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- Issue #4 - OpenSea Loses Its Edge 🚨
Issue #4 - OpenSea Loses Its Edge 🚨
LooksRare's $100M in NFTs, OpenSea Acquires Dharma, & A Decentralized Wikipedia
Noah Edelman
January 19, 2022
Good Morning Shifters,
Our first IRL crypto events in LA were awesome: great food, cool NFTs, & +100 crypto curious degens. We're going to be having way more Web3 events this year, our next one being in Austin. Make sure you're subscribed to the newsletter to get notified.
Before we get to this week's top stories, we wanted to talk about our bestie Jade Darmawangsa's (400k YouTube subscribers!) awesome newsletter called The Creative Block. The Creative Block is your go-to source for everything creator economy-related, including the latest creator news, social media trends, and of course Web3 opportunities.
Subscribe to The Creative Block here:
In Today's Issue
→ LooksRare Sells $100M of NFTs in 24 Hours
→ OpenSea Shows Its Strength
→ A New, Decentralized Wikipedia
In Web3 fashion, NFT marketplace LooksRare sold over $100 million of NFTs within the first 24 hours of launching its product. Built by pseudonymous co-founder Zodd, LooksRare is being branded as a decentralized and community-centric NFT marketplace that might overtake OpenSea.
- In order to incentive people to use their platform, LooksRare airdropped (distribute to a wallet) LOOKS tokens to 75,000 Ethereum addresses that had previously bought NFTs on OpenSea. This is called a 'vampire attack', in which one platform uses incentives to lure away users from another.
- OpenSea has been under immense scrutiny in recent weeks for its foundation as a centralized entity that fails to reward users through an OpenSea token and charges unreasonably high transaction fees.
- Web3 is incredibly innovative in this respect. When users are dissatisfied, they can quickly create alternatives that satisfy consumer and developers.
Dear LooksRare, OpenSea isn't giving up just quite yet. Following its recent $300M injection of cash at a mind boggling $13.3B valuation, OpenSea acquired popular crypto wallet Dharma Labs and announced that Dharma's CEO would become OpenSea's chief technology officer.
- Dharma allowed users to directly connect their crypto wallets with their US bank accounts so that users can go straight from cash to crypto. OpenSea will be shutting down Dharma's app as part of the deal.
- “Our teams share a vision that NFTs will be the cultural focal point of crypto’s adoption for years to come — and that vision can only be realized if using NFTs becomes easy & delightful for the average person,” OpenSea CEO Devin Finzer wrote in a blog post.
A DAO is trying to recreate Wikipedia, literally. WikiDAO, which was launched on January 15th, is a self-proclaimed "libertarian movement for the immutable truth on Web3" that is attempting rebuild a knowledge database that is community-owned and rewards contributors.
- In their Mirror piece, WikiDAO praises Wikipedia for its incredible distribution of knowledge but criticizes it for lacking incentives (contributors barely get paid), its rigid editing environment, and systemic biases.
- Through a DAO (decentralized autonomous vehicle), WikiDAO will be able to reward contributors through tokens, enable a transparent revision history for each article, and "fulfill the mission of the open-source knowledge utopia."
web3 content we’re munching on 🍿
Jobs 🤓
Customer Support Specialist @ Binance
Senior Product Designer @ RabbitHole
Technical Writer @ Aave
Associate Partner, Crypto @ a16z
HR Leader @ bitcoin.com
Bounties 💸
Buy an NFT on the OpenSea market (100xp on Rabbithole)
Create a roulette game in Solana (win an NFT)
Have a great rest of the week!
Sincerely,