1confirmation Newsletter - Issue #98
NFTs have captured mainstream attention in a way that nothing else has in the 12+ year history of our industry. Opensea is one of the fastest growing online marketplaces ever with $7.5B+ in exchange volume so far this year. Financial institutions like Visa are buying NFTs, old school auction houses like Christie's and Sotheby's are selling NFTs and big companies like Coinbase are now trying to get in the game. Despite all the momentum and attention this year, only ~500K people in the world have bought or sold an NFT to date. If you're reading this you may feel like you're late, but the truth is you're still quite early.
1confirmation bet big on NFTs back in 2018 when we led the Opensea seed round (see our investment memo here). We also led the SuperRare seed round in 2020 and were one of the first investment firms in the world to buy an NFT earlier this year. We've been quietly buying NFTs since and recently shared our framework for investing in this new asset class: We Like the Nouns
Required reading this week
1confirmation backs new NFT startup built for music artists in $2.2 million round — www.theblockcrypto.com
Catalog is pioneering music NFTs and October is already a record month for artist sales on the platform 🎵
DeFi Upstart dYdX Briefly Overtook Coinbase in Crypto Trading — www.bloomberg.com
dYdX launched an optimistic rollup on Ethereum and a token in the past few months and quickly became the highest volume DEX (see their backstory here) 🏆
Hop launched last month to bridge the Ethereum mainnet and L2s like Arbitrum and Polygon. Watch this space 👀
Polkadot Is Ready for Parachain Launch, Auction Dates Proposed — polkadot.network
Parachains are coming to Polkadot starting mid November. Get your DOTs ready ⚪️
The Case for Clean Money — forum.makerdao.com
Rune lays out the vision for MakerDAO as a purpose driven DAO 📈
Rally Turns 1: A Look Back and Ahead — medium.com
Rally is pioneering creator coins and the protocol just turned 1 🎈
Preparing for V2 Launch and V1 Downgrade
Primitive is a decentralized options protocol. Be on the lookout for v2 💪
Early NFT Investor Nick Tomaino: 'Belief Equals Value' in Crypto
An interview with Dan Roberts of Decrypt and Nick Tomaino of 1confirmation
On-Chain Analytics Show ETH Accumulation Is Greater Than That of BTC - Unchained Podcast — unchainedpodcast.com
An interview with Laura Shin of Unchained, Fredrik Haga of Dune Analytics and Richard Chen of 1confirmation