2023 Web3 year in review

Transcript

GM GM welcome to another episode of web3 Academy your one trusted source to capitalize on the next big phase of the Internet it's the Christmas special and we're here to make sense of an onchain World in constant transformation I'm jird joined by my co-host Kyle reidhead and we believe that 2023 is not going to change the world but 2024 is that's why we're carving a path for doers to confidently build and invest in web 3 today is a special episode folks and by the way merry Christmas and happy holidays to everyone hope you had a wonderful holiday we're going to look back on 2023 and just uncover what the hell happened over this

last year it was a wild one it feels like maybe it was five years all in one but we're going to cover it all starting from Jan one back when believe this on Jan one salana was $8 which is unbelievable to think about now but that's what happened that's what the world was like on chain back in Jan one so we're going to start there and then we're going to go through everything that happened everything from Nike launching do swoosh to the blur airdrop to the Bitcoin spot ETF but before that we had things like Bas being announced the arbitrum airdrop if anyone is around and remembers that BAGI one million doll bet remember that one there's just so much that happened over the year of 2023 and we're g to just look back and Kickback and just walk

through it all the biggest events that happen in 2023 we are going to cover that into today's episode and the reason we like to do this is one it's always good to reflect it's always good just to look back and see what the heck happened and that'll just help us to set the stage for what's going to happen in 2024 next week well not next week on Friday we actually have another episode coming out looking at our 2024 predictions on what we think is going to happen over the year and so before we can predict we need to look back on what's gone on and that's what we are going to uncover in today's episode so if you didn't listen to a single one of our podcast this year this is the only one you need to listen to and we're going to make sure you're

up to speed on the entire year but you don't want to make that decision in 2024 because things are happening right now off opportunities what's that I said fast they're happening fast exactly opportunities are everywhere and when we go into 2024 and the bull market that's coming if you're not on top of the news you will fall behind and you'll miss out on some big opportunities to make some money you'll miss out some opportunities to get involved early opportunities to build opportunities for your business all the things that you can do on chain and that is why you need to subscribe to our newsletter if you are not already

subscribed click the link in the show note and make sure you follow our newsletter because we three times a week are coming into your inbox giving you the real information the real stuff that you need to know to stay on top of web3 as an investor as a builder as a Creator as a business professional we're making sure you got what you need and if you appreciate that then do us a favor and not just subscribe to new but also subscribe to this podcast whether you're listening on Spotify Apple podcast YouTube whatever make sure you subscribe like rate comment all the things any of those engagements help us grow and we want to grow in 2024 so that we can continue to support all of you in your journey onchain all right before we jump into

today's episode deep bow of gratitude to all of our sponsors this year will just take a minute to hear from paragraph one of our favorites modern newsletters are built on paragraph that's right paragraph is a brand new newsletter platform that combines the best parts of web 2 and web 3 to supercharg newsletters for both writers and readers build a community not just an audience paragraph uses blockchain Tech to allow readers to collect and own the words that matter to them this takes reading a newsletter to the next level with paragraph readers can mint collect and show off quotes from their favorite newsletters this opens new possibilities

like creators sharing Revenue with fans I also love their new feature paragraph AI this integrates gp4 natively in paragraphs create edit and improve your writing effortlessly with one click and guess what we at web3 Academy are on board and have already moved our content over to paragraph We believe this is the future of newsletters because of the profound engagement it creates between creators and fans so whether you're a Creator writer or an Avid Reader it's time to check out paragraph and capitalize on the opportunity of being early all right friends welcome back so let's start from the 1st of January and

the first first of January it was a tough tough time for salana which is quite funny to look at now because it is the highest touted ecosystem in the space everyone loves salana everyone's chilling salana but man just a year ago literally less than a year ago from today this thing was sitting at $8 and it was thought that salana was dead we literally put salana is dead we wrote a report on salana early January asking the question is it dead and we did a big deep dive in it and said you know what salana looks more like what ethereum went through in the last cycle versus you know actually being dead which ethereum looked dead everyone thought it was and then it just came back and had a stellar year and salana did exactly that but for those of you that maybe came in

new this year salana was the contrarian bet back then it was the BET where no one thought this thing was going to continue because FTX had just collapsed only a month prior which is crazy FTX collapsing is only about a year and one month from today but FTX was the big investor big Builder on top of salana and so when FTX collapsed everyone thought salana was going to go with it but it turned out that salana had the comeback Story of the Year in this industry so kudos to Sal but let's not forget where it came from and where it started this year big things ahead looking forward to what are the 2024 predictions for Sana which we'll be talking about on Friday okay next up on January 25th dot swoosh Studio launch this is Nike introduced their web3

