Problem: The Web3 market has been developing at break-neck pace. It seems like every 3 months there is a new financial mechanism, protocol, or structure being invented and put out into the world. From DAOs, to NFTs, this post will dive into a few of the promising applications of crypto. Today’s post is inspired by Nakul Gupta’s Cryptechie💱 article from November 28, 2021.
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Solution: This post will describe a few of the most promising applications of crypto projects.
Gas-reducing projects. If anyone has ever tried to purchase or participate in the crypto ecosystem, they’ve all faced the biggest annoyance of the decentralized finance world: gas fees. Ethereum transaction prices (called gas) have source in the last 2 years. Thus, over the last year new Level 1 protocols such as Luna, Avax, and Solana have been “chipping away at Ethereum’s DeFi market share, even as TVL in DeFi overall has increased 10x to $110B+.” (as Nakul describes). Nakul goes on to share his findings: the ethereum ecosystem’s share of DeFi TVL as well as share of the smart contract platform market is decreasing rapidly (though it is still an ultra-sound triple point asset). See below for a manifestation. This opens the door of opportunity for another billion-dollar protocol.
NFT and DAO Aggregation Projects: As more and more NFT or DAO projects spring up every day the problem of infinite choice and finite time selection arises. How do consumers select the best NFT project for them given all of the options? There is ample space in the market for a project or company that serves to aggregate the existing NFT or DAO marketplaces in a single pane of glass. As Nakul describes,
“While OpenSea acts as an aggregator of data and NFTs, OpenSea users aren’t able to instantly purchase NFTs listed on other marketplaces instead they are required to bid and wait for acceptance of the purchase. What if users were allowed users to instantly buy NFTs listed on other marketplaces. While OpenSea remains the largest NFT exchange, there are a variety of marketplaces for dozens of categories of assets including pfps, IP, art, sports, collectibles, and more. Currently, the liquidity between marketplaces remains fragmented. Listing assets across a variety of exchanges is time-consuming and purchasing NFTs of the same collection from a variety of exchanges has been tedious.4”
Token-gated Physical Communities: For anyone who was at NFT NYC, they saw first-hand the effect of “token-gated parties.” It’s the Web3 equivalent of the bouncer at the door: unless you have a token (NFT, coin, whatever) associated with an event then you can’t actually attend. Lots have speculated what the future of this may look like (from random mint party access to NFTs of NFT holders), but I am interested in platforms and tools like Collab.Land which enables communities such as Friends With Benefits ($FWB). The industry is ripe with opportunity!
Monetization: Varied monetization depending on the project.
Contributed by: Michael Bervell (Billion Dollar Startup Ideas)