⚡ TFC Newsletter: 05/01/2023
Blur Launches NFT Lending, Robinhood Launches Fiat to Crypto Ramp, Poap Tooling, Crypto Analytics, Account Abstraction, and more!
💡 Intro
🥳 Happy Monday!
Markets are down across the board, but there’s some exciting Web3 product updates to start the week off with, including the 2 below.
Blur’s launch of “Blend” could have major ramifications on NFT prices over the next week or 2, as traders lend out their NFTs to buy other assets.
Based on past action from BendDAO lending: we could be in for a crazy month!
Blur Launches Their Own NFT Lending Service: In one of the biggest NFT infra launches this year, Blur just launched their own lending service.
The new service is called “Blend” and allows any trader to borrow against their NFTs and immediately receive ETH in return.
Why This Matters:
Blur could regain market share against OpenSea Pro: OpenSea Pro has been beating Blur on total aggregator volume. With the potential for new Blur rewards, this could sway users back to Blue.
A NFT pump may be coming: Blend can greatly increase liquidity in the market as people lend their blue chip NFTs and get ETH in return.
NFT lending can become easier for the average user: NFT lending platforms are still hard to navigate for the average NFT trader. Based on Blur’s excellent UI/UX, they can make lending go more mainstream for traders.
Robinhood Launches “Robinhood Connect”: At Consensus 2023, Robinhood launched their own fiat-to-crypto on-ramp featuring support for Dapps and self-custody wallets.
Robinhood has over 23M users and is a favorite financial app of many millenials, making it a prime candidate for Web3 adoption.
They also introduced many updates to their Crypto app including:
A New Crypto Home Tab
Advanced Charts
Advanced Order Types
Price Alerts
Learn and Earn
SUIPAD / $1.16M — SUIPAD (a launchpad platform for SUI), has raised $1.16 million from various investors, including NGC Ventures, GBV Capital, and Kairon Labs. — Yahoo Finance
NFTGo / $4M — NFTGo (platform that aggregates NFT data) raised a $4 million bridge-round investment led by Qiming Venture Partners and Hash Global. — CoinCarp
Transmira / $4M — Transmira, a metaverse platform, has secured a $4 million investment and a 20% equity stake from nChain. — FinSMEs
Secro / $3.6M — A new-generation electronic bill of lading called Secro has raised $3.6M in Seed funding round. The funding round was led by Augment Ventures and TMV. — FinSMEs
Aki Network / Undisclosed — Aki Network, an application suite based on Aki Protocol for consumers, disclosed its seed round at a valuation of $40 million, with Emoote from Akatsuki's Web3 fund and Mask Network being the lead investors. — Tweet
Giddy / 6.9M — Giddy, a crypto wallet, has raised $6.9 million with participation from Pelion Venture Partners, Peak Capital Partners, Clarke Capital, and other investors. — CoinDesk
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Avocado
"A user-friendly Account Abstraction Wallet."
Type of Product: DeFi Wallet
Purpose of Tool: Avocado is a user-friendly Account Abstraction Wallet made by Instadapp that facilitates the adoption of DeFi protocols by simplifying the user experience. It allows users to perform multi-network transactions while connected to a single network.
Super cool wallet that’s taking off in popularity.
It’s main improvement over typical wallets is it allows users to interact with different blockchains without managing multiple wallets.
Users can use dapps like Uniswap without worrying about the underlying blockchain and even pay fees in other tokens.
It drastically cuts down on user interactions needed.
Network Abstraction: Avocado shows all balances from multiple networks in one place, making it unnecessary to switch networks when executing transactions. It allows users to transact on any chain, making the process simpler and faster.
Gas Abstraction: Avocado offers USDC as the native gas token, eliminating the need for users to maintain native gas balances in each chain. Users can top up their USDC balance and use it as gas on any chain, simplifying the gas payment process.
Account Abstraction: Avocado offers greater modularity in its design, providing a wide range of use cases such as authority roles, recovery mechanisms, interoperability, and enhanced security. The wallet offers the same level of security as transacting directly on the chain, making it a secure option for users.
Simplified UX: Avocado's simplified user experience makes it easy for users to initiate transactions and navigate through the wallet's different features. It allows users to execute multi-network transactions while being connected to a single network, enhancing the user experience.
Team / Funding / Backers / Other Info: In October 2019, InstaDApp, a decentralized finance platform, announced that it had secured $2.4 million in a seed funding round. The investment was made by a group of strategic investors, including Coinbase Ventures, Pantera Capital, Naval Ravikant, Balaji Srinivasan, IDEO Colab, Robot Ventures, and Loi Luu.
Sowmay Jain, InstaDApp Co-Founder
Link to product | Link to TFC listing
Artemis
“Crypto metrics that matter in one place."
Type of Product: Crypto Analytics
Purpose of Tool: Artemis is a comprehensive analytics platform that gathers crucial crypto metrics from various sources, such as on-chain metrics, developer metrics, and fundamental metrics, and presents them in a single location. This platform can assist teams in quickly developing dashboards and monitoring activity across blockchains to highlight the metrics that matter.
