👾 Hot Take Friday

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Are you ready for Hot Take Fridays?

I’ve decided it’s time to shake things up around here and give you something a little easier on the eyes every Friday. 

Yes, there will be hot takes. Some will be better than others. 

Why? Because Friday is the day we all long to shut our laptops and run out into the world. 

For you, perhaps that includes wistfully gazing at canines at the dog park, admiring their shiny fur and big eyes, thinking about how you might be able to convince your spouse to let you adopt one of your own.

Sorry, I’m projecting. Let’s get down to business. Just read the first bullet point of each news bit if your brain is already turning off and going into happy-hour mode.

— Kate Irwin

• MetaMask has unveiled mUSD. Yep, their own stablecoin.

  • The TLDR: mUSD will launch on Ethereum and Linea. 

    • You know, I actually had never heard of Linea until this announcement. It’s an Ethereum L2 from MetaMask’s parent company ConsenSys, with over $400M in total value bridged thus far. Wow, so many blockchains these days. 

  • Stripe subsidiary Bridge and stablecoin company M0 are helping MetaMask deploy mUSD.

  • My hot take: I know stablecoins are going to make a lot of people rich and help move TradFi onto crypto rails, but does everyone need to launch a stablecoin — and a blockchain, for that matter? 

    • Apparently, the correct answer to this if you want to make money is still YES.

• Is anyone else a fan of the 2008-era FX biker show Sons of Anarchy? Hopefully not just me. I’ve seen all 92 episodes and wish there were more. Anyway, Ron Perlman of Hellboy fame — who later played the SOA motorcycle club’s President — is now the founder of a blockchain-powered venture dubbed Watrfall (yes, the “e” is missing on purpose).

  • The TLDR: It’s a fan-powered film and TV financing platform using Walrus to store data onchain. They’re letting the masses “financially invest in the stories they care about.” This looks like:

    • 5% platform profits in perpetuity 

    • Sharing in project net profits as well

  • My hot take: This sounds cool on the surface, but any film-meets-crypto project has yet to succeed. The upside to that is that there’s room for one to succeed. So is Watrfall the one? I don’t think we know enough about it to know for sure.

    • For instance, pplpleasr’s recent film funding platform Shibuya failed to crowdfund (buuuuut Shibuya wasn’t offering an investment opportunity for fans). To give you a sense of how badly Shibuya flopped, each of the five Shibuya shorts has raised less than $1K each total in the past three months (and each short had a fundraising goal of anywhere from $40,000 to $100,000).

Little secret: There are other similar projects like this brewing, so keep an eye out for more. Hollywood is still struggling, fam.

• Immutable is now working with Gamedia, the studio that made the now-dead Gala game Spider Tanks. 

  • Unclear how much money is being exchanged here. These game partnerships usually publicly omit any deal financials, so we’re only left to speculate and hear rumors on TG on what’s going on under the hood.

  • Gamedia is apparently bringing a game to Immutable Play “later this year.” I suspect it’s probably Spider Tanks (lol), so don’t get too excited (but hey, I could be wrong)

My hot take: Meh. Immutable continues to make a lot of noise without really delivering anything worth the hype.

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