This Week in Web3 | 1.9.23

GM. Happy New Year from Layer3! After a short holiday break, we're back with what happened this week in web3. Before scrolling down, though, make sure you check out what we got done last year with our newly published Year-End Report!

Here's what we'll cover:

• Going bonkers over $BONK: The dawn of the Solana memecoin

• Chinese computer researchers claim to have cracked encryption with quantum computing

• Product updates from our CEO & Co-Founder, Dariya

• What we got done in 2022

Sarah at Layer3

WEB3 DIGEST

What the hell is $BONK?

Another memecoin has entered the spotlight, this time on Solana.

Modeling itself after Shiba Inu Coin, $BONK is the newest memecoin phenomenon that has seen an astronomical increase in speculative activity. After initially airdropping 50% of the coin's supply to active users on Solana, the coin saw over 4 million transactions over the past four days, with more than 117,456 users holding $BONK at the time of writing.

Despite the momentum, however, BONK's developers have scrambled to thwart the coin's downward price trend. As part of an effort to decrease overall BONK supply, the BONK team burned over 1 billion BONK on Jan 4, with 5 trillion BONK being burned just one day after that. But it hasn't really helped. As with most memecoins, BONK's gains of over 2,015% last week have largely disappeared, with the coin losing most of its value in just a couple of days.

Despite BONK's sharp downturn, the increase in wallet activity may have just given Solana a boost, with $SOL up approximately 47% in just the past week. Maybe memecoins haven't lost their place as a user acquisition strategy after all.

INFORMATION DIET

Sarah's Recommended Reads

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. 

This week, we're providing a much-needed recap thread of 2022 that'll leave you with a smile. Instead of the countless disasters, failures, and regulation that crypto has faced over the past year, we wanted to provide something a bit more lighthearted.

Because let's face it: web3 is hilarious, and sometimes we just have to appreciate that more.

Let's not forget this banger of a stream early in the bull market:

The heights of the corporate web3 bandwagon, and a surprise package:

And of course, my own personal favorite: Kevin. Ah, the days where you could drop an NFT project with a 3ETH mint price, all without even showing the sh*tty pixel art you commissioned from some guy on Fiverr. How we will miss those times.

What was your favorite web3 moment of 2022? Let us know by voting in the poll 👇

Quick Hits

• Crypto exchange Huobi to cut 20% of its staff as ‘bear market’ strikes – link

• Chinese Researchers Claim They Cracked Encryption With Quantum Computers – link

• Mastercard launches web3-focused artist incubator with Polygon – link

• SEC and EDNY to investigate Barry Silbert of DCG for internal transfers – link

Product Updates from Dariya

Hey everyone!

A couple weeks ago, we launched a new feature that allows our quests to reward Discord roles. We know that many of our users are active on Discord, so we wanted to give them a way to showcase their progress on Layer3 within Discord communities. Now, when users complete quests on Layer3, they can earn Discord roles that display their achievements and signify the milestones they’ve hit in web3.

These roles are a fun and visible way for users to show off their skills and engage with others on Discord. We hope this new feature will make it even more rewarding for our users to learn about and explore web3 on Layer3. And for community leads reading this, Discord roles are a great way to reward & engage your user base. Stay tuned for more updates and quest releases in the coming weeks!

And remember, we love meeting our users. Shoot me a DM @dariyaxyz!

— Dariya, Co-Founder and CEO

What we got done in 2022

2022 was a hell of a year for web3 and a huuuuuge year for us. In case you missed it, here's a quick highlight reel of what we got done this year.

• Grew from 0 to 100,000+ monthly active users

• Grew from 0 to 30+ paying customers

• Grew from 3 to 9 full-time team members spread across Europe, Asia, and the US

• Grew a community of 87,000 Discord Members, 20,000 newsletter subscribers, and 184,000 twitter followers

• Built influence for where users spend time on-chain, over 10 million unique on-chain interactions attributed directly to Layer3

• Built a no-code tool to create powerful product stories through Quests

• Built a comprehensive web3 user loyalty and retention system with token, NFT, XP, Discord Role, and achievement rewards

• Built dozens of other features including a token reward distributor, a gasless NFT minting system, enterprise facing dashboard and tools, a robust notification system, and in-platform sybil protection

We've learned so much from building out the alpha version of our product to what you know it as today. We're also proud to be one of the fastest-shipping teams in web3, and to have such a great community of users who are always there to iterate and build with us.

With that said, check out our full year-end report here:

As always, thank you for reading!

Join our Telegram, Discord, and Twitter to stay up-to-date on the latest Quests, communities, and more. Until next week, frens.

Cheers,

Sarah from Layer3