In this week’s edition of The Context, Friend.tech gets buzz and OpenSea gets bashed. Here are the top stories and how they were covered, along with YAP Global’s take:
[Friend.tech Gets Early Traction 🧢]
Web3 social platform Friend.tech launched as an invite-only beta on August 10 on the Base network. It quickly picked up more than 100,000 users while generating $25 million in revenue. Friend.tech works by allowing X (née Twitter) users to sell “shares” in exchange for access to a chat group.
What Journalists Said🧑💻:
The platform is “streamlining the old process in which Twitter influencers would hawk their own personal memecoins to their followers,” wrote Matt Binder (Mashable). But buyer beware: The team is anonymous, app users must give Friend.tech permission to post on their X account, and a leaked database made users’ wallet addresses public. “Scammers have already descended.” ‼️
We’ve been here before, suggested Jacquelyn Melinek (TechCrunch). Friend.tech looks like “a newer take of a slightly more controversial attempt by BitClout” to “let people buy and sell tokens based on people’s reputations.” It got early buzz only to fade away amid legal issues. 🐝
In the meantime, social media personalities are cashing in, wrote Kate Irwin (Decrypt). “Prominent esports influencers Ricky ‘FaZe Banks’ Bengston, Nordan ‘FaZe Rain’ Shat, and 100 Thieves CEO Matthew ‘Nadeshot’ Haag are among the top passive earners” on the platform, raking in “over $73,000, $19,000, and $27,000 in passive income, respectively.” 💸
PR Perspective 📢:
This is an interesting social experiment in that the platform promotes clout-chasing in a very transactional way. But as with BitClout, legal issues may prevent the early buzz from sticking around.
[OpenSea to Stop Enforcing Creator Royalties 👑]
NFT marketplace OpenSea announced it would sunset a feature that lets creators prevent their NFTs from being resold on marketplaces that don’t enforce royalties. OpenSea said its Operator Filter “depended on support from everyone in the ecosystem”—support that didn’t materialize. It became “technically impossible for the Operator Filter to block [platforms that don’t enforce creator fees] without also blocking marketplaces that do enforce creator fees.”
What Journalists Said🧑💻:
Resale fees are one of the main ways NFT creators make money, wrote Jacob Kastrenakes (The Verge). “But despite the many promises of Web3, it was ultimately up to NFT marketplaces to enforce and distribute those fees for artists. And as the NFT market has deflated, more marketplaces have been happy to cut artists out of the picture as a way to lower fees and attract sellers.” 👩🎨
This is “the latest shift in a long-escalating disruption of the NFT industry,” said Sander Lutz (Decrypt). “Though OpenSea had reigned for years as the unchallenged behemoth of NFT marketplaces, Blur’s aggressively free-market approach soon upended that status quo.” OpenSea has had to continually alter its royalty fee approach to compete.
NFT enthusiasts aren’t happy, Lutz (Decrypt) wrote in a follow-up. OpenSea investor Mark Cuban publicly called the move a “HUGE mistake,” and Bored Apes creator Yuga Labs announced it would end compatibility with OpenSea. That’s no small move. “To date, sales of Yuga-owned collections have generated over $9 billion worth of NFT trades across the entire NFT market.” 🏦
PR Perspective 📢:
The debate around NFT royalties has been ferocious, but this could ultimately prove a publicity boost for the industry, allowing NFTs to reach newer audiences at a time when interest is waning. If anything, this is a positive PR move at least because by having NFTs proliferate across different platforms, there’s a significant potential that said collections may reach newer audiences during a time where interest in NFTs is relatively lackluster. This could potentially help OpenSea attract more engagement from artists and NFT traders during this slightly dry spell for the industry.
[Coinbase Wins Approval for Crypto Futures Trading 🥇]
Coinbase announced it will soon begin rolling out futures trading to U.S. customers after receiving approval from the National Futures Association, an industry organization regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
What Journalists Said🧑💻:
This is a big market for Coinbase to be getting into, wrote Allison Morrow (CNN). “Crypto derivatives make up more than 75% of all global crypto trades,” but have been mostly unavailable stateside, “in part because of their complexity and high levels of risk.” ⚠️ These futures “allow traders to speculate on price movements without actually owning” any crypto.
Could this be what gets the crypto exchange out of a rut? “Earlier this month, Coinbase reported a sixth consecutive quarter of losses as regulatory risks and lower trading volumes continue to weigh on the company,” reported Vicky Ge Huang (The Wall Street Journal). But the SEC, which sued the exchange this year, is unlikely to get involved because it doesn’t oversee futures offerings. 👨⚖️
Crypto commentators view this as “a major win,” wrote Martin Young (Cointelegraph). “The move has also placed Coinbase in a position normally helmed by traditional finance firms”—in this case, the Chicago Board Options Exchange and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the only regulated exchanges that currently facilitate Bitcoin and Ether futures trading. 📈
PR Perspective 📢:
This is good news for the crypto industry in the U.S. at a time when the country needs credibility to remain competitive with other crypto trading hubs. Because Coinbase is one of the largest centralized crypto exchanges, this will naturally have a massive sway over how the industry operates. By moving to a broader trading market, this may lead some renewed customer interest.
[Tweet of the week]
https://twitter.com/search?q=%23cryptomemes&src=typeahead_click&f=top
[DeFi Definitions]
A segment exploring one particular aspect of DeFi.
This week: “EIP” by Jon Yap.
Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) are standards that specify potential new features or processes for the Ethereum network. They contain technical specifications for proposed changes and serve as the ‘source of truth’ for the Ethereum community. EIPs are not only essential for documenting the changes made to Ethereum but also for proposing, debating, and adopting new changes.
EIPs are categorised into different types, including core EIPs for low-level protocol changes, and Ethereum Requests for Comments (ERCs) for application standards. Core EIPs affect the consensus and necessitate a network upgrade (such as EIP-1559), while ERCs, like EIP-20 (for fungible tokens) and EIP-721 (for non-fungible tokens), describe application-level standards.
Every network upgrade on Ethereum consists of a set of EIPs that must be implemented by all Ethereum clients on the network to maintain consensus. This makes EIPs a central unit of governance in Ethereum, inviting anyone to propose changes, which are then debated by various community stakeholders to determine their adoption.
The EIP process was initiated in October 2015, inspired by the Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs) and Python Enhancement Proposals (PEPs) processes. The EIP GitHub repository holds all the proposals, which are reviewed for technical soundness, formatting issues, and grammar by EIP editors. These editors also assist EIP authors in advancing their proposals.
Anyone within the Ethereum community is allowed to create an EIP, following the guidelines set out in EIP-1. Before submitting a proposal, it’s recommended to solicit feedback on Ethereum Magicians, a platform where new ideas are discussed with the community.
The usual disclaimer: This newsletter collates the main themes and headlines of the week in DeFi/crypto/metaverse/Web3/NFT land and tries to provide unbiased context. It's aimed at anyone who wants to keep an eye on the space. It's put together by a team at YAP and doesn't contain any promotion of our clients (if one is mentioned, we'll flag that).
The team: Founder Samantha Yap and consulting editor Jeff Benson, Sam O'Donohoe, Ewan Brewster, Damian Alvarez, Andrew Wickerson, Tiffany Mac Sherry, Becky Corbel and Delon Chan. Your feedback is, as always, welcome. Ping us at thecontext@yapglobal.com. Old newsletters can be found here.
This newsletter is prepared by YAP Global, an international P.R. Consultancy focusing on helping cryptocurrency, Decentralised Finance (DeFi) and Web3 brands through impactful storytelling. Find out more about us here.