What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #263

Going down the crypto 🐰 hole...

Nov 13, 2021

In the last month, my twitter feed has experienced an epic takeover of tweets around web3, DAOs, and the metaverse. Many enterprise investors who were all in on dev tooling just weeks ago are now fully in the “crypto rabbit hole.”

And here is why it’s different now versus 5 years ago…

Jesse Pollak (jessepollak.eth) @jessepollak

$ENS is a watershed moment: * important public good, built as OSS over many years * $2B+ of ownership distributed to contributors and users, with no allocation to investors * scaled liquid democracy governance w/signed constitution welcome to our crypto cooperative future!

This past week, the Network Solutions of Ethereum addresses just did an airdrop of tokens (award free tokens to early users/contributors) and created quite a buzz. As for myself, I bought my own ENS address just weeks ago and was airdropped $11k which is now worth about $15k. You can find me at edsim.eth

edgar.eth 🦉 @EdgarAronov

50% of $ENS goes to a community treasury. That's 50m tokens. With the current price at $29, that's a 1.5 billion treasury managed by @ensdomains users & contributors. Web 3.0 is astonishing.

While everything in infrastructure land won’t be turned into a coop or DAO, it is something important to pay attention to because I truly do believe what can be Web3-ed will be.

Ed Sim @edsim

All web2 infra will have web3 equivalent which is why I ❤️ this token drop ENS is decentralizing governance w/ #ENSDAO! @ensdomains is an open public identity protocol owned by the community. I own edsim.eth, claim your $ENS governance tokens 👇🏼 claim.ens.domains ENS AirdropENS token claim appclaim.ens.domains

Example - Discord

sassal.eth 🦇🔊🐼 @sassal0x

If web2 platforms won't integrate web3 features, we'll just work around them and build our own platforms Web3 is inevitable

Ryan Brown 📼🎮 @Toadsanime

Discord is pausing its NFT plans after a huge backlash, which included a wave of users cancelling paid subs. I was told the server made of Discord staff & big game studio reps erupted over this, with many threats to take communities elsewhere. Hard to progress facing that. https://t.co/WP6hkyZsXD

But Josh Elman brings up a great point…

Josh Elman @joshelman

I feel like the critical question we should all be asking needs to be flipped. It isn’t “how will you make money?” But instead “how will you grow to have meaningful mainstream adoption?”

Josh Elman @joshelman

So instead of asking “how will you make money?” Or with NFTs “how much money are you making right now buying and selling into the hype?”, please ask “how does this lead to deep habitual usage?”

We went down this 🐰 hole back in 2017 looking for a there there at the intersection of crypto and enterprise. So we started an enterprise blockchain accelerator with IBM (creators of Hyperledger blockchain) and Comcast (investing in the future).

And after meeting over 1500 “enterprise” blockchain companies, we (cofounded with Rob Bailey, Eliot Durbin and myself) were fortunate enough to invest in infrastructure and analytic cos like Blockdaemon, Fireblocks, and Amber Data. What we concluded was as much as supply chain and couponing and other use cases sounded super cool and relevant, databases for the most part worked just fine. In addition, IBM and hyperledger fabric blockchain is pretty much dead - no one wanted to take part in a company led revolution versus one led by the people. Ultimately, the real killer app we discovered back in 2017 is digital money and hence blockdaemon (now the largest independent node operator and staking platform), Fireblocks (leading digital asset and custody software), and Amber Data (cryptocurrency APIs to run your business) all in the portfolio. This next wave with DAOs and NFTs is going to be quite exciting so if you’re building anything infrastructure related (auth, security, privacy, off chain stuff), I’d love to chat.

As always, 🙏🏼 for reading and please share with your friends and colleagues.

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