#24 DAO governance mimics the evolution of democracy. Spotify into NFTs

Disclaimer: Everything we write in "The Crypto Insider Report" is an x-ray of the industry as we see it, through the lens of publicly available information. We are not financial advisors.

Technology Making Old Ideas Powerful Again - DAO Governance

While DAOs as a topic are very hot lately and a new one seems to pop up every other day, they are just now starting to face real, nontrivial challenges. EY’s global blockchain leader, Paul Brody, a guest on our podcast, writes about this on CoinDesk.

As DAOs get to actually do things, members need to rally and support ideas, debate and reward performance, as well as align and sanction subpar execution. This is easier said than done, especially in an environment of extreme (if we can call it that?) democracy, where all token holders get to propose as well as vote on ideas, regardless if they are competent in the matter at hand.

Paul writes how DAOs are starting to take a page out of the traditional governance book, going perhaps for filtering committees, as well as representatives and vote delegation in order to account for some of the mentioned shortcomings.

A similar thought is voiced by Maria Shen of Electric Capital, who suggests that DAO governance mimics the evolution of democracy, facing similar challenges but tackling them using new technology.

Mihnea

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Growing interest in funding Web3 assets

On March 15th, 2022 ConsenSys announced the close of a $450 million Series D financing round, which valued the Company at over $7 billion. The valuation has doubled since its $200 million Series C raise in November 2021. The round was led by ParaFi Capital, with other investors including Temasek, SoftBank Vision, Microsoft and Marshall Wace. 

ConsenSys is a pioneer in creating the foundational software for Web3 interactions. It was created in 2014 by Joseph Lubin, a co-founder of Ethereum. Its primary products are MetaMask, a popular tool used by a global user base to mint and collect NFTs, join DAOs, and participate in DeFi protocols, and Infura, the leading Ethereum development platform, with 430,000 developers.

This financing round was dubbed as being “relatively easy” by Lubin, highlighting the increased interest in funding Web3 assets. ConsenSys took in digital assets as well as fiat and converted them immediately to ETH, which the Company will use in DeFi protocols and staking. Its next round (Series E) will be named Series ETH and ConsenSys will assist its investors in becoming fully crypto native and contributing ETH as a symbol of the ongoing paradigm shift. 

The current funding will support hiring of over 600 new employees globally, with the Company having open roles on its website across the US, LatAm, APAC and Europe (including Romania). The Company announced that MetaMask crossed 30 million in monthly active users in January, a 42% increase from the 21 million reported during its previous round. The US, the Philippines, Brazil, Germany, and Nigeria represent some of MetaMask’s most active markets. Lubin announced that MetaMask will experience a revamp on the UI front this year as well as progressive decentralization. He announced plans for a DAO that would not govern MetaMask, but would enable the creation of novel pieces of MetaMask to be funded. Similar probably to what MetaCartel does for Ethereum as a whole. He also confirmed that MetaMask is intending to launch a token. On the Infura front, it would accelerate the global adoption of its development tool suite as well as ConsenSys’s efforts to drive NFT adoption for artists, content creators, brands, IP owners, game publishers and sports leagues (currently, it has a white-label NFT product).

Razvan

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Crazy tools for NFTs 

We all got to know and use rarity.tools and I am not going to go into details about this tool because it's pretty well known already, but lately, I got to know and use two more, better ones perhaps. Let's start with the one in between and we'll finish with the Star of the day 😁 If you're using Discord and you're into NFTs, for sure you have used, at least once, the sniper bot that can show you the rarity position of a certain NFT, before the collection gets well known and integrated into all the statistics. This helped a lot of people to find good bargains, but that came with a cost, from the people who were selling's point of view.

Now it got a lot simpler: Rarity sniper 🎯 got upgraded, like a rarity.tools on steroids. Funny thing is that there are more and more dedicated tools for different blockchains nice ones, but what Rarity Sniper does is hold projects from 15 blockchains already: ethereum, Solana, Polygon, Binance, Flare, Cronos, Elrond, Arbitrum, and some more. It's always easier to have something in one place, easy to access. The interface is pretty neat, easy to understand, so enjoy.

But 'la piece de resistance' in today's article is NFTGO, with 6 stars out of 5

In here you can find all the stats you would think of in an NFT project, from pricing evolution, rarity distribution, new drops, whale activity, holders trend, and leaderboard and much more.

De design is exactly how it should be, impeccable and, to be honest, adding a bit more data into it and making it multichain would start to make all the other apps obsolete.

Just having these stats, amongst others, together with the news we've had these days about Yuga Labs, the creators of the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs, acquiring the intellectual property rights to Larva Labs' CryptoPunks and Meebits collections can put you ahead of the market just a bit. And maybe just a bit is all you need. 🧗🏻‍♂️

Enjoy!

Cosmin

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Spotify ventures into NFTs in an attempt to avoid disruption

The days when non-fungible tokens (NFTs) were seen as simple JPEGs are long gone. The industry has moved to being seen as having real utility and the vast number of utility traits that users can attach to their NFTs are driving their adoption and popularity. 

In the first blockchain course launched by Stakeborg Academy (soon available in English too) I was writing about the advantages NFTs can bring to the music industry, especially for musicians. Thanks to smart contracts, artists can receive copyright instantly through NFT sales. Tokens help generate new revenue streams for musicians, improving fan base interaction and adding new streaming options. Fans can use their favorite artists' tokens to gain access to exclusive benefits, such as special events, general merchandise, extra tracks on an album, and even partial ownership of some of the songs.

Spotify is the latest tech giant to venture into NFTs and head off potential competition from crypto start-ups, after this week, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg confirmed that Instagram would soon start to support NFTs. Other social media companies, including Twitter and Reddit, are also working to add new features for displaying or trading NFTs.

Even though it is yet an exploratory stage the good news is that the true impact of NFTs has started to unfold gradually and web 2 companies can no longer aford to ignore their utily.

Evelyne 

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For more educational crypto content, check out the links below:

• The Stakeborg DAO Talks on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOrFZZifNn4Nx4nSQL3WS52ALPXgrTSVG

• Discord channel: https://discord.com/channels/901898461568442458/903006233584341052

• StakeborgDAO Quarterly Reports: https://docs.stakeborgdao.com/reports/dao-quarterly-reports

• Stakeborg Academy: https://academy.stakeborg.com/