Sup, nerds!

Before we get into it, ya boys are at Consensus! Hit reply if you’re here too and we’ll catch up with as many people as we can 🎉

Alright - here’s what you’re getting in today’s edition:

• 💅 This is cool: PayPal’s “adapt or die” moment

• 🔎 This seems important: Why ETH's growing pains are transitory

• 🤝 Partner: Make your money hustle from the comfort of your own phone​

• 🔪 Let's dissect this: Onboarding the next 2.7B into crypto? We’ll take it.

Terms used in this edition (click for an explanation, or ask Web(GPT)3!):
Stablecoin, bull run, layer 1/2.

💅 This is cool:

This Is Paypal’s “Adapt or Die” Moment

In one sentence: The crypto space is quickly becoming faster, cheaper, and easier to access (globally) than PayPal’s existing closed ecosystem, so they’re adopting it before it kills them.

In today’s “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” news:

PayPal just launched their PYUSD stablecoin on Solana (after launching on Ethereum last August).

“Ok, same stablecoin, new chain. Who cares?”

Fair point.

What’s exciting us about this is the writing it puts on the proverbial wall.

PayPal is a closed payments ecosystem, that earns its money by taking fees from the trade of fiat currencies — and now they’re partially transitioning to crypto — a place where:

1. They don’t own the underlying ecosystem (instead, Ethereum and Solana are user owned).

2. They don’t collect any fees on PYUSD trades made outside of the PayPal app.

…so why would they give that up?

The crypto space is a growing ecosystem that is quickly becoming faster, cheaper, and easier to access (globally) than their existing closed ecosystem.

So PayPal needs to adapt or die.

Right. But how do they make money?

If they’re anything like other stablecoins, they’ll take a small portion of their stablecoin’s total cash balance, and put it in short term, easy-to-get-out-of investments in order to eek out a profit.

Boring subject, exciting implications!

🥇 Want the news before anyone else?

🔎 This seems important:

Why Ethereum’s Growing Pains Are Transitory

In one sentence: The Ethereum user/developer/investor experience is high friction right now, but the ecosystem has enough inertia to not only get past it, but to fix it.

Up until the Ethereum ETF’s were approved, the ETH price had been copping a lot of flack for being sluggish.

We’re not about to jump on that band wagon.

But we’ve been trying to make sense of why ETH has had such a slow start to this bull run, when compared to other projects…

Here’s where we ended up:

All crypto projects succeed based on their appeal to investors, users, and developers.

Over the past year or two ETH has seen some massive upgrades — but with that has come growing pains which have affected its ‘three pillars of appeal.’

Investors

A lot of transaction activity has moved over to the 10+ major Ethereum layer 2 chains (think: apps on the iPhone, where Ethereum is the iPhone, and these layer 2’s are the apps).

This is a good thing! It means the Ethereum ecosystem can handle way more users, without things getting slow and expensive.

The problem is, most of these L2’s are quietly fighting it out to grow the biggest user base among them, and each of them have their own tokens.

This makes the decision making process harder for investors…

(“Do I invest in Polygon? Optimism? Arbitrum? Which one will appreciate the most over the next few years? Which ones will die?”)

And with that, investing in competing top-tier projects like Bitcoin and Solana becomes the easier option from a decision making perspective.

Users

These L2’s are making things faster and cheaper — but they’re also splintering the compatibility. Back when everything was built on the Ethereum layer 1 — if you owned ETH, you could explore any ETH based application or platform.

But now, this compatibility is siloed to the L2 it’s built upon. If you have your ETH on the Base L2, and want to explore an Arbitrum app/platform — you need to bridge your tokens over (which is not necessarily quick or easy to do).

Crypto die hards will work through this friction, but it pushes the crypto curious to label ETH as ‘too hard to use.’

Developers

Devs want to build in a coding language they know (or can learn quickly), on a chain that is full of passionate users, with extensive tooling and resources.

Right now, the dominant, easy-to-build-on, user-chosen L2 is yet to be crowned.

So the decision on where devs should invest their time, money, blood, sweat, and tears comes (again) with a little extra friction, and splintering focus.

Here’s the good news:

Ethereum has enough inertia to roll right on through these growing pains, and onto making ‘account abstraction’ a thing.

Account abstraction will mean users can explore any apps/platforms across the entire Ethereum layer 1/2 ecosystem, without even knowing they’re moving between chains (it all just happens quick n’ cheap in the background).

We can’t wait!

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🔪 Let's dissect this:

Onboarding The Next 2.7B Into Crypto? We’ll Take it.

In one sentence: A whole bunch of European and Latin American countries are going to get access to Mastercard’s brand new feature, ‘Crypto Credentials,’ which lets you send BTC to a normal sounding address (e.g. @web3daily).

2.7 Billion.

That’s how many new people could be onboarded into crypto with this new innovation by Mastercard.

(Well, sorta - hear us out).

There are 2.7B people in the world who have a Mastercard credit card.

And soon, a whole bunch of European and Latin American countries are going to get access to their brand new feature: ‘Crypto Credentials.’

You know how a typical address when sending crypto is some random combo of number and letters like this? 1iVGyMIj0xoWNoWAS3i4vARijBQDWoqBCJ

Well, Mastercard’s Crypto Credentials turns that 👆 into this 👉 @Web3Daily.

And yeah, the ENS has existed for a while allowing people to send transactions on Ethereum to normal sounding wallets (e.g. web3daily.eth), BUT, this is specifically for BTC transactions.

Here’s why this is exciting:

Okay so we got kind of ahead of ourselves when we said it would onboard 2.7B people into crypto…

But even a fraction of a percent would have a meaningful impact in these early(ish) days.

More importantly, we love to see a huge traditional finance company define, develop, and take to market, an innovation specifically focused on the crypto space.

That, my friends, is called progress.

What is Ethereum Name Service (ENS)?