GM. Every Monday, we tell you about interesting things from the last 7 days. Avoid FOMI (fear of missing info) with Layer3 🤝

Your Web3 Briefing 📝

A roundup of the biggest Web3 headlines over the last week

Coinbase NFTs are here

After hyping it for over a year, Coinbase finally launched their long awaited NFT marketplace.

They say it’ll be the “world’s easiest-to-use”.

And it better had be - because by most accounts Coinbase are pretty late to the game. OpenSea is already the dominant player, and the field is crowded with other established marketplaces (Rarible, Nifty Gateway, LooksRare to name a few).

Even other big, centralised platforms (Binance, FTX, Crypto.com) have launched similar NFT marketplaces, and LimeWire (yes, that LimeWire) is also following suit.

So how will Coinbase win?

For one thing, they’re leaning in to the social-feed vibe. The Verge say that “visually speaking it looks like a cross between Instagram and OpenSea”.

And even if Coinbase are ‘late’ to the NFT-marketplace party - they’re still early to the NFT game more broadly. The technology is still highly immature - and by being more measured and deliberate with their launch efforts, Coinbase may play an outsized role in shaping the nature of mainstream adoption.

That said, the market doesn’t think so, yet. Coinbase’s stock has hit an all time low

But we wouldn’t bet against Coinbase just yet.

Stripe pilot crypto payments with Twitter

The payments company, Stripe, are piloting crypto payments - storming back into the game after dropping support for Bitcoin years ago.

Stripe are gonna start by enabling USDC payments on Polygon - but say that more rails and currencies are coming, soon.

They aren’t doing things by half measures. Stripe’s first partner to test this out will be Twitter - who’ll pilot crypto payments for a select group of creators.

According to Stripe, supporting USDC payments will enable many people who wouldn’t otherwise be able to hold dollars to do so.

NFT project accidentally locks away $34M

A hotly anticipated Ethereum NFT launch, The Akutars, went very wrong when an apparent flaw in the underlying smart contract locked away $34M worth of ETH.

Apparently it can’t be accessed by anyone - the creators or the buyers.

Here’s the post-mortem thread:

The team will issue refunds via funds from previous sales - and the NFTs will be airdropped to buyers via a new smart contract.

What else you should know

• A bank in Germany's applies for local crypto licence

• Another one. Justin Sun will launch an algorithmic stablecoin, USDD, on Tron - using $10 billion of crypto as collateral

• Australian authorities lay out guidelines and roadmaps for crypto regulation

• And France’s President Macron’s at it too - he doesn’t want Europeans to be left behind in the development of web3 and the metaverse

• Infura service outage causes chaos - with MetaMask stopping working for some users

• The state of Tennessee wants a contractor to hold crypto on its behalf

Tweets of the Week 🐦

We spend time on CT, so you don’t have to. Some of our favourite recent tweets:

A way you can track whales

Was only a matter of time

More on what happened with Aku

Nice mental model for stables

Pre birth

Web3 101: Etherscan 💡

Each week we’ll cover an essential web3 concept in simple terms - this week we’re looking at Etherscan ✨

What is it?

Etherscan is a "blockchain explorer" for the Ethereum network.

It's sort of like a search engine for the blockchain - where you can find transactions that happened and look through transactions, blocks, wallets, smart contracts and more.

It's free to use and one of the most trusted explores.

Why would I use it?

The good thing about the Ethereum blockchain is it's transparent - which means you can use Etherscan to, well - see what's going on.

This can help you check-in on your transactions, monitor just about anything you want to (wallets, contracts) - and even spot suspicious activity on the blockchain.

How do I use it?

Sticking to the basics - there's a big search field that you can use to search for something (e.g. a transaction ID). All you need to do is paste it into the search box in order to see all the details - including stuff like:

• Transaction hash

• Status

• Block

• Timestamp

• From/to

• Value

• Gas Price

The list goes on. And depending if you're looking up a transaction, smart contract, wallet address or anything else - the context will be different.

Jump in and check it out here!

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That's all for today!

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Yahya at Layer3