Facebook Freezes Hiring, SEC Is Coming After You!
gm fellow degens 🥸
We are serving lunch this Sunday. Although we promised that it will be 4 day work week, things change and we adapt. We are paying employees after all, we own their souls so why not make them work on Sundays too.
What is in the Specials for lunch today?
☠️ Facebook freezes hiring and building Metaverse
👀 SEC is coming after you. Yes, after you.
👨🏫 Lesson of the day / ERC tokens
☠️ Facebook paused hiring and building Metaverse
Rumor has it that Mark is planing to change the name of his platform back to Facebook (jk). All that noise from last year about Metaverse faded pretty quickly. Whether such movement was impacted by the OthersideMeta land sale is unknown to me. Btw, we had an entire newsletter dedicated to OthersideMeta sale if you want to check it out.
Last year, back in October Facebook changed its name to Meta with the intention to prove to everyone that the main focus for the next decade will be building Metaverse, a digital experience for its own users. Apparently, they are facing lot of issues, to the point where Facebook (Meta) is freezing hiring for the division responsible for Metaverse development. This comes as a response on the $3 billion loss from Reality Labs, the division responsible for overseeing the development of Metaverse project.
According to their team, this freezing comes because of some unprecedented issues that have happened recently, such as “Russia's invasion of Ukraine; changes that Apple made to privacy settings on its iOS operating system last year; and a softer macroeconomic environment as factors that weakened Facebook's ability to rake in revenue.”
When Apple did change privacy setting in the beginning of this year ( Apple Privacy Settings - you should definitely read this article), it did cost billions of dollars to tech companies. Especially Facebook, they rely a lot on tracking you at everything you do, which was not possible with the changes Apple made on iOS.
As a side note, we also have noticed a trend where Metaverse land projects are not exotic product as they used to be. We had the sale from Otherside from last week which has not been performing great compared to their genesis BAYC avatars (although land is supposed to be more valuable than the avatar itself). Other projects with similar downward trend patterns:
Decentraland - FP went from 5ETH to 1.9ETH
Sandbox - FP went from 5ETH to 1.25ETH
NFT Worlds - FP went from 16ETH to 5.74ETH
Overall interest about Metaverse has been on downward trend since its peak back in October when Facebook changed its name to Meta.
I do believe that we fell for the trap of thinking that everything related to Metaverse should be coming soon, we are still on the early phases of what will be developed next. I am bullish in the potential of Metaverse in long term, as we get more capable of supporting more advanced technology. As of today, VR and AR is way behind where it is supposed to be in order to provide you with fully immerse Metaverse experience. Even computers/phones we use on daily basis are not capable of working seamlessly on a Metaverse experience.
👀 SEC is coming after you. Yes, after you.
Seems like SEC is in a hiring spree. They have opened up an additional 20 positions for the unit responsible for protecting investors in crypto markets and from cyber-related threats. This will bring the total number of people working on this division to 50.
Their focus will be mainly:
Crypto asset offerings;
Crypto asset exchanges;
Crypto asset lending and staking products;
Decentralized finance ("DeFi") platforms;
Non-fungible tokens ("NFTs"); and
Stablecoins.
Such initiatives will definitely help bring trust to the space as well as protect existing investors from rugpulls. Here is their full press release.
We have seen such initiatives from Feds as well where they Charged Two 20-Year-Olds In Alleged NFT Money Laundering, ‘Rug Pull’ Scheme.
There is this great research from Chainalysis where it talks about scams and rugpulls over years. Last year has seen a crazy upward trend in rugpulls, especially in the NFT space. We are talking about billions of dollars here. The good thing about blokchain/general ledger that every information is out there and it can’t be taken down. For all those rugpulls that have happened in the past, we will be able to address as more regulations come in the space. We will go after them, fore sure.
👨🏫 Lesson of the day / ERC tokens
This is a new section added to our newsletter. The whole purpose of this section is to make you more knowledgeable about web3 space. It might be a document where we explain concepts ourselves or feature content from other authors who we consider they have done a good job explaining them.
Today’s lesson is about ERC tokens. ERC stands for “Ethereum request for comment”. There are different types of ERC tokens such as ERC-20, ERC-721, ERC-1155 etc. Such terms are difficult to explain. I came across this post on LinkedIn from Ankit Jaiswal where he talks about the types of ERC tokens and explains their meaning in a way that it is easy to understand.
I will copy-paste his content below, but I would definitely suggest you to connect with people like Ankit Jaiswal as they can be an amazing source for you to learn stuff about web3 space.
ERC-20 vs ERC-721 vs ERC-1155
Let's understand the popular crypto standards with the help of different ticketing systems:
CASE 1: When you ride a metro/subway train, the ticket you buy is same as everyone else for the same destination. Even if you exchange the ticket with someone, it would still work for you as there's no differentiator between those tickets. Such items are called 'fungible', meaning that they can be mutually exchanged. Other examples of fungible items are currency notes, shares of a company etc.
CASE 2: When you take a flight, you can't exchange your boarding pass with another person even if you both are going to the same destination. That's because your boarding pass has your name and your seat number, both of which are unique. Hence each boarding pass is different from others. Such items are called 'non-fungible', meaning they can't be exchanged with other items. Other examples of non-fungible items are your driving licence, your college degree, a piece of art etc.
CASE 3: When you attend a concert, you can buy a General pass, VIP pass, Multi-day pass and so on. If you hold a general pass, you can exchange your pass with someone holding a general pass but not with someone holding a VIP pass. Hence, such items are a mixture of fungible and non-fungible. Different categories of passes are non-fungible, but the passes within the same category are fungible. Other examples being shares of different companies, metro tickets for different destinations etc.
On the blockchain, we can represent digital assets and real-world assets with the help of 'tokens'. Usually, these tokens are created following a standard so that they can have a predictable behaviour, properties and security.
Tokens representing assets like Case-1 are called ERC-20 standard tokens. Like USDC, wrapped ether etc.
Tokens representing assets like Case-2 are called ERC-721 standard tokens. Like BAYC NFTs, Cryptopunks NFTs, house deeds, marriage registrations etc.
And finally, tokens representing assets like Case-3 are called ERC-1155 standard tokens. Like fractionalised music video NFTs, fractionalised real estate etc.
- Ankit Jaiswal