Empty Metaverses??, Spice Girl Scams????, Sushi Sex Rumors ??

The big talk ??

The metaverse. The multi-billion dollar play from Web3 to convince everyone who uses the plain old boring internet that crypto has value above and beyond just wildly speculating and buying NFTs.?

This week there has been quite the hullabaloo over how many people are actually using the metaverse, and whether the sky-high valuations some of its proponents are fetching are justified. So, dear reader, it’s high time we had a talk about a boy named Metaverse.?

Before we dive in: first, what do I mean when I say ‘metaverse’. Well, my dear reader, a simple description would be, “a virtual world whereby each individual is represented by an avatar and has the ability to move freely within it.”?

Think of it like a massive, endless game of Fortnite, except the aim (ideally) isn’t to kill each other but to ‘do things’ like talk and hang out. A more cynical version (who, me?) would be an undefined, vague assemblage of different ideas and technologies arranged in such a way that means it’s hard to judge if they fail or what direction they would ultimately move in.?

It all started when DappRadar, an analytics company began poking around Decentraland and The Sandbox, two of the most popular metaverses, or at least, that’s what everyone thought.?

Over a 24-hour period, DappRadar recorded 38 “active users”, while competitor The Sandbox had 522 “active users”. Now, the definition of an active user according to DappRadar, was someone who engaged with a smart contract on the platform. So if you logged on, hung out with your mates, and did little else, that wouldn’t count as an active user in DappRadar’s eyes. Still, it didn’t seem all that promising.?

Looking across both ‘verses, the largest number of daily "active users” ever on Decentraland was 675, according to DappRadar. For The Sandbox, it topped out at 4,503 users at one time.

A spokesperson from Decentraland disputed the numbers, saying it regularly brought in 7,000 unique users per day , and The Sandbox also disputed the numbers, both citing differing measurement techniques than those used by DappRadar.?

But the bigger picture here is even with those more favorable numbers, and the long line of companies signing multi-million dollar deals to create a presence there, these metaverses haven’t delivered the promise of Web3. Yet.

Meta, formerly Facebook, has also struggled to convince people its own version is worth spending time in. Its most recent demo of how far it has come has drawn more criticism than praise. Its pivot from Facebook to Meta is an attempt to showcase to investors that it could diversify its revenue beyond advertising - 96% of the company’s cash comes from ads.?

Despite the vast resources, Meta’s world hasn’t caught fire, even with two billion users sat on its other platforms. So what’s going on??

Well, the metaverse is an awkward place to spend time in , be it through Meta’s headsets, or the processor-intensive worlds of your browser. There’s also not an awful lot to do. Shopping is clunky , and events online aren’t as big a draw as people hoped. There are also bigger issues around policing that none of the above seem to have fully grasped yet.

The metaverse’s fortunes are also intimately tied to the fortunes of the markets more broadly. Whereas a game developer based in the United States isn’t really affected by swings in the value of the dollar, developers building in Web3 are at the mercy of token holders. It’s the curse of crypto. Speculation is still king, and when times are good, the public are interested in metaverses. When times are bad, they high tail it outta here. Because, well, the reasons above.?

So the next time you see a company or even a state launch its metaverse - there are a lot more than you think - it’s likely to be a lonely place for the foreseeable.?

What people are shouting about: ???