Studio which allows the community to cocreate Nike products their first was the your for force one that's a mouthful to say your Force One why it's so difficult and this was an opportunity to co-create the next pair of Air Force Ones Kai I know you are a DOT swoosh holder and this didn't happen on January 25th but later in the year Nike released their first nft collection along with some physical shoes the TN J or TJ this is not a jpeg shoes released as well so lots coming out of Nike we had big hopes

at this point that Nike was going to be one of the big stories of the year because they really captured a lot of the median attention early in the year but haven't heard a ton about them lately so excited to see hopefully big things are coming next year yeah I mean things here like the first was it was a surprise they launched because remember this was two months after FTX collapsed and so everyone was hating on this space All Brands were pulling back and Nike decided to continue on which was a big surprise and I think a bit of a relief to everyone in the ecosystem and because also we didn't have the runup here we we started to get the run up in January but it was a little bit it was more like February in terms of pricing because we really hit lows in January so it was a

surprise they still continue to launch but good for them I think the reason we haven't heard a lot is they're still in in beta and still closed right I am a holder of this but I actually don't hold it because it's actually only available I think in the US or maybe it is in other countries now but not Canada so I can't even get it I just luckily had candy who's a member of our community who bought it and still holds it for me so hopefully she doesn't rug me so I think when they open this fully they might do better but I think they just they're having struggles with the tech they're really focusing on community building which is good they want to keep it small to build community so I think they're doing the right thing I don't know maybe they'll do something more in

the next year but we did have higher hopes than what than what really came out of this still think there's big things to come from Nike and their team there okay next up is still January actually web three Academy launched web three Academy Pro in January this is our Flagship product for those of you that are around you you listen our po as you know about Pro it's been here for all all the year now but previous to this we had a whole year where we never had a product but Pro reports is where we brought in an onchain analyst and every week we look at what's happening on chain and we decipher it in a simple easy way to understand and it helps Builders it helps investors understand what's going on on chain and so our first report ever launched in January and it was about lens we actually did a

review on what was going on with lens which I thought was really interesting really cool our second report was is salana dead and thankfully in that report we called that it was not dead and that it was bound to do really well this year and so we we did well on that there's a lot of great Pro reports if you haven't checked those out you haven't gone pro highly recommend you do again in the show notes Jay already talked Sig it for a newsletter when you sign up you get the chance to go pro as well that's where the real good stuff is where we do a lot of talk about investing in Frameworks we look at Value cruel investing strategies and just everything that's going on on chain Jay on the screen here is showing a few of the few the reports and uh it covers

everything from salana to layer twos to tokenomics to economics and so much more so anyway highly recommend you guys check that out but that was our first product which we're very proud of we have more than 200 Pro subscribers now over over the year that we have accumulated and uh we get a lot of good feedback so thank you to all you who joined and went pro this year we really really appreciate you and um deep bow of gratitude to our Pro members incredible to think that we've written 50 Pro reports one week for the past year Kai huge shout out to you and to Pablo our onchain analyst for really leading that and Raul who also wrote a couple J got in there too it was a good year for Web Academy Pro very exciting okay next up

on February 14th we had the first blur airdrop so this was really what kicked off The nft Marketplace War you remember that from more so 2022 was when that was really on fire and openc and blur and everybody was competing and battling for who was going going to be the nft marketplace to survive and obviously blur did very well because of their incentive program where if you were to use their protocol you might get their airdrop which happened on February 14th this also was what

really led to the zero royalties and royalties being removed from nfts because sorry being removed from NFC marketplaces respecting royalties because blur knew that they were going after the Traders and if they removed royalties then Traders would come because Traders are always looking for the most profit and they'll go wherever the most profit is so blur really started the year it's actually crazy to look at this February 14th started the year with a big airdrop a lot of attention and they also recently ended the year there as well when their next air drop happened yeah they also got rid of platform fees if you remember so blur usn't charging the platform and so op he followed suit on February 17th it was

like Hey we're going to drop platform fees as well now they ended up I believe they've added them back now but at that point they were like we don't know what to do we're scared that we're going to get beat by blur it was a wild like few months there I mean we wrote a lot about the nft marketplace Wars but we everyone was really unsure what was happening with that business model turns out I just did an onchain review for 2023 and opy is still the top app to generate in terms of generating revenue on chain this entire year so they still made a lot of money so openc which is crazy considering the year that openc had but still quite impressive a wild wild ride with blur coming in all right February 23rd this was another sigh of relief that the industry had it was tough times

back then I'm sure many of you guys remember the stresses that we had in our industry back then but coinbase came in and they launched a blue dot on Twitter if everyone remembers that little GIF and that sent Twitter going absolutely nuts no one knew what was going on and it turned out that coinbase was announcing they were launching a Layer Two on top of ethereum which was a few things here one we were like okay the onchain world is back you know it's not over we have a public company now it was a crypto one but a public company nonetheless that is is now building on chain and then it also kind of fulfilled our thesis around the L2 thesis saying hey we've got a public company that's launching an L2 on top of ethereum which we had been talking about for God knows

a year at least that this L2 thing was going to be big but I think more than anything it was just a relief for the industry to be like all right we're going to keep building we're going to keep shipping everything's going to be okay here and I I remember the Vibes on crypto Twitter were pretty big at that point people were pretty excited on what coinbase did there yeah and this also kicked off either just before right around eth Denver and I remember the energy coming out of eth Denver was the first time you really felt like the whole Community got together everybody was excited again there was really a Builders focused community on okay we've removed the speculation everybody here wants to build for the long term and yeah I mean coinbase

