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 🐦

🐭 #1 - Controversial play-to-earn launch

Pixelmon is one of the most hyped up play-to-earn games out there. Imagine a cross between Pokemon and Minecraft, and you've got a game that has thousands of people excited - about 200k Twitter followers and 40k Discord members to be exact. Pixelmon held its first NFT sale on Monday with nearly 8,000 people each paying ~3 ETH for an NFT.

However, the community also discovered that development of the Pixelmon game isn't quite as far along as the team made it seem. When you combine that with the founding team's complete anonymity, you get a lot of questions from an anxious community. The team is often the biggest determinant of success in an NFT project, and Pixelmon's floor price of ~1 ETH only a day after the sale is a strong sign of the community's distaste with this week's events.

💰 #2 - Historic crypto heist

Last week played host to the second-largest crypto heist of all time when a hacker discovered an exploit in the Wormhole bridge. A bridge is a protocol that lets users move assets from one blockchain to another. Wormhole was one of the most popular bridges for moving Ethereum onto the Solana blockchain, but it turns out there was an issue with the mechanics of the protocol.

At a very high-level, the hacker was able to trick the Wormhole bridge into thinking it received ETH (it didn't) and wrongly minting that amount of ETH to Solana out of the Wormhole smart contract. This amounted to a monstrous sum of money that also affected all holders of ETH on the Solana chain and dropped the value of SOL by more than 10%. In a surprise move, a quant trading firm and investor in Wormhole repaid the full amount lost in the exploit back to Wormhole only a few days later.

For a more detailed explanation of the Wormhole exploit, check out this short video.

🎮 #3 - What NFTs can do for gaming

One of the most exciting applications of NFTs has always been in gaming, and this tweet does an A+ job of explaining why. At their core, gaming NFTs allow 1) the usage of in-game goods as financial assets with scarcity and value, and 2) the ability to use these assets across multiple games.

We've already seen the first point proven in Web2 games like Counterstrike and Team Fortress 2 with in-game economies worth hundreds of millions of dollars. In these games, rare character and weapon skins have sold for tens of thousands of dollars or more. The second point is where things could get especially interesting with items and economies crossing across multiple games. Hence, many in people Web3 see gaming as the next major step for NFTs and crypto.

💠 #4 - Major DAO removes its leadership

Brantly was the Director of Operations at ENS, the Web3 DAO that runs the infrastructure for all ".eth" domains, similar to what Google Domains and GoDaddy do in Web2.  Brantly had a tweet from 5 years ago resurface that expressed some very controversial opinions. The ENS community was taken aback by the comments, so they gave Brantly, a long-time ENS contributor, an opportunity to explain and redeem himself. Instead, he doubled down on his opinions.

If you're dying to know what Brantly said, you'll have to go and find the tweet yourself. I'm sharing this story because it's a great example of a DAO voting on an outcome, even if that meant removing one of its leaders. The vote wasn't unanimous, but the DAO successfully reached a majority decision through its internal governance mechanisms.

🎸 #5 - Coachella enters the NFT chat

You know NFTs have gone mainstream when Coachella is launching collections of its own. Most of their NFTs are old Coachella photos and festival art, but the main attraction here is the Coachella Keys. There are 10 Key NFTs, each giving the holder lifetime access to Coachella along with bonus perks depending on the Key.

The lowest bid on a Key right now is $26,000, which seems surprisingly low relative to the monstrous sums of money people are spending on other NFTs. With two days to go on the auctions, we'll have to wait and see where the final sale price ends up.

🔥 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!