Peer - The Web3 Social Network

A16Z's New $4.5B Crypto Fund, A Deep Dive into Peer's Web3 Social Network & Blockchain, and the Top News of the Week

Issue Summary: Welcome back to Coinstack, your favorite weekly newsletter for institutional crypto investors, where we review the top news and reports in the digital asset ecosystem. This week we do a deep dive in Peer, a new web 3 social network and metaverse platform.

In This Week’s Issue:

  1. This Week in Crypto

    1. 📝 Peer Deep Dive - The Web 3 Social Network

    2. 🗞️ Top Weekly Crypto News - A16Z’s Big Web3 Fund, Tether Launches Peso Stablecoin, New Crypto Rules in Basel

    3. 💵 Weekly Fundraises - Mondu ($43M), Kroo ($33M), DTTcoins ($10M)

    4. 📊 Key Stats - ETH, Lens Protocol, CitaDAO

    5. 🎧 Best Crypto Podcasts - Coinstack, Bankless, Delphi Media

    6. 📈 Top 10 Tokens of the Week - CXO, BEL, TRX

  2. Coinstack Podcast Episodes

  3. Join Our Telegram Group

  4. Who We’re Following on Crypto Twitter

  5. How to Get Started in Crypto Learning

Thanks to Our 2022 Coinstack Sponsors…

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Peer is a web 3 social network and blockchain technology company founded by Tony Tran to develop consumer-focused blockchain software, hardware, and services for the next evolution of the internet. Peer is headquartered in Seattle, Washington. To learn more, visit the Peer website and follow @peerpmc.

HeartRithm is a crypto yield fund that invests in DeFi, margin lending, and algorithmic trading to generate monthly yield for institutional allocators and qualified clients in a market-neutral manner. They also have a major social impact mission and are giving away a portion of their performance fee to fund philanthropic efforts. Learn more at www.heartrithm.com.

Celo, the mobile-first blockchain that makes financial tools accessible to anyone with a mobile phone number, is a proud sponsor of Coinstack. Connect, transact, and store your crypto assets on the Celo blockchain using only an SMS interface. Learn more about Celo at www.celo.org.

Peer Deep Dive - The Web 3.0 Social Network

By Mike Gavela & Ryan Allis, Publishers of Coinstack

Peer is building a decentralized social network that is designed to be the Web 3.0 version of Facebook, plus much more.

Under development for the last three years, Peer is getting ready to launch a major new decentralized social network.

Think Facebook but…

  • with a token that rewards creators

  • with users owning their own data

  • with a different type of business model

Peer is building their social network on top of their own high throughput blockchain that is designed to be even faster than Solana and Avalanche.

The utility token driving the ecosystem and rewarding creators will be called the Peer Metaverse Coin, or PMC, which is expected to launch later this month in June 2022.

Peer has raised $14M to date and is led by CEO Tony Tran, COO Heath Abbate, and Chief Design Officer Kyle Hay.

Peer plans to launch their token in June. You can sign up for Peer’s PMC token waitlist here.

Web 3.0 – The Next Generation of the Internet

To put Peer’s web 3 offering into perspective, let’s share some background on what exactly web1, web 2, and web 3 is…

Web 3.0 is the next generation of the internet that allows:

  • Users to own their data, which can then be ported to multiple applications

  • Creators to be paid via token rewards

  • Ability to create all new media formats never before possible

  • Open sourced algorithms

  • New business models that aren’t reliant on advertising

Over the next five years, you can imagine that common Web 2.0 applications like Airbnb, Uber, and Facebook will all be replaced by Web 3.0 applications where renters, drivers, and users actually get rewarded --- such that value creation is shared among users, creators, builders, and investors.

In Web3, users own their entire digital footprint—from social and media content they've collected throughout their lives. Peer calls this the Decentralized Federated Identity (DFI). Users will be able to create public utilities (access tokens) to their data so they won't need to share their DFI with each service they sign up with, decreasing their vulnerability on the net.

Services they want to use will request the token, which they'll share. And users can revoke access at will. People’s data will essentially function like an API in Web3. Their wallets will contact the application data -- and people will own their wallets.

Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon from A16Z were on the Bankless podcast this week covering Web3 and their new $4.5B crypto fund. This is where the web is going.

Let’s lay out some context…

What Was Web 1.0 and Web 2.0?