definitely one of the winners of 2023 in more ways than one okay then on March 16th we had the arbitrum airdrop speaking about l2s the arbitrum foundation dropped 1.1 62 billion ARB tokens worth $1.4 billion to Day by far the biggest airdrop of the year and if you remember we talked about how later because all these aird drops have claim periods I don't exactly remember how long the claim period was for the ARB air drop usually around like 60 to 90 days and over 55 million ARB tokens were not

claimed so 55 million in ARB tokens went back to the arbitrum Dow treasury crazy to think that $55 million was unclaimed yeah you know what kind of sucks op also was launched in this year as well and arbitr and op both launched their tokens in the full-on bar Market in some of the toughest times then you've got salana launching their tokens now at the smartest time big mistake but I think they just wanted to get they needed something to get anything going during that time keep people around which they did so like we got to be grateful for the L2 Community hopefully they've got more coming for the bull market because obviously aird drops are they hit a bit different these days and they did back then that's for

sure March 17 bag's $1 million bet who remembers this Banks were collapsing this was due to interest rates getting quite high this is about the point where we reached I think the highest and we've kind of stayed at that level well I guess we were we were close to the highest anyway but basically as a result of this Banks started collapsing and so Bitcoin went on its first run of the year so March was when finally crypto really started to take off Bitcoin went on a huge run as I think we had three or four banks in the us all collaps and um BAGI got real loud and he basically started saying that this was Bitcoin this was going to be the hyperbitcoinization and hyperinflation of the US dollar and Bitcoin was going to go to a million and he made a million dollar bet that this would happen I

forget who he made the bet with but anyway I think it was with two people actually and he said he would do it it would do it in 90 days well obviously that did not happen in fact since he made that bet it was kind of almost like a top signal we didn't do much uh for the rest of the summer until the end of the year here so pretty funny but it also created waves across crypto Twitter and even mainstream media because people were like what's this guy talking about overall was a good I guess marketing play for the space though it didn't turn out but either way is what it is pretty cool to see okay then next up on April 12th ethereum staking unlocked this was a huge event ethereum chappella upgrade occurred on April 12th and allowed any

Staker to unstake take their position now here's the main thing we were all expecting a big withdrawal would a lot of people withdraw their staked eth and the opposite happened a lot of people flocked to staking eth which led to us writing a report about staking as a service and recommending consistently really throughout the year that you should be taking a percentage of your East whatever percentage you're comfortable with and staking it I mean maybe you should be staking 100% of your e to be honest well to be clear this report was written well before the Chappelle upgrade went live and it predicted that we would not see a big

withdrawal and that we would we would see it go up to 20 30% which it did so if you were a pro member early on you had this and not only that but we told you which tokens were going to do well from this which was rocket pool which it doubled within about a couple weeks so to be clear we called it well before it all happened and so this is one of the reasons why you want to be a m is because we look at what's coming and we can not predict perfectly but we have a good idea because we're so integrated into the into the ecosystem but yeah it was a massive upgrade for ethereum and it has worked out really well I think uh overall and if you Stak or if you bought staking tokens during that time you hit a pretty strong narrative it didn't last

long because again we were in a bare market so RPL and and Li and those they shot up during that time but then they came back down not too long after but everything did during the summer anyway May 11th worldcoin which was one of the big news events that happened in 2023 not because worldcoin has done so much for the industry but because Sam Oldman the Kingpin of of chat GPT the CEO of open AI not chat GPT but they announced that they were one they had already announced they were doing World coin but everyone kind of forgot about it they announced this back in I think it was 2021 but they didn't really do much and then all of a sudden they were like Hey we're back and we're moving and onto optimism and so they were moving a layer two and so it's was like okay someone

who obviously is in the tech World who's I mean we was the highlight of everybody during that time still probably is today Sam Alman and he was saying hey we see layer twos and we're going to move our company onto there so that was like again another big moment I think for layer twos and then just also worldcoin kind of gained a lot of traction at that point and it became a big thing over the next few months of people going and scating their eyes in the orb in the orbs to sort of verify their idenity and and proof of humanity which has become a a fairly big thing but hasn't really taken off like I think we originally thought it might they do have over like 2 million users and one of the most used apps in crypto right now I was actually again looking on chain doing my review

and realized it was one of the most used apps it's mainly for swaps and things but there's quite a bit of users on there anyway interesting that um worldcoin which we still don't know if they're going to be the big thing yet or not but they moved on to optimism and sort of solidified the all2 moment yeah and I think the there was so much around worldcoin on both sides because of the orb and a lot of skepticism of like what what does it mean to scan your eyee and then how do they hold that data do they have custody of that do we have custody of that the orbit is still it's not an open source Tech yet even though they say that they will eventually which makes sense it's not open source they spent $50 million developing it but it was a real moment of both sides of the

crypto conversation the negative side was using it as a moment to say crypto bad and everybody involved that believes in onchain identity was like here we go this is the start of something really big and as you said it kind of it grew really fast in the beginning and then kind of hasn't seen the growth since then even though that being said you know onboarded probably two point over two million people on chain and are still very active app in wallet okay next up May 16th The Ledger recover fud so Ledger decided to launch recover which is an optional and paid service which would help user regain access to their Seeker phrase in

case they lost it which is a big problem in crypto a lot of people lose their Seeker phrase and so Ledger being a leader in the space wanted to solve that by providing Ledger recover a service that would solve that problem the problem was the way in which Ledger recover worked showed everybody in crypto that maybe their Ledger wasn't as safe as they thought it was and it led to a huge blow up this felt like one of the biggest fuds of the Year especially since Ledger is just sort of really known and respected in the industry as being a leader everybody uses their products and loves them me we both both

