Bankruptcy, web3 use cases, and more

GM, and welcome to RollCall by Rollfi!

Get caught up from the past week in 10 minutes or less:

• Voyager files for bankruptcy📉

• Web3 use cases🧠

• Other stories from the week 📰

Voyager files for bankruptcy

Last week, we wrote about several crypto companies hurting from the bear market, including Celsius, Three Arrows Capital, and Voyager Digital.

This week, Voyager Digital has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy just two weeks after their disclosed exposure to 3AC and halting withdrawals altogether on their platform. Chapter 11 allows companies to reorganize their business with court approval while remaining operational. This will put a halt on all civil litigation surrounding customers wanting their deposits back.

Voyager CEO Stephen Ehrlich had this to say on Twitter:

This all comes shortly after Alameda Research, Sam Bankman-Fried's firm, agreed to loan Voyager $200M and 15,000BTC to protect customer assets. Voyager says it has over $1.3B in crypto assets and $350M cash available to safeguard customer assets on the platform and $110M in operational cash to continue paying employees.

As Laura Shin of Unchained writes, "If the restructuring plan gets passed by the Court, customers with assets in the platform will receive a combination of crypto in their accounts, proceeds from the 3AC recovery, common shares and Voyager (VYG) tokens. Matt Levine from Bloomberg estimated that if the VYG token has no value and 3AC doesn’t recover at all, users could expect 72 cents on the dollar."

Web3 use cases

"Crypto is a solution looking for a problem" is a phrase you hear a lot from people who doubt the usefulness of crypto & web3. And to date, the use cases referenced mostly rely on the usefulness of the base technology to eventually create something useful.

However, Packy McCormick wrote two great pieces over the last two weeks on different use cases for the technology enabling web3. While he got caught in the headlights on the Cartoon Avatars podcast last month, he came back stronger this time with some well-thought-out use cases both in action today and possible use cases for the future.

If you have the time we suggest giving them a read. If not, we have the TL;DR.

He says that while web3 products today are far from perfect, they're in their early phases and "good enough" for the group of early adopters whose needs are not being met by web2. And as opposed to web2 companies, web3 is focusing on financialization first, and then user experience. Here are some of the use cases he discusses:

Web3 use cases today -

• NFTs - Whether you think they are dumb or not, the use case of owning digital property has proven valuable and fun to some. With $31.3 billion in trading volume of ETH-based NFTs on OpenSea in the last year alone, the collectibles model of NFTs have created tons of value, and more and more interesting models of NFT projects continue to emerge.

• Decentralized exchanges (DEXes) - Uniswap has surpassed $1T in volume in just three years by allowing users to swap any pair of tokens without going through a central party and creating incentives for providing liquidity.

• Defi Protocols - like Compound and Aave allow for peer-to-peer lending that aligns incentives without going through a central party like Celsius or BlockFi, that have notoriously mismanaged funds.

• User-owned marketplaces - companies like Braintrust allow users to own the marketplace they participate in by incentivizing them to do things that make the network better.

• Wireless networks - Helium incentives users to provide hotspot networks to those around them and earn $HNT tokens.

• Stablecoins - Maybe the most common use case today, stablecoins allow people to instantaneously send funds across the world without going through incumbent financial institutions that take a large cut.

Web3 use cases in the future:

• Regenerative Finance - tokenizing things like carbon credits makes them more efficient and transparent. The idea of regenerative finance is to "put a price on externalities, charging those who create negative externalities and rewarding those who create positive externalities."

• Decentralized Science - blockchain-based funding models could change the way research is funded and shared. Funding from across the globe by communities of patients, scientists, and other partners could be used to fund research for diseases that aren't worth it for big pharma.

• Web3 Social & Gaming - Imagine if all social apps were built on the same network, then users could own their data and carry it over from app to app, and followers could follow across multiple apps at once. In gaming, player economies can be used by tokenizing assets in the game and creating incentives for players to keep playing.

• Data ownership & wallet-aware sites - With users owning their data in web3 and traditional companies becoming more aware of that, companies can leverage data in users wallets to offer things like personalized recommendations, discounts for donating to certain causes, and users can leverage their data and online identity in many more ways.

More stuff from the week

• FTX bails out BlockFi in a deal that provides the lender with $400M in cash and the option for FTX to buy BlockFi at a maximum price of $240M, a far cry from a reported valuation of almost $5B last year.

• Yuga Labs has filed a lawsuit against Ryder Ripps for copyright infringement after a his involvement in a controversial Youtube video last month and a knockoff BAYC NFT project.

• These charts by Nifty Table illustrate just how bad of shape the NFT market is in right now.

• Solana Labs has been accused of violating securities law by an investor.

Education Corner

We did our best this week to explain things as we talked about them, so instead of a glossary this week, we figured we'd refer you to some educational materials.

• Binance Academy is one of the best resources for learning all things crypto and just posted this piece on what Investment DAOs are and how they work.

• One of our favorite podcasts, web3 with a16z, did an episode on the connection between puzzle design and crypto.

At Rollfi, we're building the payroll & HR platform for the modern workforce.

Our platform can enable your business to seamlessly pay your teams in both cash & crypto. And your company doesn't need to have any crypto to make it happen.

Want to see the platform in action? Click the link below to book a live demo with our founding team. We're super excited to share what we've built and get feedback on how we can improve the customer experience.

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