GM! It's been another interesting overwhelming crazy absolutely bonkers week(s) in web3. Welcome to your Monday digest from Layer3, and here's what we'll cover:

• The rise and fall of FTX and SBF: Some tidbits you may have missed

• Eli from Chapter One: Hypercerts: Introducing exits to the funding of public goods

• Massive performance updates on Layer3 - we're faster than ever

• Featured community: Mean Finance

Sarah at Layer3

Your Web3 Briefing 📝

An analysis of what you missed in web3 over the past week

On FTX and SBF....Where to Begin?

If you don't live under a rock, you've probably seen the news about FTX. In a spectacular series of events that was nothing short of what would probably be considered a very good Netflix or Hulu docuseries special, FTX, the world's second largest centralized cryptocurrency exchange, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and collapsed nearly overnight.

The balance sheets were looking so sus that even CZ from Binance, who was originally set to acquire FTX after selling his FTT stake just a few days prior, turned his nose and said no. Maybe he got a whiff of those Bahamian Beanbags.

So instead of recapping what happened — you know, the fact that FTX's somewhat fishy trading arm, Alameda Research, was completely overleveraged and f**king around with customer deposits, fooling both sophisticated investors and retail alike — I'll just provide a special series of fun little details you may have missed instead.

1) FTX had access to nearly every crypto-related round

Aptos, Solana, Maple Finance, MagicEden, Lido. Spot your faves.

2) Caroline Ellison (former CEO of Alameda) revealed to have a private Tumblr

Pour one out for the Tumblr girlies. Caroline's secret Tumblr just dropped, and it's about as weird as you think.

3) FTX "hacked" for over $400 million

Hacked or insider job? Your guess is as best as mine.

4) FTX owes its biggest creditor over $226m and *gulp* over $3bn total

Where's all that money gone, Sam?

Maybe here? 

Oh, crypto Twitter. You truly never fail to deliver on the drama. 

Sarah's Recommended Reads: Hypercerts and Public Goods

Welcome to Sarah's Recommended Reads! Here, I'll be summarizing well-written articles or threads by web3 thinkers and builders that you should know about.

Up today is @Eli_Qian on Eigenlayer. Hyperstructures, Hyperscaling, and now Hypercerts? What does it all mean? Eli from Chapter One explains: Hypercerts are a way to fund public goods and a tool to build impact reward systems. 

How do they work? In the traditional world of startups, founders and investors are lured by the idea of multi-million dollar exits. These exits don't exist yet for nonprofits, open-source projects, and research.

But what if you could create a similar incentive structure within impact markets, where you could invest in a project and be rewarded based on how much public good it created? This is where Hypercerts come in. Projects like Protocol Labs are already building infrastructure with Hypercerts — or in their own words, carbon credits but on any impact vector.

Hypercerts maximize impact by rewarding projects retroactively for observable outcomes. Instead of grants, Hypercerts create recurring income streams for a founder of a public goods project who would otherwise be less incentivized to continue.

You can read more in his thread here.

What else you should know

• Coinbase shares hit all-time low Monday as centralized exchanges deal with FTX fallout

• Senate committee to hold FTX-related hearing in December

• Index Coop: DeFi is the answer, but we need to be better at communicating it

• NFT marketplace X2Y2 will start enforcing royalties

What we've been BUIDLing 🏗️

Our website is loading faster than ever!

As usual, our devs have been hard at work behind the scenes to make our infrastructure scalable and optimized for future performance. You may have noticed a few glitches from here to there, including a momentary disappearance of your leaderboard ranking (it's back now), but it's all been in service of trying to make Layer3 harder faster better stronger for our ever-growing user base.

And well... it finally worked! We found an optimization where we've brought down our CPU usage significantly during our big Quest launches, so that you'll never get stuck doing a Quest again. Why not give it a whirl?

🛣️ 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 Feature: Mean Finance

Our featured community of the week is Mean Finance!

Mean Finance is a protocol that enables users to Dollar Cost Average (DCA) with ERC20s, with their preferred period frequency.

We’ve created a series of Quests in collaboration with Mean Finance so that you can experience the magic of non-custodial DCAing. A perfect investment strategy in the current environment, and if you don't want centralized entities controlling your crypto/

Tune into our Twitter Spaces with Mean Finance on Wednesday to learn more!

Thanks for reading!

Join our Discord and follow us on Twitter to stay up-to-date on the latest Bounties, communities, and more!

That's all for this week! Until next time, frens.

Cheers,

Sarah at Layer3

Let us know how we did👇