K and I use ledgers and here we have them maybe seeming like they're not so truthful and they're doing things that we don't understand and it was a lot of fud maybe for nothing because once you look learned what they were really doing it wasn't as bad as it initially seemed however it doesn't deny the fact that there was certainly a lot of people that made the decision okay I'm I'm going to leave Ledger and then I think there was a lot of people that respected the way that they handled it because they did a great job on the pr and the Comm side of dealing with this and expressing how Ledger recover really works which is confusing stuff most people don't understand the tech side of this yeah it was a good learning moment I think for

many people in the space even ogs who thought they understood wallets I think learned a lot here so I think that was really good I learned the trade-offs of using even Hardware wallets like a ledger there's still some trust assumptions in some ways and then obviously depending on what you signed up for then it can be even more or less they ended up not launching recover remember they actually pulled back said we won't do it and then sometime in the summer they ended up laun or just recently actually they ended up launching it which was pretty crazy that the market pushed that much but just shows like the good thing about bare markets you learn things that you otherwise would just not care about like nft royalties we figured out weren't going to be a thing that was in 2023 and that took just some crazy events to

happen same with this here with Ledger and so like there's just like these underlying things that we all thought were true we realize we not so it's interesting what you learn through fud and through just I don't know crazy events pudgy Penguins May 19th pudgy Penguins toys go on Amazon the savior of nft projects in 2023 was pudy Penguins without a doubt and uh they just kept shipping all year it was very impressive what they did but the big news was they created physical toys and they launched them through Amazon which is really cool they sold a ton since then since May 19th they've also launched in Walmart they've also launched in what's the big toy store in the UK yeah but I can't remember the name can't remember anyway they're all over the place what's really

cool is they these are just toys but you can mint a nft and get access into and it's it's more what you're doing a skinny QR code and it gives you this like proof of adoption of these of these toys and then you get access into a digital world so really starting to connect the physical and the digital worlds um which is something we've always talked about that web through could do but no one was really doing it and who would have thought but an nft project is the one of the first to really do this at at somewhat scale May 19th they launched this it was pretty exciting to see an nft project finally do something cool and like something that could potentially go mainstream and they just continued to ship since then and continue to do more and more and more and just so impressed on what pudy

Penguins has done since May 19th and honestly at this point in May nfts were really dying out at this point and so this was something that the industry needed to be like okay there's still some hope here yeah pudgy Penguins was definitely the nft project Story of the Year and this is just one of many things I mean if you would bought a pudgy I don't have the the price up but I want to say May 19th I want to say the Pudgies were like 4 e I'm guessing somewhere around there maybe 3 to 4 e would be my guess and today they are over 10 e so shout out to a project that not only created a sustainable business made a ton of

Revenue off their toys is just getting started also brought value back to their holders so they were 1.2 eth on May you said May 19th yeah yeah 1.4 eth damn wild there you go they're sitting they went up to 11.8 and they're currently sitting at 9.6 we right about 10 actually sorry well way to go to Wild Luc and Nets and the whole team over a pudgy keeps on crushing it okay next up June 5th and 6th two dates for the price of one the SEC Sues binance and coinbase these were massive I mean anytime the SEC does

anything everybody pays attention one of our predictions for 2023 was that regular ulation would come and it would be a good thing we still believe regulation is a good thing not sure we would agree with the way that the SEC is going about bringing regulation into the space but this was confusing because binance and coinbase were sued at the same time it caused a lot of people to think that they were being sued for the same thing right but they were not it was actually quite different binance was sued for comingling funds well coinbase was sued for operating as an unregistered broker and and that kind of caused some confusion because a lot of people just saw the headline SEC Su coinbase and Su binance and they put the

two together in the end the coinbase lawsuit amounted to nothing it went absolutely nowhere the binance lawsuit proved to be a big problem and led to as you guys will know what was like a month ago CZ had to step down as the CEO of binance and might actually face prison well we'll get to that because that's a big news event as well and I believe it's in here I would assume so we'll get to that one uh yeah he's getting that little head there but yeah a wild time also when I think of sentiment back then that was a tough one like we we had a finally we had a bit of a pump in markets and there was like you know pudgy Penguins there was the l2s it was

like okay are we back are we back and then it was like boom coinbase bias were like ah and then it was a tough summer it was a really rough summer after that by the way I got to go back and correct my statement I was looking at py penguins in 2022 at 1.5 uh I was gonna say I was like really whoa it was four four and a half you were right okay you want it I just had to correct that all right June 8th we move on to June 8th to go hand inand with what happened with coinbase binance and even Kraken at this point as well which was 55 cryptocurrencies or tokens were deemed Securities and this is one of the reasons that binance coinbase Kraken were all sued oddly enough they were sued for different ones like they weren't just all the same even though

