👧 Will you meet your kids in the Metaverse?

GM gamers, investors!

This week we cover:

1. Highlights —> What’s moving the market?

2. Metaverse under 13 years old?

3. Evmos —> the future for EVM devs?

   1. A new format of analysis, share your (honest!) feedback

Let’s dive in

1. EDX Live and BTC over $30k 🥳 (article)

   1. Citadel, Fidelity, Charles Schwab, Paradigm, and Sequoia started a new venture in Sep’22 - EDX Markets (Crypto exchange).

   2. Now they finally kicked it off and onboarded a few big names into the game.

   3. New money new gains, BTC +8%, ETH +5,6%

2. Deutsche Bank is stepping in (article)

   1. One of Europe’s leading banks ($1,4T AUM) has applied for a regulatory license to operate a custody service for digital assets (cryptocurrencies) —> meaning they can do crypto if approved.

   2. Curious to know about others? JP Morgan is doing DeFi since before there was any DeFi and Citi leveraged blockchain for 1st trans-border sale with no paper documents.

3. More Bitcoin ETFs (article)

   1. BlackRock, the world’s biggest asset manager filed for a Bitcoin ETF, allowing retail investors to get easier exposure to Bitcoin.

   2. It’s not alone, Invesco and WisdomTree also filed for a Bitcoin ETF.

4. Gods Unchained launched on Epic Games (tweet)

   1. Probably not the true hottest alpha call, but this game was one of my entry points to web3 gaming, so I’ll highlight it.

   2. Takeaway? Epic still supports web3.

5. LVMH partnering with Epic Games (article)

   1. Ever heard of Metaverse fashion shows?

   2. It exists, and it’s a big deal.

   3. Now with the support of Fortnite.

6. IMF to control Central Bank Digital Currencies? (article)

   1. The topic of CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currencies) is very popular nowadays.

   2. Central banks are finding ways how to leverage blockchain to keep governance rights to the currency while leveraging the technological benefits.

   3. Now, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is coming up with a platform to support international transfers using these currencies.

Anyway…

Metaverse under 13 years old?

You may know it, or not, but most of the “Internet” is available to users over 13 years old.

YouTube, Google, Facebook, TikTok, you name it.

All these platforms are 13+ because a 25-year-old law told them - Children's Online Privacy Protection Rule ("COPPA")

This law was intended to prevent tech companies from collecting personal data from our kids.

But we all know how it is in reality👇

A simple window pop-up and asks you if you are old enough.

One way or another, kids are not supposed to use social apps, including Metaverse.

That is about to change.

On June 16, Meta announced new parent-managed Meta accounts.

“Starting later this year, parents will be able to set up parent-managed Meta accounts for Meta Quest 2 and 3 for their children ages 10 – 12.”

What does it mean?

It might sound boring and unimportant, but let’s explore what it can do for something already live, let’s say… Roblox?

We know Roblox is very popular among kids, but how much might surprise you.

According to Statista, roughly 23% of Roblox users are kids between 9-12 years old.

Considering they have 65m active daily users, that’s almost 15m daily users in this age group.

These are the new users that might soon enjoy the perks of Oculus, most probably increasing sales (“later this year” = Black Friday or Christmas?🧐).

But more important is the potential impact on the industry.

If Meta can do it, why shouldn’t other apps? Both web2 social platforms but also web3 upcoming projects.

Not to mention the indirect effect on further loops, like TikTok videos boosting the reach of kid-friendly applications and soon possibly Metaverses.

My 2 cents?

I know a kid who started doing some TikTok videos at 9 years and was devastated that when finally one of his videos went viral he lost the account due to age restrictions.

So I can understand both sides and don’t want to start a political discussion here.

From an investment point of view? Too early, too broad, no direct investment action.

There will be a lot of discussions, lawsuits, and turmoil around this as people will get upset.

This will for sure play with Meta stock prices, I might jump in to buy the dip, but I’m still careful around tech stocks (see here).

Evmos - the future for EVM devs?

One of my investor clients asked me for a review of a few projects in his portfolio.

So I took a break from gaming and dived deeper into security, privacy, but also Evmos.

Summary

• EVM-compatible Hub on Cosmos

  • EVM library (Ethermint, dev tool) for the Cosmos SDK, turned into an EVM-based blockchain in the Cosmos ecosystem.

  • Onboarding EVM developers (the biggest group, Ethereum) into the cross-chain IBC/Cosmos world

• Leveraging IBC (Inter-Blockchain Communication protocol)

  • A protocol to enable cross-chain deployments (1 app on all blockchains that support this protocol)

  • From the big chains, those already support IBC: Binance, Polygon, Avalanche, Cosmos

• Incentivise developers to build on Evmos (revenue share with validators), and users to use it (refunding part of the gas fee)

• The core of these incentives is the Revenue model

  • Transaction fees are reduced to end users (gas limit - gas used)

  • Then split 50:50 between validators and developers

• This revenue split comes with dApps built on top of the Evmos marketplace (not live yet) and only from EVM transactions, Cosmos SDK transactions are not eligible

  • This marketplace is more of a web2 feature (like Steam or Apple’s AppStore) and not mandatory in web3.

• Twitter has low engagement, but that might be due to the target audience = Developers (not so active on Twitter)

• Roadmap is a bit unclear, but the team is moving forward and the project is backed by strong VCs

• Tokenomics is inflationary with a lot of airdrops and low demand; Low TVL

• Ecosystem - https://evmos.org/ecosystem contains pretty much everything from Cosmos, not just Evmos native apps

Check the full review here, and let me know what you think of the format ⭐️.

Until next time,

Matt.