This Week in Web3 | 2.6.23

GM to the 22,557 funky people currently subscribed to This Week in Web3!

Here's what we'll cover today:

• Uniswap drama: The latest on Uniswap governance and more

• Breaking down the recent activity on Canto

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

• Community Feature: The Best Tools for Your Web3 Growth Stack

Sarah at Layer3

WEB3 DIGEST

A controversial governance decision shakes it up for Uniswap

Uniswap's latest governance proposal has got people properly riled up.

Following Uniswap's latest proposal to deploy Uniswap v3 on BNB Chain, many a folk called out some of the governance decisions made during that proposal, including the massive red "Against" vote from a16z, which was cast with all 15m of the firm's available votes.

The theory behind this vote? The massive venture capital firm would rather have Uniswap use the bridge powered by a PortCo that they funded instead (LayerZero). The proposal currently suggests using Wormhole Bridge. 

Of course all of this is speculation, but it does drive home an important point: "Decentralization" in DeFi is often a facade, and the power to decide the fate of the protocol is often entangled with the tap that it drinks from.

And yes, this also includes the votes from other whales, such as the 5.76 million votes from Compound Labs’ Robert Lesher, the 4.92 million votes from GFX Labs, and the 3.5 million votes from Blockchain at Michigan — all of whom eventually ended up swinging the vote towards "For." For an Average Joe $UNI holder, good luck swinging the vote either way. 

This Uniswap governance drama played out over a couple of days — and involved influential figures such as Ric Burton, who also spilled the beans on how he allegedly got screwed over by Uniswap's founder during his early days.

I won't go too in-depth there, but you can read the full thread for yourself:

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 chatting Canto. We ran a Quest a couple months ago to bring users to Canto using a popular DeFi App, but I've never really gotten the chance to properly dig into it.

Until some DeFi folks on Twitter started chatting, and I found this neat summary of a thread by 0xMinion (Research and Investing @ GBV Capital). Let's get into it!

For those who aren't familiar, Canto is a Layer1 blockchain built to "deliver on the promise of DeFi...enabling accessibility, transparency, and freedom for new systems." However, in terms of actual usage, Canto still has yet to make a real dent. Overall, the total number of Tx's range from 2-10k on a daily basis.

Strangely enough, although the chain was built for DeFi, an NFT marketplace named Alto Market has managed to capture just over 30% of the total market share in terms of total smart contract interactions in just a couple of weeks. Previously, this was topped by Slingshot, which accounted for nearly half of the contract activities in the first 3 months.

In fact, Alto Market has surpassed a daily trading volume of >2m Canto daily, mostly driven by a pixelated goose NFT project called "Canto Longnecks" (Ah, NFT PFPs, you never fail to amuse me).

Are you bullish on Canto? Is this Canto's NFT summer? Decide for yourself in this thread, which has more cool analytics and graphs you can follow!

Quick Hits

• South Korea to deploy cryptocurrency tracking system in 2023 – link

• Binance and Mastercard Launch Prepaid Crypto Card in Brazil – link

• Mastercard NFT Chief Quits Over Pay, Offers Tokens Of His Resignation – link

• The English Premier League has linked up with digital trading card company Sorare – link

Product Updates from Dariya

Hey everyone!

We launched our first on-chain challenge (then called a ‘bounty’) almost 1 year ago. 🎉 Since then, we’ve helped over 200K of you discover the best platforms, protocols, and products in crypto. But, as our focus has evolved, the design of our quest experience hasn’t. We’ve spoken to countless users to understand how we can provide a more exciting discovery experience to people of all levels of crypto-literacy. So, as part of a broader redesign project our redesigned quest experience will go live towards the end of February.

The new quest experience is more exciting and friendlier than our current one. Our goal here is to create the most engaging discovery experience ever – something fun that anyone can take part in. Think: being able to send Layer3 to your parents and have them finally understand why you care about magic internet tokens. We’ve had an incredible time on this project, and I can’t wait to show you what we’ve been working on.

Let me know what you’re looking forward to on Layer3, or just say hi – DM me on Twitter @dariyaxyz.

— Dariya, Co-Founder and CEO

COMMUNITY FEATURE

Featured Resource: The Best Tools For Your Web3 Growth Stack

Two weeks ago, we started doubling down on our community-facing content. This included a big overhaul of our blog, as well as digging into what would supplement the current value we give to our customers and community.

Now, we'll be releasing a new blog post every Friday, packed full of resources on how to grow your web3 product or company. We're also curating an exclusive "Layer3 for Growth" community with some of the most talented Founders, Growth Experts, and Product people in the space.

If you're interested, take a look through our first article — and DM @meowllark on Twitter to receive an invite!

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