they all hold and in allow for transaction of the same tokens for the most part so there was a list of a bunch of different ones I mean B&B xrp cardano Solana polygon Tron like so many of these that was also another kick to the the nuts for the industry but obviously and I think we'll get to this one in a second but some of them are fighting back xrp went to court and was deemed not a security that really sort of I think freed up everyone's mind share on this and I think allowed tokens to finally go back up in price and I think we real Iz that hey maybe the SEC is just overstepping but it was a it was a rough June that's for sure until June 16th both of us getting excited until June 16th when Black Rock filed for a

spot Bitcoin ETF really marketing one of the biggest Milestones of crypto in 2023 totally legitimized the space you have black rock one of the largest fund managers in the world that manages over10 trillion in asset assets basically putting their stamp of approval on bitcoin not only putting their stamp of approval on bitcoin but also signaling that hey we want our investors our large institutions our 10 trillion dollars in assets that we manage we want some of that to go towards Bitcoin because we believe it is a great investment long term and that really I would say that kicked off a bit of a turning point in maybe not the

markets but more so the sentiment in the space yeah absolutely all right July 14th two things that actually happened here big things the first xrp was deemed not a security so we had Black Rock ETF filing which was huge obviously that filing was a big deal but then we also got wi of hey and actually your tokens are not Securities so this was super bullish for just the entire space hearing that so this was a really big deal we LED that SEC was just losing battles and the second thing that happened in the same week was web 3 Academy launched web3 Academy 2.0 which consisted of a bunch of different things but first off it consisted of new branding so The Branding that you're seeing as you watch this podcast that is

a new Fresh look for web the academy actually designed by a Community member of ours which is really really cool Daniel shout out to Daniel Roder yeah Daniel Roder thank you for that so that was a big deal we launched the Web Academy 2.0 GIF nft on top of a layer two Zora I can't remember was the layer two at the time yeah it was how was oh no it was we did because they people had to bridge yeah so we launched that we had over a 100 people mid to this which was really cool and then at the same time we launched just a bunch of other things along with that the big sort of thing that came out of that was our new course or Master Class called profit from the future a web 3 investing masterclass this launched in the same week as we launched web3 Academy 2.0

which was basically a course to help people not get left behind the best time to be investing in this space is before the bull market begins and we were pushing all year especially in our Pro reports that hey guys we're about to have a big year we're about to have a big year you need to get allocated even though most people are sitting on the sidelines so we built this course it's hours of material and basically covers everything from understanding Market Cycles to understanding strategy about how to invest in the space when to sell what to invest in how to understand tokenomics and economics and all the different things and we put this out there into the world back in July and said guys please go take this get allocated now figure this out so that you can be prepared for the coming cycle

a bunch of people did it I think we have over 60 or 70 graduates from the course so far you can me to nft when you graduate so that's how we even know that but more importantly we've had a bunch of those people who took it in July and August and got allocated and got ready for what was has been a pretty wild couple months so congrats to all those who took a chance and bought our course and allocated as a result of that you've already done really well and probably I would assume earned your your tuition fee which is nothing 250 bucks you probably earn that in like a day if you bought salana or whatever you bought congrats again to everyone and again if you want to check that out in the show notes below you can do that if you go pro you get this course for 50% off so

my recommendation right now is if you are not figured out your strategy for this bull market is GoPro that'll get you all the weekly reports that you need and then 50% off this course as well the perfect little setup and let's the bull market the bullk package or something what did you call it when we did that de bull market prep pack that's it bull market prep pack and then I just want to be clear about one thing is we are here for the long term I think that if you've been listening to us you know that now we're not a short-term project we've been building web 3 Academy for almost two years now we produced hundreds of podcasts and newsletters and onchange reports every year uh and with that this master class and a lot of stuff that we

sh sh this year was our signal that even though we were in a bare Market even though times were tough we were still shipping and this master class was very much built with the future in mind so even though we launched this master class in the summer in July it still holds true today and we will continue to keep it updated and you also get access to a private Discord Channel where you can ask questions and make sure that you know your Investments that you feel good about them so so much around this that would give you the confidence you need to really succeed in the coming Bull Run next up one of my favorite events of the Year August 1st base launched onchain summer this was coinbase L2 which we

talked about they announced back in the spring well it went live in Late July and as a result a ton of traffic flocked on chain they had Partnerships with cocacola Partnerships with so many big brands and made this whole onchain summer where every day you could Min an nft and participate on chain and it led a lot of people to move to bridge their Capital over to base to start playing around on base and a lot happened on base one of the not notable things that happened that you might remember is a meme coin called bald Rose to almost a hundred million M market cap I hate that every time there's an onchain event there's a

meme coin that goes along with it exactly we definitely will not advise you to invest in mean coins however if you want to have some fun they can be very risky and they can do well but needless to say there was a lot of exciting things happening on bass and it really kicked off The Narrative around onchain this was sort of the first time that we all started to use the word onchain and onchain since then has kind of become I think for us one of the main lingos or languages that we use to describe the entire web 3 space we even got hats that say onchain right on it I was going to wear it but it's cold here and so I wore a t instead but yeah and the other thing that was cool about the

