Hey there, I’m Luca - lifelong startup nerd, crypto fanatic since 2016, and now keeping up with trends across Web3 is my second full-time job.

Here’s everything you need to know about the last week in Web3 - in 5 tweets 🐦

(Completely unintentionally, the theme of this week's newsletter became decentralization. Read on for some commentary, fantastic examples, and not-so-great examples of decentralization!)

🤯 #1 - Is Web3 decentralized after all?

Moxie was the cofounder and CEO of Signal, the ultra-encrypted messaging app, until earlier this month. Signal's privacy-first ethos aligns closely with that of crypto, but Moxie has some acute criticisms of Web3's "decentralization" in the present day. Namely:

• There are only ~5500 Ethereum nodes today, AKA servers that keep tabs and transact on the Ethereum blockchain

• Most decentralized apps built on Ethereum use two companies' APIs (Infura and Alchemy) to perform their operations on the blockchain

• The actual blockchain data of most NFTs is just a link to the image on a website, often OpenSea, which hardly makes it better than the Web2 world

These points are all true and very valid. As you might expect in Web3, people are building their way around these issues. The best overview of these new projects + a rebuttal of Moxie's piece lives here if you want to check it out. (The first half is pretty plain-english, the second half is a bit more technical.)

💸 #2 - A decentralized NFT marketplace...

OpenSea has been the undoubted juggernaut of NFT marketplaces, both in terms of brand and transaction metrics, in 2021, but its biggest issue is that it operates as a standard, private, Web2 company. Users expected that OpenSea would eventually release a token to reward its users and provide some governance rights, but that's looking less and less likely.

Enter LooksRare, the new kid on the block. When it launched ~1 week ago, it retroactively awarded $LOOKS tokens based on peoples' past usage of OpenSea. People could then stake (i.e., put in another account) their $LOOKS tokens to earn a share of LooksRare's 2% transaction fees. By comparison, all of OpenSea's 2.5% fees go straight back to the company.

LooksRare had very strong initial transaction volume, about ~10x that of OpenSea's, in the first few days, but there's speculation that a lot of it was due to people selling their NFTs between their own wallets. Only time will tell if LooksRare will meaningfully disrupt OpenSea's dominance.

⛓ #3 - ... A not so decentralized blockchain...

Dapper Labs is best known for partnering with the NBA for their Top Shot NFT collection, and more recently, with the NFL for their NFL ALL DAY collection. In order to keep fees manageable for these collections, Dapper uses their own blockchain called Flow, which largely operates like Ethereum or any other blockchain.

However, Dapper exercised its role as the centralized owner of the Flow blockchain to ban an account that threatened its status with a potentially lucrative Chinese market. One of the core tenants of the blockchain is that it's permissionless, meaning that it's impossible to revoke anyone's access to it. Evidently, Dapper decided against that for their Flow blockchain.

🗞 #4 - ... and a decentralized media company!

Rug Radio is the first ever decentralized media company. The last year has seen a lot of "firsts" in terms of decentralized projects, but this one's especially exciting because of how much sense it makes in the media and content space in particular. Media is inherently designed for the masses, and there's no better way to form an organization reflecting the masses than through a DAO.

What are some of the benefits of a decentralized media company? Members of the DAO have a say in the media that will be produced, the majority of content will likely be produced in-house by DAO members, and any revenue + benefits from the media will go directly to DAO members.

📖 #5 - Rabbit hole resources

I'm including this simply because it's a fantastic compilation of high-level resources on Web3. If you're remotely interested in the space, do yourself a favor, bookmark the tweet, and go through a few of the links next time you're procrastinating on your work.

Reading about something can only take you so far, and ultimately, you have to learn by doing. With something as deep and expensive as Web3 though, more reading certainly can't hurt. I probably spent 20-30 hours just consuming content before I took any sort of action in the space.

🔥 That's all for this week! Which tweet taught you something new? Which corners of web3 would you like to learn more about?

Let me know by replying to the email or tweeting at me - any and all feedback is welcome :)

🎉 P.S. Pass along the ~good vibes~ by forwarding or sharing this to your friends if you learned something interesting!