The Meta(verse)
I’ve been spending a lot of time in the Metaverse. Pretty much, since the beginning. I’ve also been BUIDLing from the beginning.
Lately, I’ve been exploring the parts of the Metaverse that live on Twitter and Discord. I also recently had a work meeting inside AltSpaceVR in an Oculus Quest 2 for the first time.
Yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg came out and made a big announcement. Facebook, the company, from this day today forward, will be known as Meta. Zuck’s announcement video definitely generated a reaction on Twitter. Some hate… Some more hate… and lots of memes.
Facebook is not going away any time soon. Zuck will continue to be that guy. It’s his job now. Privacy concerns, the Social Dilemma, the whistleblower, the Facebook Papers, his mannerisms, and his billionaire status make him an easy target for ridicule and schadenfreude.
From the YouTube comments:
“This really, really feels like an episode of Black Mirror…”
“He recently got a firmware update, he's acting a bit more human, excellent job to the devs. Can't wait for the next update.”
“His animated character is more real than the actual Zuckerborg”
The Metaverse responded:
“Coincidentally”, a Cryptopunk was bought for over half a billion dollars the same day. It was actually a flash loan, as described below. A signal? Maybe.
Additional details to this “stunt” emerged, and this was the message:
This cryptopunk used a $532M flash loan to flash Zuck, and promote the Portals project. To further make the point, there is a 250 $ETH offer on the same punk (over $1B USD) on the official Larva Labs site for cryptopunk #9998.
What is a flash loan? A flash loan is a DeFi transaction where a wallet is able to secure an uncollateralized loan of any size, as long as it can be paid back in the same transaction. This can be used for arbitrage and it can be used as an attack vector.
A couple days ago, Cream Finance, a DeFi lending protocol project was attacked.
To understand what happened, I turned to a Penguin on Twitter. I think he is a Pudgy Penguin.
The Penguin wrote a blog post to further explain the hack, and he is actually a core developer on Sushi, one of the most popular decentralized exchanges, which has a fascinating origin story that began with a vampire attack.
Clever Degens, technically savvy and smart contract capable, can see the Matrix, applying asymmetric information advantages to make near instant $USD millions trading $SHIB and $DOGE and NFTs, yield farming, executing flash loan arbitrage, minting digital money like the Creature from Jekyll Island. Renouncing their US citizenship, tumbling their crypto on Tornado Cash, buying Macbooks as hardware wallets, they can shop cryptonatively using Bitrefill, and buy anything they want, and what they want are Punks and Apes…
Because Punks and Apes can get you into the rooms that give additional asymmetric information advantages. Some Degens are playing Where’s Waldo with the IRS and SEC, but some are also coming out of the shadows, retaining the appropriate attorneys and accountants that billions of dollars can afford, and creating the proper Matrix structures (crypto-venture capitalist firms) to hold their wealth.
We are in the midst of the greatest wealth transfer event in history.
Elon Musk, part of the Paypal Mafia, is on track to become the first $USD trillionaire in the world. The Degen Mafia is here, and their wealth is far more liquid.
From a Discord NFT group:
Roads maps are all well and good but I don’t really read them. Bayc hardly had much of a roadmap. Punks definitely didn’t have one.
I prefer to look at one of your other points -
Community community community.
The beauty of it is, we are the community and it’s in our hands to make it a great and desirable place to be.
Sequoia hosted an AMA on Discord, and gave away POAPs to the audience.
“Traditional venture capital is dead.” -a traditional venture capitalist
Zuck and Meta(FB) will continue to build their version the Matrix, one made of commerce and ads. He employs some of the greatest technical minds of our generation, like John Carmack, to innovate the software and hardware of virtual and augmented reality.
"The Metaverse is a honeypot trap for architecture astronauts." -John Carmack
Maybe Horizon Worlds is where you’ll want to hang out. Maybe not.
The Metaverse isn’t a new concept. It’s just the latest buzzword for the Internet. An Internet with native decentralized money built in. With every boom, there is an opportunity to create additional wealth and freedom. It’s a personal decision to decide which game to play.
