The guy on the left is the CEO of Decentraland. We’ll get to that soon. It’s a digital real estate platform.
UPDATE:
Yikes just in time https://www.wsj.com/finance/currencies/the-worlds-biggest-crypto-firm-is-melting-down-338b8e17?mod=hp_lead_pos4
You have free access to WSJ through GA Tech https://education.wsj.com/search-students/?mod=wsjedu&user_type=students
The “Web3” link below, at first I just posted it without paying much attention to it. It’s a Harvard Business Review article. It’s actually pretty good, I recommend you check it out. It’s written before the crash so it’s a sober look at the possibilities that still exist, despite the hype of nearly weekly or even daily fraud and theft announcements.
OK on to the article:
Web3 is out there, it’s the combination of crypto and blockchain and a bunch of potentially “web-changing” applications.
This is not the same thing as Tim Berners-Lee’s Web 3.0 based on the “semantic web”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web3.
No one knows yet whether this is really going to be the next version of the web, and with crypto prices at the moment, it’s not looking so great. Who knows what tech will survive the wreckage seen in some corners of the crypto universe.
At the same time, I would remind people that many technologies with staying power started out as elements of over-hyped financial bubbles. The commercial internet itself survived 1999-2001 just fine, for example. Railroads were certainly the over-hyped stocks of the day, yet they still serve us as critical infrastructure.
So having said all that, let’s talk a look at the dark underside of Web 3. Here’s a great little site that tracks financial and other types of fraud in the Web 3-verse:
Now, I wrote most everything above for the first post of the Spring 2023 semester, and it’s all just as true today. At the end of this article I post the rest of that Spring 2023 article, at the time the FBX debacle was in full swing.
For today, I found an article about a recent hack of Mixin, a Web3 site.
Mixin Network suspends operations following $200 million hack
What I found quite troubling was this line:
This makes the Mixin incident one of the most significant crypto heists this year…
One of the most significant? What about the others? Are they so commonplace that they hardly make news? Apparently so.
I looked at the web3isgoinggreat.com site and found this more recent fraud for nearly $180 million out of Hong Kong. A few days before the fraud was verified, this headline came out:
This was followed more recently with this update:
Here another case where some crooks hired trusted celebrities to shill the operation. Of course the actual suspects are on the run, and the people being arrested are likely just for show. It’s not unusual for these crooked Web3 companies to use celebrities and influencers. FTX used CNBC’s Kevin O’Leary and HBO’s Larry David as promoters for the failed FTX scheme.
Equally interesting is the digital land rush (and subsequent crash). Places like Decentraland and the Sandbox saw huge inflows to purchase real estate in a place where they are still making it*.
The crypto housing crash costing digital landlords a fortune
Here’s a clip from the article:
The value of metaverse property transactions peaked at $893m in the second quarter of 2022, according to analytics company DappRadar. Some declared that virtual land was the next frontier for property barons…
There was some serious money chasing those digital real estate assets. As a proxy, the price of Mana, the cryptocoin of the Decentraland platform, peaked over $5 and is currently at 30 cents. That’s a 94% loss.
Investment in metaverse property crashed to just $43m in the final three months of last year – a 95pc decline in six months.
If you think any of this has a future, now is the time to pile in. Me, I’m not so sure. The market is not dead, and probably won’t die. At the same time, I bet the piece of land someone paid $450K for to be next to Snoop Dogg is worth less now.
Read through the Telegraph article and you’ll learn a lot of details about people’s dreams gone to bust. Someone actually took out a mortgage to buy property in Decentraland. That’s quite a bet, one that hasn’t worked out.
OK see you next week!
Here’s the rest of the original article, a flashback to January of 2023, it’s mostly to share the links:
This section of the weekly post is normally where I take a look at some security issue in the news. I usually do a couple stories about NSO Group’s Pegasus Software, but right now Crypto is in the news. This is most acutely felt in the breakdown of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX platform.
(note: that link should be readable by all, but we also all get free WSJ access as GA Tech students, try this link https://education.wsj.com/search-students/. We get free NYT access as well.)
Let’s take a step back and get the high-level view. Web3 is out there, it’s the combination of crypto and blockchain and a bunch of potentially “web-changing” applications.
This is not the same thing as Tim Berners-Lee’s Web 3.0 based on the “semantic web”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web3.
* This is a reference to Mark Twains famous quote about real estate, “buy real estate they’re not making any more of it.”
Photo credit: “Esteban Ordano, CEO de Decentraland, Jon Jacobs, CEO de Neverdie Studios, Alex Amsel, Head of Blockchain Strategy en Fig.co y Stephen Thorne, inversor en Atomico.” by Imágenes libres -@Sonaratv is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0.