#15 Crypto is Money
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1 Concept 💡
Happy Thanksgiving week everyone 🦃! It’s been a whirlwind of a year — I hope everyone gets a chance to enjoy some downtime with their loved ones. But before you do, let’s quickly touch on what we saw over the past couple weeks:
Sotheby’s accepted live Ethereum (ETH) bidding on Banksy and the US Constitution auctions (the ConstitutionDAO raised 11.6k ETH ($49+ MM USD) in an ultimately failed bid to win — more on that below!)
KrauseHouse, a DAO whose mission is to buy a NBA team (and one I’m a member of!), casually raised 408E.
MadRealities raised 63E as they build the world’s first web3 interactive entertainment channel.
Acala, a DeFi protocol on the PolkaDot (DOT) chain, raised 32.5MM DOT (~$1.28B USD) as a crowdloan via DOT’s parachain auction process.
As the guys over at Bankless wrote about on Friday, every day feels like we’re getting one step closer to crypto realizing its vision of building an alternate financial system and acting as independent money.
Many of us (including myself) got their start in crypto viewing it as a speculative asset whose value was pegged to a local fiat currency (USD, EUR, etc): you didn’t own 5 ETH, you owned $5K USD worth of ETH.
However, as the ecosystem has matured, there’s been an ongoing progression to view crypto as magical Internet money to now serious Internet money. DeFi protocols have billions of dollars locked up in smart contracts to support lending/borrowing/derivatives, companies including MicroStrategy, Square and Tesla hold Bitcoin on their balance sheet, and NFT floor prices are typically referenced in ETH (not USD). In the Krause House Discord server, the chatter on launch day was centered on how much ETH we were raising, not how much USD that mapped into. And DAO treasuries are electing to keep their $$ in ETH, not converting it back into “traditional money”.
We still have a long way to go. Many more people need to be onboarded to web3 + crypto. Gas fees are still outrageously high (see below). Crypto prices are still insanely volatile making it risky for DAOs/business to keep their entire cash reserve in crypto.
And it’s really hard to rewire our brains to think about money that’s not our local currency. But someway, somehow — the vision of crypto (which was and still is mocked by many) feels closer and more real with every passing day. WGMI.
Side note: I’d appreciate it if you could share with atleast 1 other person who might like this!
2 Things On Our Mind 🤔
1. As you may have heard, the ConstitutionDAO lost its bid to buy a copy of the US Constitution, being outlasted by hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin. It’s especially ironic since Citadel (his hedge fund) makes money front-running order flow that they get from RobinHood - here, he front-ran ConstitutionDAO because he knew what their max offer was gonna be.
In crypto-land, it’s all out war between TradFi and DeFi, but the guys over at All-In had a much more nuanced discussion on ConstitutionDAO and the future of DAOs/fundraising which I highly recommend:
2. There was some infighting between the ETH and AVAX (Avalanche is a L1 competitor chain to ETH) crowds on Twitter last wknd. The guys over at Bankless did a great job laid it out here (it should be noted they are on team ETH).
My take: the cult-ish nature of crypto is a feature, not a bug. It allows groups of builders to collectively push forward on ambitions most people would consider insanity. Enjoy the noise - it means there’s passion and progress happening to elevate the entire crypto ecosystem.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
Karthik