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Greetings all,

In this week’s episode of Ventures, my guest Arvin Khamseh and I discuss the NFT landscape in terms of current best practices for how to build and market to a community of buyers and evangelists. We talk about the wide variety of NFT use-cases, the importance of a compelling team and roadmap in an NFT project, and a number of extremely practical tips for how to market an NFT collection successfully based on Arivin’s impressive track record in the space.

Check it out: Strategies and tactics for marketing NFT projects successfully :: with Arvin Khamseh

The Promise of Web3

If we take a step back a moment and think about how banks work, at a fundamental level, it now seems shockingly problematic. Large banks spend thousands of dollars to acquire customers from an early age and charge them all sorts of fees and interest on debt instruments. In return, the lifetime value of a customer is hundreds of thousands of dollars, while most people never escape “the rat race” of debt, fees, and living paycheck to paycheck.

Even if we take away the fact that the Fed and other central banks are controlled by a relatively small number of families, it seems alarmingly expensive and inequitable (not to mention slow) to use the traditional finance system.

The promise of Web3 and DeFi is to create an international economy that is free from intermediaries that charge exorbitant fees (and influence monetary policy via an opaque system). Unfortunately, most blockchains seem to have lost sight of the bigger picture and have devolved into an extremely fragmented network of “Layer 1s”, bridges, and sidechains/rollups. While there are some promising signs of hope that the core vision of Web3 can be realized, I can’t help but wonder if NFTs and Metaverses (especially on expensive and slow blockchains!) are distracting us from the true promise of DeFi and DAOs.

Still, like many things, we (the collective Web3 community) are learning a lot about DeFi and DAOs via the flashy work of NFTs and Metaverses. For that, I remain cautiously optimistic. I believe we will see more new exciting projects emerging that help more people escape the traditional banking system and help realize the fuller vision of the Web.

Have a great rest of your week!

~Will