Listen Now

In this week's episode of Off-Chain, we cover the biggest stories of the past week in web3. This includes: The governance proposal that's targeting a hard fork of the Terra blockchain. The state of Bitcoin mining in China. Do Kwon's legal battles. How Stablegains has lost $48mm of investor's cash and has no way to pay them back. Robinhood launching a web3 wallet.

If you listened to our episode on STEPN back in March, you’re probably familiar with the term “move-to-earn”. It’s a subset of play-and-earn and it’s gaining a lot of traction. Put simply, these web3 games center around you doing physical activity in exchange for crypto-based rewards. STEPN has arguably been the category creator here and now boasts over 300,000 DAUs, but there are a lot of new projects entering the space that are building on the model. Genopets is one of them. It’s probably unfair to say they’re new to the space because this project has been in the works for several years, but what I love about it is how they blend together the nostalgia of a Tamagotchi game with a physical exercise game element. If you have no idea what a Tamagotchi is, well, you obviously didn’t grow up through the 90s! Actual gameplay to one side, the Genopets tokenomics are really interesting. They have both a completely free-to-play element that doesn’t require you to purchase an NFT initially, as well as a path that includes buying in-game assets. I’ve been playing in the beta and have been enjoying it so far, and I believe they’re slated for a full launch in Q3 of this year. If you’ve enjoyed some of the recent episodes where we’ve been speaking with GameFi teams, this one’s going to be popular with you. I talk with Albert Chen, the co-founder & CEO, as well as Kevin Kim, the COO, and we dig into all aspects of the gameplay, game economy, and what to expect from the future of the project. Genopets website.

Markets have been in turmoil this past week, triggered by rising inflation concerns and then the monumental de-pegging of the Terra stablecoin, $UST. We dig into exactly what happened, including how someone has walked away with around $800mm in profit as a result. All this and more in this week's episode of Off Chain, your weekly roundup of the biggest stories happening in web3.

We sit down with Shane Mac, the cofounder of XMTP, which aims to become the communication network for web3. We discuss the evolution of communication and how there's a huge gap in web3 for wallet-to-wallet communication that requires an infrastructure layer like SMTP to power it.  

In this week's episode of Off-Chain, we dig into the biggest web3 stories of the week, including: The $320mm Otherside land sale. Square Enix goes all-in on GameFi. The $55mm Fantom liquidation that's been causing chaos on the network. Tennessee is legally recognizing the formation of DAOs. Fort Worth is running a small Bitcoin mining experiment. Coinbase takes out the first Bitcoin-backed loan. Kraken's new NFT marketplace.

I speak to Bumzy, one of the early contributors to the Crabada ecosystem, and now leading growth at CrabaDAO. We take a look under the shell of the play & earn game that's accounting for over 60% of the Avalanche network's transactions. Bumzy's Twitter. Crabada website. CrabaDAO website.

This is the first episode of our new weekly series, Off-Chain, that covers the biggest stories in web3 from the past week. In this week's episode, we cover: Stripe launching crypto payments. Fidelity offers Bitcoin as a 401(k) investment option. Optimism has announced its token launch (plus airdrop). Coinbase announces beta of NFT marketplace.

I speak with Palmer, the cofounder of Monster Champions, a brand new play and earn game that's just launched. The game looks to create an exciting experience both on and off chain for players, with some interesting tokenomics to keep things growing sustainably. Palmer's Twitter. Monster Champions website.

In this episode, we speak with Shehan Chandrasekera, the Head of Tax at Cointracker, to walk through all of the different tax considerations for individuals holding cryptocurrencies and NFTs. We discuss staking rewards, airdrops, wash sale rules, gas fees, NFTs, and more. Cointracker website Shehan's Twitter

Jones Dao is a protocol that’s focused on managing options trading strategies for retail investors through their vaults. Options trading in DeFi is just starting to take off, with Dopex really leading the charge here, and Jones Dao are very closely aligned with them, using Dopex for the majority of their options trading. Options trading in general is an enormous part of traditional finance. Even retail investing platforms like Robinhood see the majority of their revenue (~38%, in fact) come from options. And what’s great about this for DeFi is that options trading can be extremely profitable regardless of wider market conditions. Ice Cream, one of the cofounders, talks through this in more detail in the episode, and shares their plans for going multi-chain, adding new vaults, the introduction of veJONES, and something I’m particularly interested in - their synthetic options LPs. Jones DAO website. Jones DAO docs. Ice Cream's Twitter.

In this episode we interview Yawn Rong, one of the co-founders of STEPN. STEPN is one of our favorite new play & earn apps that is probably best described as a version of Strava or MapMyRun on the blockchain. New players are earning ~$25 each day for doing 10 minutes of walking, whereas some power users are earning as much as $400+ each day! Don't miss this one. STEPN website. STEPN whitepaper. STEPN Twitter.

If, like me, you grew up in the 90s and loved football, you probably spend a disproportionate amount of your time playing football management games like Championship Manager (later Football Manager). Well, Metasoccer is bringing all of that nostalgia onto the blockchain. They're building a play & earn football management game. You own everything from the players, backroom staff, and stadia as NFTs, and you compete in a league against others around the world. In this episode, I speak to Gustavo Sabino, the head of growth at Metasoccer, about how it all works. Metasoccer website. Metasoccer documentation. Metasoccer Twitter.

Nat Eliason runs the treasury at Crypto Raiders, a popular play & earn game within the Polygon ecosystem. We discuss how Nat made the leap from working in web2 to taking on a major role in an emerging web3 project, as well as sharing what he's helping to build at Crypto Raiders.

The founder of Metafabric, an ambitious web3 project that aims to build a social network within the metaverse, speaks to the podcast about what they're building, why it's important, and what the future of wallet-to-wallet communication in web3 will look like.

I speak with the founder of Metagoons, a web3 incubator that combines the play-to-earn guild model with an incubator for emerging web3 creators. Metagoons website. DJ's Twitter.

We talk to FoodFarmer, the founder of Food Farmer Finance, about his "farming-as-a-service" platform. The platform is one of a few in the emerging FaaS space that looks to deliver returns from yield farming to investors in a completely passive way.

In this episode, we speak to Miles Anthony, founder of Decentral Games - the creator of ICE Poker. Miles walks through how play-to-earn gaming wokrs, give a deep dive into the economics of ICE Poker and how the whole thing works. Poker has arrived in the metaverse and people are making real money from it. Don't miss this one. Decentral Games: https://decentral.games/ Miles on Twitter: https://twitter.com/0xMiles 

After two US Senators sent a strongly-worded letter to a number of the payment processing companies that had initially joined the Libra Association, a mass exodus began. The letter, sent to the likes of Stripe, Visa and Mastercard, urged them to leave the association, threatening to subject them to "a high level of scrutiny from regulators" on all of their payment activities. This is quite the blog for Libra, Facebook, and it raises some serious concerns around the approach taken by the US Senators. 

Off the back of the news that researchers at Google have developed a quantum computer that managed to compute a problem in under 3 minutes that the world's most powerful classical supercomputer would take 10,000 years to complete, we look at the implications on blockchain and the technology that we use in our every day lives. Not only that, but we look at how Kik has taken the bold move to retire their 300 million user product to focus on fighting the SEC around the launch of their cryptocurrency, Kin (plus much more).