Web 1.0 is considered to be the period between 1993 and 2003.

  • The internet was mostly a collection of static web pages, meaning users would have "read-only" access to the web. These static pages were composed using three fundamental technologies.

  • These used the following three major protocols:

    • HTML - Hypertext markup language, the formatting language of the web

    • URLs - Uniform resource locators, the unique web address that we all use to find web pages, and

    • HTTP, or hypertext transfer protocol, allows for retrieving all that information across the web.

There was no logging in or interacting with posts or viewing analytics during Web1, and it was not user-friendly. No algorithms could dynamically serve pages, and the web pages themselves were also very basic. The functions that served the most purpose were things like email or perhaps the real-time retrieval of news and the like. Most of the early internet was not even monetized by ads; it was mostly just one giant hyperlinked web of pages sourced from various search engines such as Yahoo, Altavista, or Netscape.

A simple summary of each key epoch of the web the last 30 years is…

1993-2003: Web 1: Read

2004-2019: Web 2: Read-Write

2020-Onward: Web 3: Read-Write-Own

Web 2.0 – Software on the Internet

Then around 2004 came the concept of Web 2.0. We saw a shift in how we used websites during this period. Through advancements in web technologies, such as JavaScript, CSS, and HTML5, interactive and rich websites started to proliferate interactive web platforms that would allow the user to generate their content and be a much larger part of these websites.

Web 2.0 was not just read-only but read-write, where the users on these platforms were fundamental to the content as well. This is sometimes also called the social web. Moreover, it was driven by innovations in technology, such as mobile phone apps, and companies that have flourished in the web2 environment, including Facebook, Google, YouTube, Twitter, Uber, et cetera, et cetera.

Web 2.0 gave us the rise of social networks where people could view content, create content, and build communities. Social networks became a place where we could share our most intimate moments and stay connected.

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies proliferated during this time, giving rise to giants like Salesforce, Hubspot, and Mailchimp -- that weren’t possible during Web 1.0. During this time (2002-2012), I co-founded and built iContact into one of the leaders in email marketing SaaS offerings in Raleigh, NC.

While Web2 was great for consumer, SMB, and enterprise software — the business model of web 2 social networks (i.e. ads) drove companies like Facebook to become extractive from their users and creators — and led to a centralized and controlled web that is now being revolted against.

Whenever we viewed Facebook and YouTube or even performed Google searches, these centralized companies started collecting data about us so that they could serve us better content, which in turn would make us stay on their websites longer. Eventually, these monoliths realized they could package up all the data collected on us and sell it to advertisers. Web 2.0 is the age of targeted advertising and the lack of privacy for its users.

2022: The Opportunity for a Web 3 Social Network

If Elon Musk decides to close the deal to acquire Twitter, he may make the future version of Twitter decentralized and tokenized, building upon Twitter’s own Blue Sky Project.

Even under Musk’s leadership, it will take many years to decentralize Twitter, open-source its feed algorithms, and give a token to its content creators.

While others like Bitclout, SteemIt, and Lens Protocol are working on it, no one has yet truly established themselves as the leading Web 3 social network — what Peer is aiming for.

Facebook, the big gorilla in the web2 social network space, doesn’t exactly seem to be understanding the open web revolution, either.

Facebook’s Biggest Risk - Failing on Web 3.0

While Meta/Facebook has made a full move into their proprietary and closed “Metaverse” accessible via the Oculus VR device, they have failed to understand that the future of the web is open platforms, not closed platforms where they take 47.5% of metaverse sales.

The biggest risk to Facebook the next ten years is that someone else will beat them in creating an easy-to-use and beautiful social network that actually rewards its creators and users rather than extracts value by selling their data and attention to advertisers.

Yes, Mark and Sheryl -- you’re about to be disrupted Clay Christianson style unless you wake up now. A closed Metaverse is just not going to win.

Facebook seems like Microsoft in 2005 -- late to web 2.0. Without a significant pivot, Facebook may miss the open web revolution entirely.

The metaverse isn’t the revolution. The open web is the revolution — within which the metaverse lives.

No, a centralized stablecoin for payments called Libra, or Diem, or whatever, will not save Meta — and neither will a private walled garden metaverse that takes almost half of creator sales.

