🚀 Crypto 101 — The Primer You Need
Web3, De-Fi, Crypto, Bitcoin, NFTs — The World has changed | Drop #69
This week, instead of covering just one early staged startup, we’re going to cover seven interesting projects emerging from the “Web3” wave that are taking over the internet. This week’s drop is powered by Crypto Dispatch — all the amazing info on this issue is from them. Subscribe to them for more articles like this one!
This week, we have three interesting groups of projects lined up for you: NFTs, DeFi Projects, and DAOs. Let’s jump into it!
1. 🎭 NFT Drops
NFT stands for ‘non fungible token’. In real life, most things are not ‘fungible’ (i.e. no two things are exactly the same). This lack of fungibility leads to items, people, and ideas having value — for example, antique trading cards, leaders in communities, patented ideas are all fungible concepts and things that have imprints in society.
NFT brings this concept of ‘stamping’ uniqueness onto digital goods from images and music to tokens of writing and spots in a community. You can purchase ownership of an NFT using cryptocurrencies (most notably, Ethereum and Solana). By buying ownership, you are putting your name onto a permanent record of ownership of that token — i.e. nobody will ever be able to fake or take away your ownership of your digital token.
There are many exciting NFT projects emerging recently, and Crypto Dispatch covers them before they go big. Here are three that we love:
- Cryptoys — digital toys that live on the blockchain. This project recently closed a $7.5 million round from notable venture firm, A16Z. You can read up on Cryptoys on Crypto Dispatch.
- McDonalds NFT — National food chain, McDonalds, recently launched it’s own NFT project — the digital McRib. They are only minting 10 in total (which can be earned via raffle). Enter to win today!
- Bored Ape Yacht Club — One of the most popular NFTs right now is B.A.Y.C. This thriving community loves their apes — so much so that they’ve transacted 199.9k worth of Ethereum on it ($859 million USD)
2. 🦑 DeFi Projects
There are bunch of projects in the decentralized finance space that are pushing the boundaries of what can be done with cryptocurrencies and blockchain. Here are a few interesting ones that are emerging (and are often discussed in Crypto Dispatch).
- Mastercard x Bakkt — Global payment pioneer, Mastercard, has recently partnered with crypto exchange, Bakkt, to broaden cryptocurrency offerings to the public.
- Serum — Serum is a complete, non-custodial decentralized exchange running on an on-chain central limit order book (CLOB) on Solana’s mainnet. They let folks make transactions without expensive fees (also known as ‘gas’).
3. 🏝 DAO’s & Communities
Beyond NFT projects and financial projects, there’s a third and very compelling use case for cryptocurrencies: communities! Folks are starting to form decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) which are communities that have a common purpose but function (and thrive) without a centralized governing body. Members of the community function as individual nodes and their output allows them more leverage and power in the community. Folks can utilize their community tokens to vote (like shareholders) and ultimately shape the direction of their group.
Some interesting DAOs to check out:
- Uniswap — Uniswap may be one of the largest DAOs that exist right now. They utilize their protocol (Uniswap Protocol) to help power numerous applications emerging from their ecosystem — everything from governance platforms, to developer APIs.
- SolFarm — A Solana-chain project that is build a yield aggregation platform. They’ve raised $5million in strategic funding to kickoff their project to bolster the Solana community.
Enjoyed this drop? Interested in learning more about Crypto, DeFi, NFTs, and Web3?
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