Happy Holidays, & may Web3 live long & prosper!

Jack Burning Bridges

Former Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey, burnt some bridges this week. It started with some bold tweets about web3 — generally heralded as the next iteration of the internet powered by decentralized technology — but Jack is less than optimistic.

“You don’t own ‘web3.’

The VCs and their LPs do. It will never escape their incentives. It’s ultimately a centralized entity with a different label.

Know what you’re getting into…”

There is a wide range of “decentralization” in the crypto world, so it’s absolutely important to “know what you’re getting into”. If a project is overly centralized it can pose a risk to the project’s resilience and uncensorability.

However, the idea that web3 is controlled by VCs was rebutted by a slew of people.

Let’s start with Erik Voorhees:

“This whole "web3 only benefits VCs" narrative is nonsense. Sure, some projects sell tokens to VCs earlier than to the public, but the majority sell to public at t=0.

More importantly, in *all cases* these token projects are more accessible than traditional equity markets.

Further, many projects go beyond selling to retail early, they actually *give away tokens in massive quantities* to early supporters and users. Cost basis to many retail owners of these tokens is literally $0, and yet the narrative says VC's get lower price than retail.”

Then there was Balaji Srinivasan:

“Twitter started as a protocol, the free speech wing of the free speech party. Then corporate & political incentives led to deplatforming & censorship.

Web3 offers the possibility, not guarantee, of something better.

…

We agree that Bitcoin has decentralized control of the reserve currency away from the Fed.

We agree cryptography and incentives were key to making that happen.

Web3's bet is that we can do this for all centralized services.”

The fact is, web3 offers the hope that users of a platform might share some of its success as stakeholders, and have more control over their data. Yet many people are painting those who are providing resources to make this a reality, as villains.

We should stop pretending that blockchains appear out of thin air. You generally need a mix of sweat equity and capital to bring anything into existence. Early VC firms like Andreessen Horowitz came into this space before almost anyone had even heard of bitcoin, and put tremendous money into helping bring to fruition a lot of the early projects that helped build the foundation of this financial revolution.

“As if Bitcoin became a trillion dollar asset without billions in venture capital, a thousand marketing teams and partnerships at a thousand companies, so very many exchanges & service providers… Bitcoin is the result of millions of people and an entire industry over a decade.”

As with any profession, there are good actors and bad actors, but the current trend of vilifying all VCs is another example of the anti-wealth, anti-business narrative taking over and trying to infuse itself in the blockchain space.

There is nothing wrong with investing money in a project with the hopes of profiting from it — it’s not just valid, but it should be celebrated. Taking risks with the hope of rewards is how things get built.

And bitcoin too has vested interests:

Every core developer has a vested interest in the project, and many also have huge capital resources due to being early adopters.

It’s strange to single out a particular vested interest like VC money and say that this vested interest is somehow invalid, while others are valid.

Jack finished off the week by taking cheap jabs at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and then going on an unfollow spree, with Marc Andreessen, Brian Armstrong, and Tyler Winklevoss all being cut out of Jack’s timeline. Tyler took it in good stride, with a mature and dignified exit. The same can’t be said for Jack:

I had a rant on Charles Payne’s show this week about it all:

What’s all this talk about “Silicon Valley Greed” in Crypto?

Justin Sun’s OTHER Big Reveal

Justin Sun has just revealed that he was the $28 million dollar mystery bidder for a seat on Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin back in June. Ultimately he was not able to accompany the crew of three on the privately owned spaceship's inaugural flight due to an undisclosed scheduling conflict, but now he’s ready to take his seat in an upcoming flight in 2022. He is also launching a campaign entitled “Sea of Stars” that will help nominate and pay for the five additional crew members for the flight.

The campaign will search for nominees who are outstanding leaders in their fields, which is not limited to technology. The price of the tickets will come out of his own wallet and will not be sponsored by TRON (from which he just stepped down).

TON Spinoff Green-lit

Telegram CEO Pavel Durov has announced that TON, Telegram’s attempt to create in-app crypto payments, has been resurrected… independent from its original company. TON, which is an acronym for “The Open Network” is a blockchain project designed to enable speedy transactions on decentralized applications (known as dApps), allowing crypto assets to be used on non-native blockchains. The project’s codebase was given to a new team, and rebranded as “Toncoin”, to illustrate its independence of Telegram. Durov gave the new team his blessing in a Telegram post this week:

“When Telegram said goodbye to TON last year, I expressed the hope that future generations of developers would one day carry on with our vision of a mass-market blockchain platform. So I was inspired to see the champions of Telegram’s coding contests continue developing the open TON project, which they rebranded to Toncoin. … I wish its team the same success. Coupled with the right go-to-market strategy, they have all they need to build something epic”.

This statement comes on the heels of Telegram’s partnership with “Donate”, which is preparing to accept donations using the Toncoin cryptocurrency as the vehicle.

The separation of the cryptocurrency development from the messaging app itself seems to be taking a leaf out of Signal’s book. Earlier this year Signal announced integration of MobileCoin, an independent privacy coin for which Signal founder, Moxie Marlinspike, happened to write the whitepaper.

While MobileCoin was created as a privacy-preserving, in-app payment method, Toncoin is not privacy-focused. In addition, many people are shocked when they find out how little privacy they’re actually getting by using the default messages and group chats of Telegram itself.

Who Doesn’t Love a Polka Party?

Polkadot is celebrating the release of its first five parachains this week. Polkadot, the brainchild of Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood, is a tool that aims to solve interoperability issues between blockchains.

“No single blockchain design works optimally for every use case. Each chain comes with trade-offs making it good for some applications and not others. … The parachain model was created with the belief that the future of Web 3 will involve many different types of blockchains working together”.

These tools, known as Parachains, work within a space hosted by Polkadot and create digital bridges that help different blockchains interpret data and communicate with each other — an issue that many are anticipating will grow larger as things like the Metaverse, for example, evolve. The first five parachains, which deal in various areas of the DeFi world, are called Acala, Astar, Clover, Moonbeam, and Parallel Finance. To celebrate the milestone, Polkadot held a digital party.

Polkadot anticipates that this is only the beginning of a lucrative and important piece of technology. We’ll see if the market feels the same way.

Happy Holidays everyone!! We are so grateful for your viewership, and wish you a wonderful festive season!

Please join us for the final NBTV show for the year!

Thursday December 30th, 3pmEST

With special guests, Aaron from Altcoin Daily, Crypto Jebb, and Heidi from Crypto Tips!