Why Web3 Is Attracting the Best Engineers, Entrepreneurs, & Investors

Web 3 is the next generation of the internet that people envision will be more decentralized and permissionless, built on decentralized protocols where users help with content creation and the governance of the web itself. Users also can own a part of the network through the token. Web 3.0 is bringing a decentralized alternative where we are all users, owners, and developers -- and we all benefit together from network effects and massive cash flows.

New web3 social network entrants like Peer can design a content algorithm that does not optimize for selling user access and data but rather optimizes for providing rewards to creators via tokens. Creators then become part-owners.

As Chris Dixon from A16Z wrote last week,

“We think we are now entering the golden era of web3. Programmable blockchains are sufficiently advanced, and a diverse range of apps have reached tens of millions of users. More importantly, a massive wave of world-class talent has entered web3 over the last year. They are brilliant and passionate and want to build a better internet.”

Max Mersch and Richard Muirhead from Fabric Ventures sum this up well in their Medium article, What Is Web 3.0 & Why It Matters.

“Web 3.0 enables a future where distributed users and machines can interact with data, value, and other counterparties via a substrate of peer-to-peer networks without third parties. The result: a composable human-centric & privacy-preserving computing fabric for the next wave of the web.”

The Problems with Social Media Today - Monetizing Users With Ads & Algorithms

Social networks suddenly became echo chambers of one’s thoughts and beliefs, with newsfeeds constantly feeding us clickbait content to keep us on the platforms pumping shareholder profits. In contrast, content creators would be paid virtually nothing for their added value to the network.

These algorithms on social media apps can now make great predictions of what content you will enjoy viewing, and most of the time, they're right. How many times do you just open up social media, and the content you desire is already there without you even having to search for anything? The reality is that you go onto social media without knowing what you're even looking for. The algorithm is just so powerful that you can trust that nine times out of 10 is going to provide you with some sort of content you will enjoy. This becomes a psychological hack for some people. That unpredictability and randomness of what's going to show up next can excite people. Being able to open up an app and see the content you enjoy can feel like a reward, almost like a very fortunate slot machine.

You end up coming across things you didn't even know you wanted to see, but the algorithm did. Does this subconsciously create the link between the stimulus of opening the app with the reward of the dopamine hit from seeing desirable content? As a human being, dopamine is something you crave. So you always subconsciously have a reason to keep going onto social media. The advertisers are the real customers because they pay, and you don't.

Your attention is what the advertisers are buying, and that wouldn't be worth anything if social media platforms did not know how to keep you on the app for long periods. This begs the question, does there come the point where the company should be preventing certain things from being presented just for our retention? Like our Twitter, fake news reads six times faster than real news, as it is typically more exciting and gives the app more engagement, which is what they want.

One Thing Peer is Doing Differently - The Social Timeline

Tony Tran, the CEO of Peer describes the current phenomenon in Web2 Social Media living with blinders.

"It comes down to the way that people understand social media at this point. They are being unwittingly put into these hazardous, dopamine-driven addictive loops. Moreover, one of the things that we have discovered as we were building this Web3 metaverse concept is that everyone essentially is seeing only a slice of the actual information. And so part of our thinking was, how can we find a mnemonic that can explain to people what is going on when you go and use these social networks? When you use social media, what happens to you? Blinders came to mind. Why do we put blinders on horses? We want them to see only what we choose. So when you scroll the feed, when you scroll any kind of an experience on your phone, it is like you have blinders on; you can only see what is being shown to you. As a result, you get addicted to the information that your mind is looking for."

Peer aims to solve this issue by rearchitecting the timeline and feed algorithm, they called it the Fluid Timeline.

One of Peer’s patented innovations is that their timeline isn’t only vertical scrolling -- but vertical and horizontal scrolling -- where the horizontal axis represents time and the vertical axis is a distance away from the user, with closer stories shared first. This opens up an entirely new world of possibilities.

Horizontal Axis = Time

Vertical Axis = Distance

Peer: The Blockchain, Technology Platform & Social Network

So, what is Peer?

Peer is a consumer electronics computer software and online services company building technology for the Web 3 Social Network and metaverse.

Yep, they are focused on building both a high-speed blockchain AND a Web 3.0 social network app built on top of that high-speed blockchain.

They plan to start with the social network app, then build out their own hardware, including wearables, head-mounted displays, and other devices and accessories that would enable users to fully immerse in this new web ecosystem -- all built with open standards.

