Thanksgiving NFT starter pack
Some talking points to help you navigate your Thanksgiving convos!
Metaversal is a Bankless newsletter for weekly level-ups on NFTs, virtual worlds, & collectibles
Dear Bankless Nation,
Today crypto and NFTs will come up during Thanksgiving dinner conversations for more than a few of us.
It can be hard to explain, right. And there’s a lot to explain. For those of us here sometimes it’s felt like a decade just passed in the span of the last year. Where to start then?
Keeping things simple and using broad strokes is probably your best bet, of course!
Accordingly, below I’ve put together some “big ideas” and helpful resources that can help you get the conversation rolling while the gravy’s flowing.
-WMP
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How’s crypto doing?
Well! Earlier this month the market capitalization of the cryptoeconomy — BTC, ETC, everything — hit a new all-time high of $2.8T. That said, Bitcoin remains the largest crypto per market cap, though its activity levels have been dwarfed by Ethereum and a handful of Ethereum apps in recent times.
This is because while Bitcoin does one thing well — decentralized payments — Ethereum now does many things well in facilitating decentralized payments and decentralized apps of all varieties.
This dynamic has led to Ethereum becoming the main public goods infrastructure for decentralized finance (DeFi), decentralized media (NFTs), decentralized organizations (DAOs), social tokens, and beyond. The combination of these fields of interest is “Web3,” and their user-controlled possibilities have been generating massive demand lately.
Extra resources:
What are NFTs?
NFTs are non-fungible tokens.
In other words, they’re media or products — think art or virtual land — whose ownership and provenance are tracked on a blockchain like Ethereum.
Over the past two years, the NFT ecosystem has rapidly evolved and activity levels around NFTs have increasingly boomed. The idea and appeal of NFTs being “programmable culture legos” has attracted mainstream interest in a way nothing else in the cryptoeconomy has before!
However, the NFTs are like a “blank canvas” technology and the ecosystem remains very young. As such, over time we should expect to see NFTs branch out into many more use cases, including more mundane and traditional things like car titles and real-world mortgages on the blockchain.
Extra resources:
What is the metaverse?
The metaverse is when the web becomes a giant virtual universe composed of many virtual spaces instead of a bunch of flat, static webpages.
Lately you hear about the metaverse in the context of Ethereum and NFTs because these Web3 technologies are increasingly being viewed as the open economic railing that can connect many virtual worlds into an open metaverse.
To be sure, the metaverse is more of an ideal than a reality at this point. Yet it’s clear we seem to be accelerating towards it at this point via NFTs and so forth.
Extra resources:
Should they invest?
The short answer? No, not until they’ve done some preliminary research and have some foundational knowledge about the basic topics of interest, e.g. blockchain, smart contracts, etc.
At the end of the day, though, all you can do is try and guide your family and friends in the right directions. That means keeping things simple at first, like initially steering them to the main assets like BTC and ETH as well as user-friendly marketplaces like the upcoming Coinbase NFT platform.
Also, if any of your close ones do dive in deep, guide them toward best practices like hardware wallets and beyond!
Extra resources:
What comes next for crypto?
Further mainstream adoption, that’s what!
Seriously though. It’s difficult to convey to beginners in a short amount of time the full range of technical circumstances leading up to this historical point, though we can try. And in that regard I’d say welcome to the rollups revolution!
Indeed, over the next few years we’ll see layer-two (L2) “rollup” scaling solutions make super fast and super cheap transactions a reality for many millions of international users. These are the blockchain infra “level ups” that will take DeFi, NFTs, and DAOs straight into the heart of the mainstream, and we’re seeing the beginnings of this playing out now!
Ultimately, we’re not dealing with fads here — we’re dealing with socio-economic revolutions powered by unprecedented kinds of technology. And now our tech is on the verge of offering these possibilities to billions of users.
Extra resources:
Action steps
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Not financial or tax advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This newsletter is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research.
Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here.