onchain summer on bass was we were still in bare Market Vibes prices Wen going up we don't have like what we have today here in December and so you know when you don't have price going up you often don't have a lot of people doing much on chain and coinbase kind of you know Chang that narrative and was like look there is a lot you can do on chain and they really showed off what was possible and so yeah it was cool it was a fun time and I think just kind of set the stage for what's possible moving forward so kudos coinbase for contining to do that all right August 7th PayPal launches a US dollar stable coin this was just another big company that was kind of coming in and saying hey this space is legit and we want to be a part

of it right PayPal one of the biggest Finch companies in the world and they now are launching a stable coin on top of ethereum which was huge I think to date PayPal has gone almost up to to 100 we was at 100 million in its market cap so it's growing it actually stopped its growth for a little bit there because on December 8th my birthday or no it was a little bit before was in November it got a subpoena or something from the SEC and so it stopped but then December 8th is it's now started again and so they've started to grow I think it grew by like 10 million just on on December 8th which is why that that date came up but the stable coins called py USD and um it's something they're going to use probably mainly internally in their own app

obviously they already have crypto self custody crypto in there and now they're kind of adding to that and we think that they'll probably do a lot with this and so excited to see where it goes stable coin's obviously another big winner of 2023 and PayPal sort of set the leg legitimacy in that so that was really cool there's one other thing that happened August 1 so we actually missed it but that was we moved our newsletter onchain and so as Jay said onchain became the the big thing in August and we F suit with that at the same time that Bas launched we moved over to par paragraph which off of substack which is basically substack but your newsletters go on chain and that allows us to have our membership on chain so PR members get an nft we called out the pro pass

and that gets you access to our Discord to our onchain gift shop to a bunch of other things and then also we can our newsletters go on chain that you can collect and you can do a whole bunch of fun things with we just partnered with layer three as you can see here we did a little quest with them using sound which is where you can collect music and um if you collected our nft you got some points for some quests that they're doing we had 579 collectors of our article um which is really cool we weren't able to do this with substack they don't allow us to do anything onchain paragraph allows us to a bunch that's why they are our number one sponsored have been for six months now we absolutely love what paragraph is up to and um we're very excited to practice

what we preach which is everything should go on chain and we want to push that forward as well so hopefully all of you listeners have enjoyed that too okay next up August 11th friend check goes wild I can't believe this was only like five months ago this is August 11th this feels like an eternity you go so friendch is a social fi app that uh I'm sure many of you use both Kyle and myself used it uh as we love to experiment on chain but basically the way it works is users can hold keys of their favorite influencers and if you hold a key to that influencer then you get access to a private chat with them and friendch ended up being the biggest

onchain app of sort of August September maybe even into October at a time when there wasn't a lot happening on chain everybody was over on frch now a lot of that had to do with speculation and a lot of people look at fr's message though here we have it in the newsletter says we are provisioning more resources again we generally did not realize there was still so many people left in crypto which is hilarious because again August which isn't that that far away was still very bearish sentiment and not much going on so it was really cool for them to come and just light it up fun fact this the app that generated the second most revenue on chain in 2023 fch crazy wild and if you want to dive into we wrote a full onchain report about frch

value acrel really showing this concept of onchain value acru of how money can flow onchain from an app to a protocol that it's built on top of in the case of frch is built on top of bass and then Bas is BAS built on top of the op stack and the op stack is built on top of ethereum and you can see how money flows to all these protocols and then also on the other end you can see how frch used a very interesting and sort of a new model of splitting fees between frch getting fees so they're building generating revenue and then also sharing fees with the creators so they're getting Revenue as well and I mean frch has kind of died out since but I think

they really showed the ability to disrupt a massive massive Market in social media and find a way to generate Revenue back to creators which is just super cool and Jay and I are super bullish on being in the Creator space and so that's something we we continue to talk about a lot remember when I I sold your friend tech key and then shut up what the heck classic J is the to Signal that' be bottom signal but yeah back to more lawsuits it sucks that you know we're mixing up the big news this year was either like big things happening like being built or launching or things happening with the SEC you know it which just very upsetting but August 29th another big win for crypto in the court system which is grayscale

wins its lawsuit against the SEC so grayscale filed a lawsuit against for being basically discriminated against and its decision to not allow them to flip their trust into a spot Bitcoin ETF grce scale thought there was no reason for that didn't make any sense especially since there was other spot ETFs that were now being filed and so this had been a court case for a little while here but they won come August 29th this was super bullish really one of the early things that sort of set off the the price appreciation in in markets because we were like okay well if this is approved it's very likely we're finally going to get a spot ETF approved I mean this has been by the way for those that hav't been in here for a while the first Bitcoin spot ETF filed ever was in 2 13 by the Winkle boss