Peer’s native programming language is Rust, the same advanced language that Polkadot, Solana, and Near use -- considered by some to be superior to Ethereum’s Solidity.

Peer plans to earn money not from ads but rather from subscriptions, gamification, and network value appreciation.

They plan to offer subscriptions for:

  1. Advance tools that let creators build and deliver blockchain experiences

  2. Programmable layer that lets developers build on top of Peer

  3. Marketplace services that let people buy and sell products and services

Peer also plans to sell Web3 devices

  1. Sales of primary hardware (watches, AR glasses)

  2. Accessories

  3. Licenses

Peer plans to launch their token in June. You can sign up for Peer’s PMC token waitlist here.

Peer’s Competition in the Web3 Social Network Space

While others are trying, like DeSo’s Bitclout, Peer is an easy-to-use user interface that we’ve previewed -- and all we can say is that it is better than Bitclout’s clunky UI/UX of 2021.

Another Peer competitor is Lens Protocol, currently being developed by Stani Kulechov, Aave's founder and CEO. Lens' purpose is to allow interoperability and composability to all social networks developed on the protocol. If you upload content to one platform on the lens protocol, it will automatically be integrated into all of the Dapps on the protocol.

Lens protocol allows creators to take ownership of their content wherever they go in the digital garden of the decentralized internet. This is a handy feature for content creators because they will be able to take their audience from one platform to another seamlessly.

Peer expects to be differentiated from Lens, as Lens is limited to your laptop and your phone and runs on Polygon -- while Peer has a compelling UI/UX, plans to operate across multiple devices, including AR glasses and a watch, and operates their own fast L1 blockchain.

Earlier attempts and decentralized social networks like SteemIt have had very hard to use interfaces that look more like 2002 than 2022 and simply haven’t reached the mainstream.

Peer’s mission is to bring blockchain to the masses and solve the problems of Web2 Social Media platforms by developing a new user interface for the Web3 Metaverse. Peer aims to tackle this problem by approaching the metaverse the same way Apple approached bringing the consumer desktop to the masses. Peer aims to control the entire end-to-end experience by building hardware and software products.

Tony Tran, Peer’s CEO, sees a role in developing a new user interface that sits on top of the Web 3 Metaverse world. Essentially, to build the operating system for the Web 3 Metaverse world. Peer is an L1 blockchain similar to how The Sandbox and Decentraland currently live on Ethereum. Peer aims to be the L1 chain that developers will flock to create their metaverse worlds, similar to how AWS disrupted enterprise technology companies with shared cloud hosting.

"One of my thoughts in the early stages was that Blockchain is too complex, or everybody says that. Thus, how do we bring that complexity down a notch? How do we create an abstraction level for blockchain technology? In the past, when you wanted to build any company, it was pretty expensive. That is what I did with my earlier startups as well. You know you are trying to build these, the safest systems, and then AWS came along and said, "Hey, you know, why don't we just abstract all of that for you and give you a nice user interface that you have full control." Moreover, the history of computing is precisely that it is giving us an abstraction layer. We can really turn something that is, otherwise, very edge, very high tech into tools that we can use practically." - Tony Tran, CEO of Peer

Peer’s Team

Tony Tran, CEO & CTO

  • Tony Tran is an experienced CEO and entrepreneur. Tony was a former engineer at Microsoft. He was at Microsoft SBG, where he helped incubate and productize Microsoft research products and then release them into the wild. Before Microsoft, Tony was the lead marketing and creatives as a creative director at McCann Worldgroup. Tony’s career highlights someone who is both a right brain and left brain thinker. Tony has been in the blockchain technology space since 2016 and has been building Peer, raising $14M in Seed funding in the last three years.

  • Heath is the COO and is responsible for running the entire blockchain infrastructure. Prior to Peer Heath was a Director at various technology firms.

Kyle Hay, CDO

  • Kyle is the Chief Design Officer for Peer, currently heading up Peer labs and working on developing hardware projects. Kyle’s design experience stems from being an early employee at Leap Motion, a high-tech gesture company. Kyle was there for about five years and then spent the preceding five years at Density, where he also joined the ground floor building hardware products and shipping them. Kyle is leading the development of Ambient hardware and software for Peer.

