so when developing Decentralized applications (or “Dapps”) on the Blockchain.

Developers will need easier ways to deploy applications faster & Alchemy sits at the right intersection of these areas. Another that I’m bullish on is ThirdWeb.

🔷 Polygon:

From 0 —> $20bn in 3 years…not bad, not bad.

Polygon solves one of the biggest problems with the blockchain - fees & scaling.

Blockchains sell blocks, and Ethereum’s blocks are EXPENSIVE. The average cost of transacting (e.g. buying your latest JPEG with Ethereum) has shot up to $100+. Imagine having to pay $100 every time you wanted to use your credit card - insane.

To solve this challenge, we have Layer 2’s (or L2s). Polygon is a Layer 2 that’s built on Ethereum to benefit from Ethereum’s network effects, but also add its own level of security and scalability. It also just raised $400m, at a $20bn valuation 🚀.

Polygon seems like it’s one of the standout L2’s, having been on a hiring spree as of late & is launching over 15k NFTs per week on the network.

My take: Last year, over $30bn was ploughed into crypto projects - I’m sure we’re going to see 2022 smash through this, especially with more talent entering the space.

🐦 Tweets of the week:

The ‘hackers’ behind that Bitfinex hack:

I’m very..very reluctant to call them ‘hackers’, especially when I see videos they willingly posted like this:

The TLDR:

  • In 2016, a hacker gained access to Bitfinex and stole 119k of Bitcoin (this is worth around $3.6bn in today’s prices)

  • Bitfinex slashed account balances of their existing customers to stay solvent, with a promise to reimburse them if the funds are ever recovered.

  • The authorities always knew which wallets the funds were in, but never knew who was behind those accounts.

  • The couple behind the accounts attempted to launder the money via purchasing $500 gift cards from Walmart

More to the story in Jack’s thread.

NFT use cases:

A few good examples of how NFTs will be used - here are my top three:

  1. Art —> being able to buy & reward digital artists

  2. Gaming —> In-game NFTs enable gamers to purchase and own their in-game assets (that they can use in OTHER games!)

  3. Identity —> Using single/unique identifiers across multiple products makes our life a lot easier

MrBeast’s 3-part framework for growth:

The 3 key things from a 23-year-old YouTuber with 90m YouTube subscribers:

  1. Capture attention (via thumbnails, titles and a great hook)

  2. Keep attention (he has a 70% watch time from start to end)

  3. Keep quality at 10/10 (control what you can control)

There’s a ton of lessons in Dickie’s thread, so I’d highly recommend reading all the way through.

Until next time

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Until next time,

Fahim