#260: A Roundup of Year End Reports

PLUS: 📣 SocialFi apps to watch, Visa's Web3 Loyalty Engagement Solution

I’m back from my holiday break, rested (for now), and ready to get back at it! Also, welcome to all the new subscribers who are wondering who the hell I am (good question).

In the meantime, happy Bitcoin ETF approval day!

Just kidding…

Wow, what a way to start off the year. Guess we’ll have to wait a little longer to see what the actual decision is.

Anyway, on to our regularly scheduled programming!

A Roundup of Year-End Reports

Several industry reports were published over the past month that are worth sharing. I won’t be able to give an in-depth summary for each, but I recommend you dig into them or at least give them a skim.

Crypto Theses for 2024 by Messari

This report is more like a novel (194 pages!), providing a great overview of where crypto is today and what’s on the horizon. Ryan Selkis and his research team cover a wide range of topics such as investment trends, people to watch, products to follow, and sector deep dives (Policy, CeFi, Layer 1s, DeFi, Consumer, and P2P Infrastructure).

Things that caught my eye:

Messari Analyst Picks (pg. 25)

This was a fun section to see what the Messari team is looking into and excited about. The overlapping themes are worth noting considering the Messari team is deep in the trenches.

Top 10 People to Watch in 2024 (pg. 32)

This list contrasts sharply from the typical influencers that may flood the X timeline, and helps provide a better idea of who will continue to influence the broader crypto landscape.

Top 10 Trends in CeFi (pg. 101)

Despite the SEC snafu that just happened, it’s obvious that CeFi (centralized finance) is now entering the space in earnest. These trends will impact what the path to mainstream finance will look like.

State of Wallet Messaging by Holder

Wallet messaging is a hot topic as marketing channels continue to get saturated and tracking is becoming spottier (eg: Google phasing out third-party tracking cookies). It’s early, but fortunate favors the bold when it comes to testing and refining new channels like these.

Drew and his team at Holder surveyed 175 B2C marketers to measure sentiment on wallet messaging.

Things that caught my eye:

Marketers are aware of wallet messaging as a channel (pg. 4)

When I saw this stat, I thought ‘this survey was only sent to web3/crypto professionals.’

I was wrong. ‘Familiar’ is a relative term, but the point here is marketers are at least aware of crypto wallets and realize that there is an opportunity.

Where the users are, the marketers will follow.

A majority of marketers value a wallet address more than an email address (pg. 7)

I find this stat intriguing because this stat suggests that there are marketers who are unfamiliar with wallet messaging (and probably wallets in general) based on the previous stat I shared, but understand that wallets are valuable as a touchpoint.

Despite their complexity, Marketers realize that wallets are an opportunity.

Building in the Dark: Mapping the Current Crypto Privacy Landscape by Variant

Crypto is largely a transparent space today, but will likely become more private over time. Variant provides an overview of the privacy landscape today and the different approaches to onchain privacy.

It’s All a Game by Colleen Sullivan (published by Messari)

Colleen is the co-head of Ventures at Brevan Howard Digital, a hedge fund. In this essay, Colleen covers the intersection of web3 and games and where the gaming industry is headed.

She drew this! Investment pro and great artist? Life’s unfair.

What’s great about this piece:

• Colleen weaves in personal anecdotes in addition to industry figures and references

• There are numerous illustrations of NFTs, all hand drawn by herself 🎨

This is a great read on the state of gaming and how web3 is positioned to take the baton and bring the industry into its next chapter. The facts and figures show that this space is not just fluff and hype anymore.

State of Web3 Gaming 2023 by Game7

Game7 is a web3 gaming DAO that provides grants, invests in companies, and conducts research.

Some highlights:

Geographic distribution of game developers has shifted from the US to Asia, led by South Korea (pg. 14)

Strategy and RPG genres dominant onchain games (pg. 31)

My hunch for this is because strategy and RPG games benefit the most from being onchain (involves coordination, inventory, complex game economies, higher value players) versus a casual game like Candy Crush (single player, simple mechanics).

Web3 Games per Blockchain Ecosystem (pg. 43)

It’s good to know what the landscape looks like today in terms of which blockchains web3 games are on today, but I expect this to change significantly over the next couple of years considering how early we are. Specifically, Ethereum Mainnet would be too expensive to support at scale due to high gas fees.

State of DePIN by Messari

DePIN = Decentralized physical infrastructure networks, and we’ll likely hear this term a lot more this year.

Some interesting nuggets:

The top 10 DePIN projects have raised a combined ~$1 billion in capital raised (pg. 8)

Solana is DePIN’s blockchain of choice so far due to high throughput and low fees (pg. 9)

These networks are scaling rapidly, with 600+ nodes deployed across various DePIN networks (pg. 38).

This is possible due to many of these nodes being set up by people like me and you.

There you have it folks that’s the roundup!

I know you’re probably feeling like this if you actually read all the reports (they’re worth reading I promise). That’s what happens when you get a two and a half week break from TPan — You get assigned reading to make up for it! 😉

Two SocialFi apps I’m watching

I know some of us are still scarred or skeptical from the friend.tech days, but I won’t stop sharing interesting happenings in this corner of web3. This space is worth following, sorry not sorry 🤷‍♂️

Bags.fm

I’ve had this mysterious app on my radar for a few months now, and the team has revealed some more hints at what they’re doing. Bags was likely inspired by friend.tech considering the account’s first post was in mid-September.

The app isn’t shy about making strong suggestions about the financial aspect of the app:

• The logo is literally a bag of money

• Usernames have a $ in front of them, similar to ticker symbols or Cash App $Cashtags

• The App name is BAGS - Financial Messenger

• It’s in the name, duh

Last week, Bags shared some more details about its launch with pre-registration available on the App Store and Google Play pre-registration yesterday.

The App Store description reveals additional details:

• “Chat with holders” - Similar mechanism to friend.tech’s key holder concept

• The app will be launching around February 25th

• These will be actual apps on the Apple and Google Play app stores, unlike friend.tech bypassing these ecosystems via a Progressive Web App

You can sign up here (referral link), and the team has gamified the invite process with a leaderboard based on views and invites.

Notable that Raj Gokal, co-founder of Solana, is #3 on the leaderboard 👀

builder.fi

Also inspired by friend.tech, builder.fi is creating a builder-centric version of the app, built by the founders of Talent Protocol. The app is currently under closed Alpha on Base.

The app takes the key concept from friend.tech, but is focused on a different interaction model between the creator and key holders:

• Messaging is based on a Q&A model vs. chatroom

• Questions can be up or downvoted, bringing the most interesting topics to the top

• The app is built on top of web3 social graphs (Farcaster, Lens, Talent Protocol, ENS) instead of X (eg: Bags and friend.tech)

Because of the curated onboarding process involving batches of users that are hand-picked, the growth will be much slower. However, retention will likely be higher over time assuming there is traction, higher quality conversation, and users with the right motivations are onboarded first.

I was recently invited to test out the alpha (thanks Filipe!), so I’ll report back if there’s anything interesting worth sharing.

You can learn more about builder.fi through their announcement or FAQ page.

Whew, it feels good to be back.

See you Thursday!