Peer’s Web3 Social Network

Peer first product is a web3 social network where users own their data. A decentralized version of Facebook and Twitter will bring the metaverse to life. The Peer team envisions the metaverse as an interactive world not constrained by desktop or mobile screens. Peer envisions a metaverse that marries our day-to-day lives with blockchain technology.

"Human beings operate dynamically across time. Today's social networks force us into a single point, and right now, our mind is fighting back. Until blockchain came along, we couldn't work with time in this way. The Web3 Social Network lets anyone create across the entire human experience of time: Past, Present, and Future. This opens up a new world of possibilities. With this, we're bringing tangibility to digital items and digital content.

In the past two decades, we have been digitizing the physical world. Now the reverse is happening with the metaverse, right? We want to take that digital thing and materialize it in the physical world.

Thus, it will create brand new ways to experience the web; it will require a whole new web altogether. Moreover, it's going to require all new applications that develop so that you can experience this materialization of the digital world. Furthermore, all that is, of course, going to be anchored on the Peer blockchain."

A few company-provided previews of Peer’s Web3 Social Networking App are shown below.

According to the team, post-launch, there will be other DeFi Dapps launching on the Peer Network including:

  1. Nooncake - A decentralized media transfer protocol that’ll be used to create a video-based town square of web3.

  2. Telesto - A project that aims to create micro-cryptocurrency with quantitative algorithmic dampeners to hedge against market volatility.

  3. Puffin - A template system for creating and uploading time-space assets into the Peer ambient web fabric.

PMC Tokenomics - The Token Powering Peer’s Ecosystem

Peer tells us that they will be releasing their native token, PMC (Peer Metaverse Coin) during their ICX (Initial Coin Exchange) via Reg D 506c in the US and Reg S overseas. The initial supply for PMC will be fixed and pre-mined at 2,100,000,000 (2.1B) with the goal to sell roughly 10% or 250M coins.

With a Reg D offering, the team has filed the paperwork to make their token classified as a security token as opposed to just a utility token. Accredited investors will be able to purchase the token from their website starting later in June.

During their Initial Coin Exchange, Peer’s team has indicated that every dollar raised will mint their stablecoin Peer USD ($UDP). This will make $USD fiat-backed initially.

The initial utility of PMC will be for rewarding validators/nominators, as a gas for sending and minting, and as a reward mechanism for driving creators in the Peer network.

Peer’s blockchain uses Nominated Proof of Stake (nPoS), so they need both Nominators and Validators to participate in the network.

PMC Token Supply Distribution

Peer expects their token supply distribution to be as follows:

  • Private Sale 15%

  • Public Sale 25%

  • Community 20%

  • Promotion 10%

  • Team 10%

  • Treasury 10%

  • Reserve 10%

At the moment the Peer team does not plan on establishing a DAO for network governance. Peer believes in a hybrid approach as a far better model for developing high-performance and polished consumer-oriented decentralized products. As a hybrid, Peer will have a corporate structure, and also a community structure.

Key upcoming dates for the product include:

  • June 2022 - Token Launch

  • Fall 2022 - Social Network Launch

If you’re interested in learning more, you can sign up for Peer’s PMC token waitlist here.

From Our Interview with Tony Tran

As background for this Coinstack Research Deep Dive article, we interviewed Tony, and he offered the following statement to us about his vision for Peer.

"When I got into the blockchain, skeptics quipped that blockchain is a "solution looking for a problem." Obviously, they didn't have any imagination. What I saw was the next information superhighway. Blockchain today is where computing was in the 80s. Everyone's talking about how a computer and operating system works—with its circuit board, compilers, instruction set, floating-point, etc.—and that raised enough awareness and support in the enthusiast community, but not the masses because it doesn't map to anything in the real world. It wasn't until the desktop made it make sense in the context of the real world that computing really took off. There are lots of talks today about how blockchain works, how fast it is, etc. I want to map it to the real world and create the next computing paradigm after the desktop.

But how?

First the visual. For the masses to get on the blockchain, we need to map it to a surface area where work can be done. The broader, the better. If the desktop led to everything we have today, what's the next metaphor? A chain is not it. I began to envision the shape of the blockchain as a 3D mesh where vertices are space, edges are Time, and the face is the content. A notational construct emerged—a fabric that a user can interface with, and a navigation method that makes sense. So the final realization: Chain is how it works, Fabric is how it looks.

