The Week in Web3

Author

Sarah from Layer3
May 09, 2022

“We all need to switch to web3 social to keep our freedom of speech."

— Stani Kulechov, founder of Aave Protocol, in response to Youtube censoring major crypto creators including Bankless, Gabriel Haines, and Optimism

GM lovely Contributoooors and welcome to our newly revamped newsletter!

Instead of two newsletters on Monday and Friday, we’ll now be sending you one every Monday, packed with your weekly digest of web3 news, Layer3 updates, community features, and all the good stuff.

Your Web3 Briefing 📝

A roundup of the biggest Web3 headlines over the last week

Haun Ventures leads $50M fundraise in Zora Labs

After debuting Haun Ventures in March, Katie Haun’s new venture firm has led its first deal in Zora Labs. The $50 million funding round values the company at $600 million.

Zora is an NFT marketplace, but more importantly, it’s an open protocol that allows anyone to launch independent NFT collections, marketplaces, and experiences.

“The future of the internet needs Zora—a hyperstructure that can “run for free and forever, without maintenance, interruption, or intermediaries.” — Sam Rosenblum, Investor @ Haun Ventures

In cofounder Jacob Horne’s words, Zora is a “hyperstructure”: a new type of product infrastructure that’s native to web3.

Terra’s UST Stablecoin loses its peg, LUNA falls 10%

UST, an algorithmic stablecoin, briefly lost its peg on Saturday and hit a low of $0.9857 against USDT. While this was not the first depeg in the history of UST, it was the first time it has lost its peg since it started to build out its Bitcoin and Avalanche reserves.

While the reasons for the depeg are still unclear, a series of major withdraws from Anchor Protocol and liqudity pools on Curve were reported over the weekend, including a $150 million liquidity withdrawal from Terra creators Terraform labs.

In other words...

What else you should know

What we've been BUIDLing 🏗️

The section of the newsletter dedicated to the real heroes of Layer3 aka the devs

We’ve had a hugely productive week at our company offsite last week in London! If you’ve visited our platform recently, you may have noticed a new onboarding flow that we’ve built for our users...

If you completed the flow, you would have also been eligible for 300 XP on our platform.

P.S. Keep your eyes out for a new product that’s launching tomorrow. We can’t wait to show you what’s in store.

🛣️ Stay up to speed on what we're building: Take a look at our roadmap to see what we've been cooking at Layer3, and a preview of what’s to come.

🚢 And if you want to help decide what we ship next: You can submit a feature request here and vote on your favorites! Some top community requests have already made it onto our roadmap.

Community Spotlight 🔍

A weekly spotlight on some of our favorite DAOs, communities, and L3 community contributors

Featured Community

What: We’re helping DAOs incentivizing governance. 1inch is a distributed decentralized finance (DeFi) network for various protocols across multiple chains, including Ethereum, Avalanche, Polygon, Optimism, and Arbitrum.

5 Days of Layer3

What: We wanted to make the contributor experience as simple as 1-2-3, where you can go from saying gm in a Discord to contributing seamlessly to your favorite community. So we launched a product with our users.

If you were active in the Layer3 Discord, you got an early preview and experience of a feature we’ll be launching to the public tomorrow by participating in #5DaysOfLayer3. That’s the power of organic, community-centric marketing

Users who completed all 5 days were eligible to receive 50 $USDT, a commemorative NFT, early access to our product launch, a POAP, and a “Superstar” Discord role.

Raffle winners will be decided randomly when we launch our new feature tomorrow! 🎉

Web3 101: Bridges💡

Each week we’ll cover an essential web3 concept in simple terms. This week we’re looking at bridges ✨

What are bridges and what do I use them for?

Bridges, otherwise known as cross-chain bridges or blockchain bridges, connect one blockchain network to the other. They allow for transfers of tokens or arbitrary data across different chains.

How do they work?

The most common function for bridges is token transfer. Through a bridge, users can transfer coins from one blockchain to another, in order to use the coin on a different network (e.g. wanting to use BTC on ETH). The crypto doesn’t actually “move” from network to network in this process—instead, the amount is locked in a smart contract, and a representation of the coin is created on the new network you want your tokens transferred to.

How do you bridge an asset?

Each chain has its own compatible bridge. You can bridge ETH to Layer2 solutions like Optimism or Arbitrum using Arbitrum’s official bridge or DApps like Hop Protocol. Other cross-chain solutions include Multichain and Wormhole.

Puzzle of the Week 🧩

Solve this and share it on Twitter by posting the completed puzzle and tagging @layer3xyz for 5 $USDT. Enter here.

Want to get your hands on a Layer3 NFT, mug or even a much coveted hoodie?

PS👇

Join our Discord to stay up-to-date on the latest DAOs and contests!

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That's all for today! Thoughts on today's email?