• Markets oh no no - Bitcoin took a nosedive this week, dragging everything else down with it. On Thursday, Bitcoin dipped suddenly below $19,000 which has been acting as a psychological barrier. Most interpretations of the sudden slump point to a report from the US government on its difficulty in curbing inflation. Things have bounced back since then, but the word on the street is, crypto winter is here, and it’s not going anywhere.???
• Bored Apes Catches the SEC’s eye - The US Securities and Exchange Commission has a bone to pick with Yuga Labs Inc., the creator of the popular Bored Ape Yacht Club collection of NFTs, over whether sales of its digital assets violate federal law. According to sources, the SEC hasn’t formally charged Yuga Labs, it’s in an exploratory phase. Yugas has said its cooperating with the agency.
• Bitcoin miners are trying to break Texas’ energy grid - Remember the cold snap in Texas last year, and how it caused massive power outages? Well, that’s going to be small fry if the number of Bitcoin miners setting up shop in the lone star state is anything to go by. The Bitcoin buildup in Texas has been so massive and so fast that it’s like adding entire cities’ worth of electricity consumption in just a couple of years. Texas utilities have gotten proposals for multiple Bitcoin mines that would require an additional 33,000 megawatts of electricity, or enough to power all of New York state .
• Centralization is inevitable, says Morgan Stanley - the big bank waded into the debate around how decentralized is crypto really. My view? It is and it isn’t, depending on what you’re looking at. Morgan Stanley saw Ethereum’s move to proof of stake as a sign of increased centralization, as 60% of the new validators are run by just four companies. It concluded, “centralization is a natural evolution of the financialization of cryptocurrency markets.”?
• October has just become the biggest month for hackers, already - We’re not even halfway through October yet, and it’s already topping the charts for hacker activity. That’s thanks to a buffer day of exploits on Tuesday this week, where four exploits took $718 million. That brings the running tally for the year to $3 billion across 125 different hacks, putting 2022 on course to outdo the all-time high of $3.2 billion for stolen crypto funds set last year.

The at first glance incredibly boring, but in reality, incredibly insightful and interesting thing you should read this week ??

Crypto addresses are now searchable on Google. Yes, it does sound boring. But it’s a small but important symbol of how Google, and Web2 more broadly have become closer to the Web3 world. In particular, Google has been busy offering cloud services to blockchains looking for reliable storage. Amazon Web Services has been doing this for years too. Meta, meanwhile, has been trying to build its own metaverse , which isn’t going all too well.

Chart of the week ??

The eye-watering numbers around crypto hacks this year, via Chainalysis.

Strange but true ??

• A crypto themed restaurant is no longer accepting crypto - When the restaurant Bored & Hungry opened in Long Beach, California, earlier this year it accepted cryptocurrencies in return for burgers. It even bragged that it was the first restaurant to accept Ethereum and Apecoin as payment. Today, things aren’t quite so rosy. Bored & Hungry has stopped accepting crypto, presumably because having revenue in currencies in decline makes financial planning a bit of a challenge.?
• A Spice Girl was used to hack celeb crypto wallets - Mel B, she of the Scary Spice fame, was the unwitting victim of crypto scammers, who somehow accessed her WhatsApp account and spammed all her friends to support a charity by sending money to a crypto wallet. It’s not known if any of the other Spices were caught up in the snafu.?
• There are now more than 12,000 cryptocurrencies that recorded zero trading activity this year - Nomics, a crypto data analytics company has found that huge swathes of the crypto market is basically dead. The crypto data provider found that throughout 2022, over 12,100 crypto tokens have had no trading volume for at least one month. Sheesh.?
• CNN has been accused of a ‘rug pull’ after it abandoned its NFT project - CNN is dropping the development of its marketplace selling collectible ‘Moments’ tied to major news events, angering users who’d spent thousands of dollars and were sold on exclusive access and features coming in the future.
• SushiSwap is on a PR offensive after rumours about its new CEO and a horse emerge - I’ve said you lot the best till last. There is a strange rumour flying around that SushiSwap’s new CEO Jared Gray, fingered a horse. I cannot believe I just wrote that. But yes, a smattering of stories earlier this week claimed that yes, Jared fiddled with a horse. The value of the exchange’s currency sunk by 10% and a slew of altcoins with names like Horse, Horse inu, Finger Horse Inu, Sushi horse have all appeared, with one coin gaining 6000%. Please please please don’t buy any of these.?

These newsletters get stranger by the day don't they?

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