TLDR Crypto 2022-05-23

OpenSea has announced a new web3 marketplace protocol for buying and selling NFTs. Seaport is designed for all NFT builders, creators, and collectors. It allows people to make offers with ETH, ERC20, ERC721, or ERC1155 items and have more control over NFT sales. OpenSea has launched a 2-week audit contest with a $1 million prize pool. All developers are invited to help optimize, simplify, and review Seaport for potential areas of security concerns.

Ethereum developers have made statements indicating that the Merge will happen within the next three months. The Merge is when the current Ethereum blockchain merges with the proof-of-stake beacon chain, turning Ethereum into a proof-of-stake network. There is a strong desire by the developers for the Merge to occur before the difficulty bomb in August. The difficulty bomb is an element encoded within the Ethereum blockchain that slows down the network. It was created to encourage developers to push forward with proof-of-stake and to make it difficult for miners to stay on proof-of-work after the Merge.

This article details how the Product Marketing Manager at Layer3 got their job as someone who had zero specialized or technical experience. It covers how they triaged their skills to figure out what would be appealing to web3 companies, how they learned in public and used Twitter as a way to track learnings and connect with others, how they learned from their rejections, and more. In the end, the author was rejected from their current role, but they made a counteroffer to work in a freelance capacity, delivered results, and was later hired full-time.

web3 users own their digital assets, so they can take their data with them when they switch platforms. This increases the potential for competition, and it gives platforms a larger value creation opportunity. New platforms can bootstrap using pre-existing digital assets, making it easier to build and focus on developing better experiences. These factors suggest that a new era of business strategy is being born.

OpenSea's new NFT marketplace protocol Seaport could have a similar impact on NFTs as Uniswap did for decentralized exchanges. The protocol will decentralize the buying, selling, and trading of NFTs and allow anyone to transfer their accounts between protocols. Anyone can use Seaport to create their own NFT marketplace. They can modify the code and use the protocol to create specific sale conditions. The protocol could lead to massive growth and innovation with NFTs and create more competition.

Anchor protocol promised annual percentage yields of almost 20%. It did this by loaning out deposits. Many people were wary of the protocol as there weren't enough borrowers to sustain the system. Investors were not able to remove their money from Anchor when Terra failed. Many companies had invested their customers' money into the protocol. There are many parties involved in the situation that will likely walk away without taking any blame as the focus is on Do Kwon.

China's share of Bitcoin mining went from 34.3% in June 2021 to 0% in July 2021 due to a ban on crypto mining in the country. It was back up to 22.3% in September 2021. Mining operations are large and moving one is not an easy task. It is more likely that mining companies used VPNs and other tactics to hide their activity for a few months than for them to have stopped mining. Some Chinese operations definitely expanded overseas during this period, but it seems that the ban just forced miners to go underground for a short period.

web3 projects are primarily judged by price and market cap, but there are many other growth metrics that can be useful when determining value. DeFi apps, such as exchanges and lending platforms, can be judged through total value locked, active wallets, and number of integrations. The value of layer 1s and layer 2s can be determined through the number of developers and applications, number of active wallets, and total number and size of transactions on the network. Play-to-earn games can be assessed by looking at their number of active players, transaction volume per user, and number and quality of guild partnerships. More details about how to determine the value of web3 projects are available in the article.