Twins and so and they obviously did not get approved it has been shut down many many times and so even when Black Rock filed we like whoa that was random but they must know something and then quickly you know what is a month or two later grce Gale wins there L suit and then it was oh I think this is actually for sure thing and so we've been waiting and I think come the 10th which is only a few days now as the time you listen to this podcast uh it looks like we'll probably get something live but this was a big win uh for us to be more confident in this spot Bitcoin ETF getting approved yeah for sure next up September 5th Visa announced that they are building on salana so Visa has been building onchain for a while really

focused on using onchain rails to lower the cost of sending money around the world settlement that they do for all of their merchants and they announced that they're extending their stable coin settlement capabilities to salana I think this really might have been the event that sort of made a lot of people look at salana again and realize salana isn't dead even though we said salana wasn't dead in January took people a while to really catch catch on to that and really also showed how Visa is continues to be committed to building on blockchain we just don't hear a lot about Visa because they're building infrastructure stuff that doesn't catch a lot of media attention also at the

same time I think it was like within a few weeks of this maker d announced that they were going to build their own chain to manage their governance and so not a chain for the purpose of like a not an app chain just a chain that would be used to manage their own governance because they're getting so big and the cost to govern was getting ridiculous for them and so they announced they're going to build their own chain and the way that they announced they were going to do that was by forking salana because they basically said that salana offered the best chain for their needs in their use case yeah interestingly September 5th when Visa said that they were uh going to build on

salana salana was at $19 currently yeah so if there was a sign that hey probably this thing's not dead and it might be a time to buy it was just September when Visa one of the biggest companies in the world decided they were going to build on it these signs were all there that's for sure and this is why this is why you can't sleep hey like why happened people don't realize you know how fast things happen 4X from yeah son is a 4X from that moment which is crazy that was not that long ago back to pudgy for September 24th pudgy toys now in Walmart so we already talked about them being in Amazon and then another big one obviously was getting into Walmart which they did they were in over 2,000 Walmart stores so

again really big deal as we said earlier pudgy just continues to ship and now they are launching their own pudgy verse I don't think that's going to make it in here but also Prett big deal that'll be coming in q1 of 2024 but yeah pudgy just had a stellar Stellar year that's for sure okay next up October 11th farcaster goes public so farcaster which is one of the largest decentralized social apps was the first between thems lens and doo to open up to the public and allow anybody they moved out of beta for a long time you could only get into foraster as invite only and they opened up the doors and said hey anybody can come and use farcaster and it led to a

bit of a a narrative and a little run on farcast for and there was a lot happening uh since then I think it's died out not as since they died out but just to grow yeah not getting as much height but the people I for what they call it cast or whatever is actually still going up they've done quite a good job look it's so tough to compete with a normal like X or Facebook or whatever especially because the crypto community still very small but they've done a great job they created a really good app it's ux is is phenomenal it feels just like Twitter and they they're continuing to grow which is quite impressive maybe the biggest news of the year I don't know probably the biggest news of the Year November 3D SBF found guilty so obviously we had the collapse in

November 2022 that was I mean that was the biggest news almost ever in this space and um thankfully you founder of that the fraudster himself Sam bman freed he was in trial for what was it maybe about two weeks or something we we covered it quite a bit five four or five weeks I think was it four or five weeks yeah and um he was found guilty and he will face decades in prison he will probably never get out of well hopefully he'll never get out of prison but let's see his sentencing is in March so we don't know how many years he's going to get but he is H the maximum sentence he could get is I think it's like 115 years yeah something like that I'd like to say that put all of the frauders and stuff behind us that we had over the last

years but there's one more that'll come up not yet don't tease us like that guy okay next up within the same week Black Rock files for a spot e ETF so we've already got lots of applications for this bot Bitcoin ETF and this black rock becomes the first to file for a spot ethereum ETF this really led to Black Rock was first but like within a week there was I can't remember how many we have now but somewhere like five to 10 others that jumped on this filing as well so we'll see tune in Friday for when we make our predictions of when we think these ETFs will get approved when

or if I think someone in our predictions because it's our team that does these predictions actually says maybe it's a no this one was a bit of surprise like I figured a Neath one would fall eventually but there was still the SEC would not admit that ethereum is not a security and so didn't think Black Rock would be the one to do this and um they did that was really cool it was a wild little ride on Twitter when that came out but uh good times speaking of that bad news that I was talking about binance doj settlement happens November 21st bance accepts A4 billion do fine in their settlement agreement with the doj and CZ one of the biggest Legends and I I didn't want to call him a fraudster when I said that I don't think he is a fraudster he's just someone who pushes

the limits as an entrepreneur and has done more for this industry than probably anyone else except for maybe Brian Armstrong and a few others but he has to plead guilty we still don't know exactly what but he's got charges of I the hundreds of millions and he has to St down as CEO of binance and then he still might go to jail we don't know that'll come I'm not sure when that's going to come but that's coming but a massive massive I mean a few things that were M with this one binance not leaving the industry but just hav to leave binance that's fine he'll go on and do more things probably with BNB which probably is bullish for the onchain world but just there was this fud around binance for so long and I think that finally gets put to rest and we can move

forward and so really you know come since November 21st we're sort of like all the Bad actors and all the like fud that was going on with everything is kind of all past us and now we've got clear sailing for 2024 and I think that is uh really really exciting for what's coming in the first news from web 3 gaming which was one of our big predictions of 2023 that did not pan out on November 28th alivium was listed on the epic game G store the epic game store is one of the biggest gaming stores in the world over 230 million active users and alivium which is one of the biggest web 3 games which is built on top of the mutable went live on the

