Messari’s Crypto Theses report is a must read for everyone. The extracted passages below show how Harmony’s strategies align with the market potential and the industry leaders – in particular, Web3 Economy (NFT, DAO, Wallets) and Infrastructures (Bridges, ZKProofs, Privacy).
https://twitter.com/stse/status/1467960973394788354
<aside> ❗ Growth everywhere, particularly: NFT infrastructure, DAO tooling, and inter-protocol bridges.
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“Web3” is a good all-encompassing term that captures cryptocurrencies (digital gold & stablecoins), smart contract computing (Layer 1-2 platforms), decentralized hardware infrastructure (video, storage, sensors, etc), Non-Fungible Tokens (digital ID & property rights), DeFi (financial services to swap and collateralize web3 assets), the Metaverse (the digital commons built in game-like environments), and community governance (DAOs, or decentralized autonomous organizations).
Crypto will be an order of magnitude larger by 2030 because the user economics here are an order of magnitude more attractive. We’re at the brink of a total transformation of the global economy. One that’s bigger than mobile, and maybe even the internet itself... we rocket to a $20 trillion bubble that lasts all year, and sits on par with the dotcom boom in real dollars - unlikely, but possible given accommodative monetary policies worldwide, neverending government spending, and crypto’s accelerating narrative momentum.
Web3 gives us “the chance to upgrade networks into crypto asset centered economies, and build systems where the incentives of network owners, network participants, and third- party developers are fully aligned.”
DeFi offers savers 5% vs. Wall Street’s 0.5%. Non-fungible tokens (“NFTs”) give creators monetization opportunities without Hollywood’s 50%+ rents. Open games and social graphs remove the 100% take rate from tech incumbents and eliminate deplatforming risks... the user-owned economy will outperform the monopolist-owned economy in the long-term.
The American Web3 Council could run point on implementing things like Hester Peirce’s Safe Harbor, handing fraud and cases of bona fide securities offerings over to the SEC. It could work with the CFTC on oversight of DeFi market makers and rules for the perpetuals markets. It could work with the IRS on tax reporting standards to fix crypto’s 1099 problem. It could work with the IRS and others to create the new taxable legal structure for DAOs.
The winning long-term plays I like in the NFT space are infrastructure related, which will outperform - by a wide margin - the expected value of even the bluest chip NFT projects. Investing in infrastructure in a niche like art (e.g. SuperRare), might not outperform the eventual top 1% of NFTs, but your expected value will be higher, it will save you lots of time, and you won’t need to be a tastemaker to have success. As NFT infrastructure expands in every feasible asset category, the infrastructure space becomes especially appealing.
A Cambrian explosion of innovation within the NFT space is just getting started. I’m not sure how much longer the market for individual NFTs can bubble up, but I do know that reliable and ubiquitous NFT tooling is still largely missing. Marketplaces, financialization primitives, creator tools, community-oriented business models, and decentralized identity management / reputation management systems are all in their infancy.
The estimated NFT market cap [was] $14 billion in early September. Given the design space that NFTs have opened up for the entire crypto user economy, the long-term size and scope of this segment is... LVMH ($375B?), while Su Zhu thinks we’ll see 10% of crypto ($225B today) in NFT market cap... more to the opportunity for NFT creators and infrastructure builders than it does to the investability of most specific NFT projects.
The world’s dominant NFT marketplace is raking in cash hand-over-fist amidst NFT euphoria, though competition is coming. Coinbase has 3 million users on a waiting list for its soon-to-be-launched NFT platform (four times OpenSea’s aggregate historical users). FTX rolled out a platform for Solana-based NFTs. Gemini already has Nifty Gateway. Other exchanges will almost universally follow suit with products of their own. Then there’s the open-source tokenized competitors who are lurking, like Infinity, and the Fantom-based Andre Cronje project, Artion... OpenSea could be a $100 billion company.