🤔 Why it Matters

Sexy marketing != impact. Especially in crypto.

Sexy marketing can get a token price to pump off forking a protocol onto a new network. Impact is designing, building, and battle testing a core primitive for the next generation of the Internet. That’s what the Gnosis team have done with the Gnosis Safe, which is the premier multi-sig wallet for individuals and DAOs to hold billions of dollars of value. They just crossed $100B secured…and that doesn’t even include NFT value. 👀

I could go on and on about how they transitioned the Gnosis Safe into a platform where apps can be listed, have leading projects like Coinshift and Parcel building alternative UIs on top, or launching Zodiac, the lego blocks of DAOs, for all your governance and operational needs. Just incredible execution with much less of the hype than other projects. 👏👏👏 For the trading enthusiasts, check out Cowswap as well, which solves the MEV problem with an elegant “Coincidences of Wants” design that I think will be used more and more for tokens and NFT marketplaces. You gotta love the humble, innovative builders in this space, and the Gnosis folks are top 3 on that list.🦉

🤔 Why it Matters

I’ll skip to the punchline. NFT minting, distribution, auctions, and airdrops will be built into every creator tool over the next 5 years. Images, video, audio, social, 3d, gaming, virtual world (especially). ALL OF IT.

You’ll see a slow trickle of news from tik tok/photoshop/sound cloud/twitter/etc adopting NFT mint and verification over the coming years. This is inevitable (shoutout to Thanos). For the investing-minded folks out there, bet on the infrastructure (picks and shovels) for this space in every ecosystem (Eth, Solana, Cosmos, etc). It won’t be winner-take-all (Peter Thiel’s tech monopolies are less of a thing in web3) but there will be the tier 1 players. Decentralized storage (see below), data, analytics, verification, pricing, etc. Alchemy being one recent bet. There will be entire VC funds raised on this thesis, and it’s a good bet from my view.

🤔 Why it Matters

Bitcoin : Money :: Filecoin : NFTs

Filecoin launched a year ago on October 15th 2020 and recently held its Filecoin Orbit event to celebrate and reflect on its first year of operation. The growth metrics speak for themselves:

• 12 EiB of total network storage power

• 3,362 Filecoin storage providers

• 10,000+ developers participating at hackathons

But why does this matter?

In an alternative universe, internet currency and DeFi originated in a Facebook / Google / Stripe corporate-owned walled garden. 😥 Frankly, it would have been less confusing and faster to market, but that never happened because humans need trust and there was no internet trust layer. You had to have the messiness and computational expense of Proof of Work to create Bitcoin, then Ethereum, then DeFi/NFTs and the goodness we’re lucky to have today. You needed those fundamental security guarantees to get this off the ground, even if the end consumer doesn’t care much about them today. They also don’t care about https or smtp but needed them to have amazing web apps.

Well Filecoin is Bitcoin for NFTs (particularly media) and Web3 (user-owned data). You need an unstoppable, permissionless layer as a foundation to build all the great use cases on top. There’s an alternative universe where all this activity stays on AWS (like many NFTs today) but that’s not likely to happen. Humans need that trust layer. So that’s why I’m so bullish on Filecoin over a 10 year horizon. This is how we build a user owned internet.