Epic gam store sort of finally signaling that web 3 gaming might be happening so we'll see what's next in 2024 they actually were not the only game to launch in the epic game store since then there's been a number of other web 3 games that have launched on the epic game store this was supposed to be the year for web3 gaming Jay you promised me it oh I'll tell you what this was the year for well not even the Year this is the month December which we are in now was a massive year for who the one that started off this whole year thinking that it was dead salana salana has airdrop season and it has been absolutely dare I say it Bonkers it started off I mean it started off with

Bach but that was way earlier in the year and didn't get as much traction at that point but then had the pipe Network launched their token which is a pretty big deal it's up to like 600 million then you had the jeto airdrop well the Jupiter one was announced but they haven't they didn't launch it yet then the goo one announced and it went to 10,000 wallets and people made a minimum of 10K including myself which was super sick and a nice little birthday present for me the Jupiter ones coming in early January where they'll launch I think it's a billion tokens or something like that and so they've just you know had a massive stimulus to the SL ecosystem which has just sent salana going through the roof because now everyone is farming salana tokens and so there's I think it's the daily of the weekly users on

salana which was sitting around like 200 to 300,000 has jumped at to like 1 million 1.5 million now in a matter of two weeks and so really it's just airdrop Farmers coming out of the Woodworks it's very cheap over there so you can make a hundred wallets if you want it doesn't cost anything so it's a wild story at the moment that's still developing but onchain points becoming a big deal and air drops season is definitely underway starting on salana but I think it's going to go to many different ecosystems it's a good time to be in crypto it's always a good time to be in crypto on December 7th flip cart announced the launch of their own L2 flip cart is the Amazon of India over 350 million customers and they launched

an L2 using polygon cdk which is basically a outof the-box toolkit to launch your own L2 and the reason they did this was to scale their onchain loyalty program which they launched back in September I believe and already has over three million users and in order to scale that they wanted their own L2 now you might ask why build their own L2 versus use an existing L2 they obviously could just use Bas or optimism or one of the many existing l2s or they could use salana uh and I think this is the start of a trend we've talked a little bit about this on the show and in the newsletter start of a trend of major Enterprises launching their own L2 couple reasons why number one is it's

very easy it's becoming very easy to launch your own L2 so when it's easy to do so and when you launch your own L2 you have a lot more control you have control over the fees on the platform you have control over the features that you use when you're developing that L2 maybe in your case in the case of flip cart they're building this for an onchain loyalty program they're going to build features on their L2 that enable that loyalty program to thrive whereas if they use an existing L2 it might not have the features that they need and so I think this is the first of many many large Enterprises that are going to launch their own L2 in the future yes

it's a big one I mean what are they a 30 billion dollar company their value is valuation is like 38 billion I think yeah I've got a prediction on on this area this topic for 2024 so tune in to that all right the last one we've got for you is a bit of a warning and that was December 15th was a bit of a wild day in crypto where there was a ledger exploit and then an nft Trader hack but Ledger exploit first if you woke up that day you saw everyone on Twitter saying don't use crypto at all just don't even use an application and the odd thing is usually would people say that you go and you revoke all your permissions to all the apps but you couldn't even do that if you did that you were going to get drained which is just not cool and then

as that was sort of getting fixed in the morning all of a sudden there was a hack for nft Trader where all of a sudden everyone's wallets were getting drain for nfts so just overall a tough tough day for the crypto world and I think a bit of a warning of just like look there's exciting things happening and I think 2024 is going to be big but also at the same time we need to be very careful and so if you have not figured out if you're not practicing wallet security or wallet hygiene you need to need to need to do this because money can be made next year but you got to be careful the last thing you want to do is lose it y well what a wrap what a year so we look through the summary here we've got BTC eth and soul are all up

over a 100% on the year to date billions of drop dollars were air drops salana had the greatest comeback of all time pudgy was the nft project of the year the SEC got its ass handed to it despite trying over over again to take us down onchain apps have started to go mainstream we got rid of a lot of Bad actors in crypto and we're closer than ever to a spot Bitcoin ETF well make sure you join us on Friday we'll be breaking down our 2024 predictions where we'll tell you when we think the Bitcoin ETF will come and if we think an ether ETF will come or maybe a salon ETF

you're going to have tune in to find out all right friends thank you thank you so much it was a wonderful 2023 thank you all for being here along this journey with us we're looking forward to a 2024 year with all of you as well and so again tune in Friday we'll talk about what we think is going to happen we'll get some right we'll probably get a bunch wrong but it's all fun and if you have some projections or predictions you can also let us know once we post that live have a wonderful day everybody Merry Christmas Happy New Year see you later this week thank you for listening to web through Academy your one trusted source to capitalize on the next big phase of the internet if you enjoyed this episode please share it and subscribe or follow so that you don't miss the next one while you're at it

there's a link in the description for our free newsletter where we provide timely and relevant web 3 insights so you can confidently build and invest in web 3 make sure to subscribe today one final note this podcast is for educational purposes only and nothing we say is financial advice crypto and web3 are risky and you should never invest more than you're willing to lose thank you friends and see you the next one