There's always been a social network. Social networks are societal foci that have often built with the latest technologies. As social creatures, social networking is a necessary part of human existence. In ancient antiquity, they were the Ancient Wonders, Souks, Agoras, Silk Road, etc. — created using the latest technology of the Time. In the age of computing, we had Bulletin Boards, Relay Chats, Forums, Web Rings, then social networking as we know it today.

The easiest opportunity to develop the visual view of blockchain is a social network.

Next, I looked for constraints that are causing a problem in the world today that a decentralized fabric can solve. There's only one glaring structure that's causing all kinds of problems—the news feed. Each day, people wake up and end on a news feed of some sort. Evolved from the web's user experience, the news feed conforms to the form factor of our display devices, so it became an enclosed space where you can only scroll in 2 directions (up and down). You're forced to see whatever is shown to you and shown enough times; it reinforces a certain view. If the computer is a bicycle for the mind, the newsfeed is handcuff for the soul. It only shows a splinter of the world, and many splinters developing daily are tearing our society apart.

On fabric, it's easy for content to proliferate and not magnify. Since it's time-based, every day is a new feed. Vertically and horizontally, all the feeds are combined into one fluid timeline. This means it's harder for fake news to get back to the top, harder for misinformation to spread, and harder for disinformation to take form. It also prevents bots and algorithms from doing harm to people.

So there—are big problems worth solving that can change the world. I went all in. I got everybody around me to go all in.

A timeline runs horizontally. So we can place everything on a principal horizontal axis (X). Our devices are tall, so the vertical axis can either be space (Y) or type (Z). So now we have a plane that someone can use Time, space, or type to navigate fluidly through a sea of data. The real magic is that it maps to the real world, which will lead to a more realistic and believable web.

Blockchain embodies Time. It enables the creation of properties that only Time had the power to create—immutability, scarcity, and tangibility. We embody space. With this, we have a way to now apply the time properties of blockchain to the world we inhabit. What we end up with is a new technology landscape where all kinds of incredible things can grow and emerge.

A Web 3 Social Network is the first step to bringing blockchain to the masses. We need people to live with the blockchain. Upload content to it, create wonderful things from it and make money with it. In Time, it will create a new web of experiences, and that new web will drive the development of the next computing paradigm."

Conclusion - A New Web 3 Social Networking Platform Coming Soon

The web as we know it has come a long way from the early days of static pages in Web 1 to the decentralized metaverse future that awaits us in Web 3. Web 2 allowed us to start experimenting with social networks allowing us to connect with one another at a greater level of efficiency and ease. The problem arose when social networks began monetizing their users at all costs by violating their privacy and developing highly addictive newsfeeds designed to keep us glued to screen as long as humanly possible in the name of ad dollars.

Web 3 allows for social network creators to own their content and own their followers. Peer is a Web 3 metaverse social network on a mission to bring blockchain to the masses with a patented design that unlocks an entirely new way to create. Peer will build protocols and tools on top of this experience to enable what they term, ambient web, which will drive a new computing paradigm.

If you’d like more information about Peer, please visit www.peer.inc, sign up for Peer’s PMC token waitlist, or follow them on Twitter at @peerpmc.

🗞️ Crypto News Recap: The Top 10 Stories

Welcome back to This Week in Crypto… everything you need to know in one scannable format. Here are the top 10 stories of the week…

  1. 💰 A16Z Announces $4.5B Crypto & Web3 Fund - Andreessen Horowitz has raised a new $4.5B crypto fund, their fourth and largest to date. $1.5 billion will be for seed investments with $3B for venture investments. From their announcement

    1. “Since the advent of computing in the 1940s, there has been a major computing cycle every 10-15 years, including PCs in the ‘80s, the internet in the ‘90s, and mobile computing in the ‘00s. We believe blockchains will power the next major computing cycle, which we call crypto or web3.Most computing cycles have “golden eras” when the right mix — including new talent, viable infrastructure, and community knowledge — comes together. For example, with mobile computing, the golden era was 2009-11, when companies like Uber, Venmo, Snap, and Instagram were started. Golden eras are when legendary teams are formed, big ideas are hatched, and great products get built. We think we are now entering the golden era of web3. Programmable blockchains are sufficiently advanced, and a diverse range of apps have reached tens of millions of users. More importantly, a massive wave of world-class talent has entered web3 over the last year. They are brilliant and passionate and want to build a better internet.”