Another great free Crypto Analytics dashboarding tool, it has a number of prebuilt dashboards worth checking out.
Artemis Sheets: Artemis Sheets is a feature that makes it simple to obtain trustworthy crypto data directly in your Google Sheets™ workbooks. With Artemis plugins, reliable crypto data is easily accessible for Excel™ and Google Sheets™. This feature contains the data of over 2,000 of the largest MC tokens, as well as 50+ crypto fundamentals.
Artemis Dashboard: The Artemis Dashboard makes it simple to compare and evaluate chains accurately, analyze metrics such as addresses, transactions, and revenue, and monitor developer activity. The dashboard provides a variety of data, including fundamentals such as daily active addresses, daily transactions, and TVL, stablecoin flows, social data such as Twitter followers, and market data such as price, market cap, and valuation multiples. This feature makes it simple to analyze and compare major blockchains.
Team / Funding / Backers / Other Info: Jon Ma is the Co-Founder & CEO of Artemis, a seasoned investor and entrepreneur with extensive experience at every stage of investing from early to late stage/public markets. He has worked for top companies such as Sequoia-backed micro-fund, SignalFire, Insight Partners, and Whale Rock Capital Management.
Anthony Yim meanwhile is the Co-Founder & CTO of Artemis. He previously worked as a Venture Capital Fellow at Pear VC and a Staff Software Engineer at Venmo. He also has experience working at Google as a Product Specialist.
Link to product | Link to TFC listing
POAP
“A curated ecosystem for the preservation of memories."
Type of Product: Proof of Attendance Protocol
Purpose of Tool: POAP, which stands for Proof of Attendance Protocol, is a blockchain-based system that turns memories and experiences into collectibles. POAP is an NFT that acts as a digital badge or sticker to prove attendance at events, both virtual and in-person, such as games, concerts, and private functions. It can also serve as proof of engagement in communities or commemorate in-game events.
How do POAPs connect to blockchain?
POAPs are created and stored on the Ethereum blockchain as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) through the use of smart contracts. By using the ERC-721 token standard, each POAP is unique and represents proof of attendance for a specific event.
This allows for the creation of a secure and decentralized record of attendance that is immutable and transparent. Anyone with access to the Ethereum blockchain can view and verify the authenticity of a POAP.
Collectibles: POAPs are collectible tokens that represent unique experiences, which can be cherished and remembered forever.
Durability: POAPs are minted to a public ledger using blockchain technology, giving them a long-lasting nature, more than traditional keepsakes.
Personalization: Each POAP represents a unique, irreplaceable part of the individual, and is designed to preserve what's important to the person.
Celebration of achievements: POAPs serve as a proof of participation and contribution to events, programs, or activities, and are meant to be a celebration of personal achievements.
Team / Funding / Backers / Other Info: During the ETHDenver 2019 hackathon event, POAP was created as a project to reward fellow hackers for their attendance. Since then, POAP has collaborated with over 100 events and has issued over 7,000 badges to participants. Some of the major events include EthCC in Paris, Devcon in Osaka, Dappcon in Berlin, EthDenver in Colorado, and EthGlobal in various locations worldwide.
Link to product | Link to TFC listing
Salsa
"Meet and Chat through POAPs”
Type of Product: Social
Purpose of Tool: Salsa is a messaging app that adds on-chain context to conversations by using social proof through POAPs. It is available for both iOS and Android devices, and users can log in with their wallets to start messaging with others.
Wallet-native messaging: Salsa turns wallets into people by highlighting what users have in common through on-chain proof. Users can tap on a profile to see what events they attended or people they met.
Private and public messaging: Users can send private direct messages or post publicly on the feed to connect with others.
Direct integration with POAP: If users are using the POAP app, they can click on the messaging icon under any personal POAP and be directly linked to Salsa to send the creator a private DM.
Engagement for brands and creators: Salsa can be used by brands and creators to engage with their audience by creating POAP events and messaging with attendees.
Team / Funding / Backers / Other Info: Salsa raised $2 million in a pre-seed funding round on Feb 16, 2023 IDEO CoLab VC and Inflection.xyz led the round, with participation from Superscrypt and several angel investors, including Nader Al-Naji, Liam Horne, Dan Romero, Balaji Srinivasan, Henri Stern, Khan Tasinga, Patricio Worthalter, and Gmoney.
Salsa was co-founded in 2022 by CEO Helena Gagern and CTO Grace Wang.
Link to product | Link to TFC listing
A thread on 7 top ETH Infrastructure related Gitcoin Projects from the past week (link):
Magic Eden | Product Management Lead | Link to position
Chainalysis | Product Designer | Link to position
Blockdaemon | Sales Executive | Link to position
Quicknode | Senior Support Engineer | Link to position
Polygon | Treasury Manager | Link to position
Dune Analytics | Head of Growth | Link to position
Optimism | Governance Operations Coordinator | Link to position
Solana Foundation | Social Media Strategist | Link to position
Orb Labs | Marketing & Community Management | Link to position
Circle | Content Writer Intern | Link to position
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Disclaimer: None of this is to be deemed legal or financial advice of any kind. Always DYOR!