GM. Every Monday we'll drop a roundup of Web3 news, tweets and vibes 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

A watershed moment for crypto?

The U.S. President issuing an “Executive Order” about crypto sounds pretty scary tbh. Will they ban Bitcoin? Eliminate ETH?! 😱

Noo - in fact, President Joe Biden’s crypto EO is actually being described as a watershed moment - as in, a really good thing for crypto.

Like when the government realised the Internet was gonna be a pretty big deal.

The main takeaway from the (overall, pretty vague) EO was that every Federal Agency needs to basically get their sh*t together and figure out crypto.

Granted that means they need to understand the consumer risk and prevent crime (fair), but it ALSO means they should support all the innovation and inclusion that comes with crypto.

We like the sound of that!

It wasn’t just the U.S. Government winning over the crypto crowd this week - there was another big announcement too 👇

Adding crypto support to your business just got a lot easier

That’s thanks to the $100bn payments giant Stripe - who, not content with already powering a big chunk of all online payments, have now said they’ll add crypto support.

Here’s a tweet from the co-founder:

Stripe, who’ve partnered with the crypto exchange FTX, say they’ll provide their customers with access to tools that make it easy (for their customers) to buy and store crypto, cash out, trade NFTs and handle compliance workflows like Know Your Customer (KYC).

Cue lots of pain for all the other companies currently trying to power crypto payments 😢

Apes buy Punks

This week the rumours were confirmed true: Yuga Labs (the creators of the Bored Ape Yacht Club) announced they’d acquired the CryptoPunks and Meebits collections from Larva Labs.

Here’s the announcement:

That point around giving “full commercial rights to the NFT holders” is pretty important.

It’s always been a pain point for CryptoPunk owners, but now - finally, they’re free (just like BAYC owners), to use the images they own for whatever commercial and entrepreneurial ends they choose.

Just to be clear - Yuga Labs have not acquired Larva Labs though - just their two collections, as pointed out in this blog post.

So what’s next for Larva Labs? It’s all under wraps for now, but they say it’s back to “what they do best, which is working on weird new stuff”. 👀

What else you should know

A $4bn hedge fund has shorted Tether and thinks it could pay off within a year

Ukraine has now raised (and started spending) around $100 million in crypto donations

Former file-sharing site Limewire is back, re-launching as a music-NFT marketplace, almost a decade after shutting down

NFT sell off? OpenSea daily volumes have dropped by around 70% from their peak, with some digital collectibles’ values down by ~50%

Britain forces the 81 functioning Bitcoin cashpoints to shut down, declares them illegal

eBay continues to fuel the crypto rumour mill by teasing a ‘Digital Wallet’ in an investor presentation

Tweets of the Week 🐦

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

Someone spotted a hidden gem in Stripe's crypto announcement 

How to weather the crypto storm 

"Useless" 🥴

Food for thought on "ownership" - who will own the feeds in web3

Not crypto, but - fair play to this person... 

Web3 101: Staking 💡

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

Like lots of crypto concepts, Staking can be bit tricky to wrap your head around. There are certainly a lot of layers of complexity - but we'll stick to the basics. 

What is it?

At the simplest level, staking is a way of earning rewards for holding crypto. 

Why do you get rewards?

Because when you stake that crypto, you're locking it away so that a "Proof of Stake" blockchain can put it to work. 

More on PoS another time, but essentially your staked crypto to helping secure and validate transactions - similar to how "miners" work with Bitcoin, but in a much more energy efficient process. 

What cryptos can you stake?

The top proof of stake blockchains by market cap include: 

1. Ethereum 2.0

2. Solana

3. Polkadot

4. Avalanche

5. Terra

How do I stake Ethereum 2.0 then? If you have loads of ETH you can become an official Ethereum validator - but if you're a beginner it's easier to get started over on Coinbase.

ICYMI

Have a read of this blog post by Sarah at Layer3 - on digital communities 👇

PS 👇

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That's all for today!

Thoughts on today's email?

• 👍 Great!

• 😐 Meh

• 👎 Nope

Yahya at Layer3