  2. 🔍 Crypto Banking Rules Now Due This Year From Basel Committee - Norms governing banks' exposure to crypto assets will be completed this year, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision said, taking notice of recent market struggles as a reason to push ahead with the controversial plans. 5/31

  3. 🇬🇧 UK Government Proposes Stablecoin Safeguards After Terra Collapse - The U.K. government published a consultation paper that outlines a strategy to reduce risk for investors holding stablecoins. 5/31

  4. 🇸🇬 Singapore to Look at Crypto Use Cases With DBS, JPMorgan and Marketnode - The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) is starting a pilot alongside financial heavyweights DBS, JPMorgan (JPM) and Marketnode, to explore use cases of digital assets in tokenization and decentralized finance (DeFi). 5/31

  5. 🇦🇺 CBOE Australia Lists Cosmos’ Physically-Settled Ether ETF - CBOE Australia said Monday it has listed Cosmos Asset Management’s ether exchange-traded fund (ETF).

  6. 🇰🇷 Korean Prosecutors Summon all Terraform Labs Staff in UST Collapse Probe - Prosecutors in South Korea have summoned all employees of Terraform Labs to investigate the collapse of TerraUSD, the stablecoin known by its UST ticker.

  7. 🇵🇹 Portuguese Parliament Holds Off Taxing Crypto Gains for Individuals - Portugal’s parliament this week rejected two bills that would introduce heavy taxes on crypto gains for individuals. 5/27

  8. 🇮🇹 Binance Gains Regulatory Approval in Italy - Binance Italy has registered as a cryptocurrency service provider with the Organismo Agenti e Mediatori (OAM) - a requirement under the country’s legislation. 5/27

  9. 🇲🇽 Tether Launches New Stablecoin Pegged to Mexican Peso - Tether has launched a new Mexican peso-pegged stablecoin, marking its entrance into Latin America. 5/26

  10. 🇨🇭 Copper’s Swiss Unit Gains Regulatory Nod for Anti-Money Laundering Standards - Crypto custody provider Copper announced on Monday that its Swiss unit has gained regulatory approval from the country's Financial Services Standard Association. 5/31Share Coinstack

💬 Tweet of the Week

💵 Weekly Crypto Fundraises & Deals

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📊 Key Stats of the Week

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1. Over the Past Year, Goldfinch Has Served ~$100M in Uncollateralized Loans, With a Superb Utilization Rate of ~98% — Maximizing Its Capital Efficiency

2. Arrakis Finance Has Amassed ~$800M TVL (68% Growth), While TVL Across Crypto Has Dipped by 48%

3. Arweave and DODO Lead This in Top Gainers by Total Revenue

4. During Peak Activity, ENS’s Daily Revenue Has Exceeded 1 Million USD in 2022

5. Orca’s Share of Solana Dex Users Grew Significantly After Late March, Overtaking Serum to the #1 Spot

6. Optimism Moves into 4th Place on the L1/L2 Revenue Leaderboard During OP Token Launch Week

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The Top Performers This Month from the Top 100: Tron is an L1, Aragon Court is a Dapp, Nest is an Oracle, Celo Dollar is a Stablecoin.

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🎧 Latest Episodes of The Coinstack Podcast

We have a new Coinstack podcast. So far we’re at 24,770 listens and growing!

Here are the episodes we’ve released so far...

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💬 Join The Coinstack Telegram Community

Join our Telegram Channel here to chat with our community, ask questions, and learn more about the future of money as we move to a decentralized internet and the creation of a new open global monetary system that works for everyone. We now have over 1800 members on our Telegram.

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📚 How To Get Started With Crypto Learning

📰 The Coinstack Newsletter:

Tracking the most important blockchain stories of the 2020s, including a decentralized internet and the creation of a new open global monetary system that works for everyone. As always, published for informational purposes only. Please do your own research. Just our opinions. Not intended as financial advice as we are not financial advisors. We may belong on many of the digital assets we write about as we believe strongly in the sector. Please do your own research. Published and written weekly by Ryan Allis and Mike Gavela.

The information above does not constitute an offer to sell securities or a solicitation of an offer to buy securities. Further, none of the information here is a recommendation to invest in any securities. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Any historical returns, expected returns, or probability projections may not reflect actual future performance. All investments involve risk and may result in loss.

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