We were off last week because I was admittedly tapped out after an awesome week at NFT.NYC. But we’re back! I’m intentionally not covering Aave V3 on this week’s update since it requires a longer write-up. Thanks for reading and if you have feedback or a request, we’d love to chat at @0xViabull.
📈 Top 3 Stories from the past week
ENS Airdrop | 🔼 45
Ribbon Treasury for DAOs | 🔼 35
Crypto is the financial and property layer of the internet. Property means owning internet media like images (JPEGs!), audio, video, gifs, memes, episodes, web pages, blog posts, social posts, domains, and increasingly virtual land, items, characters, and skins in the Metaverse. Before crypto, all this property could be duplicated infinitely with “right click and save”. But crypto allows true digital property rights, backed up by math, not a government, and that will be the most powerful force on the Internet over the next 20 years. Yes, “right click and save” still exists, but with Twitter, Reddit, and other services enforcing these digital property rights, duplication/plagiarism will fade away with time.
Domains (like mirror.xyz) we the original Internet property. They are a pointer to a particular computer connected to the internet, most likely serving up a web page you are reading. They can’t be “right click and save”-ed but have a whole host of other issues. Enter ENS, which bring cryptographically secure property ownership to domains and is one of the OG projects to come out of the Ethereum Foundation. They were doing NFTs waaayyy before they were cool. ENS has been around for a while and it’s most used as a more human-readable way to send tokens to a particular Ethereum address…although can be used for much more. It’s become a service for decentralized identity, NFT registration and trading, and a universal utility service for the crypto space. So I’m happy they’ve undergone progressive decentralization and will be governed by a DAO of $ENS token holders going forward. They’re a great example of a humble service with real utility transitioning to community ownership and governance. Claim your airdrop and delegate if you haven’t already and congrats to the team on a successful DAO launch! 🚀
When people think of DeFi, they think of speculating on new tokens or yield farming APY on new, crazy food protocols. 🤑 But those were just the initial use cases; DeFi will be the financial system for the internet. DAOs will be the native organizations of the internet and can be described as any group of people online with a shared wallet and economy. Well DAO wallets need financial services, just like any other organization on the planet, and they get those services through DeFi.
Ribbon Finance is one of the most promising DeFi projects in the derivatives/structure product space. In the next few years, more of the TradFi structured product market will move to public, smart contract blockchains because settlement time (t+0) and “code as law” features make these markets 10x more efficient than the legacy marketplaces. Traditional hedge funds have massive back offices to deal with these inefficiencies of the legacy markets, and those will largely be replaced with DeFi infrastructure.
Ribbon’s new Treasury offering is a structured product for DAOs, so they can earn stablecoin income on the large protocol treasuries they’ve amassed. This allows the DAO to get some liquidity and paying for services without selling protocol tokens and impacting the market. The big trends here are 1) DAOs are becoming the “first best customer” for many DeFi projects and 2) structured products have massive growth potential on their impact. And Ribbon has been leading the way on both. 🎀