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  • This Week in Web3—When Flipkart went web3, a tool to split NFT prices like dinner bill, The ideal DeSo Platform and more!

This Week in Web3—When Flipkart went web3, a tool to split NFT prices like dinner bill, The ideal DeSo Platform and more!

GM people of web3 ✨

It's Kabl3 reporting for duty! We are back and better and in time for your Sunday newsletter. Let’s dive right in; today we share:

  • Flipkart to foray into Web3 and Metaverse

  • Weekly web3 wrap

  • Learn with Kable Recap

  • What could Decentralized Social Media look like?

  • Interesting reads from this week

This week in crypto 📈

Weekly web3 wrap 🗞

This week, the biggest surprise for the Web3 community in India was Flipkart announcing its plans for web3 expansion. The e-commerce giant has launched ‘Flipkart Labs’ to build and create technology-based solutions and plans to venture into Web 3.0 and the Metaverse.

Here’s what Flipkart Labs aims to do:

  • Leverage emerging technologies, incubate cutting-edge ideas & deliver breakthrough solutions to the ecosystem.

  • Test Web3 and Metaverse use-cases with real-world applications.

  • Test NFT-related use-cases, Virtual Immersive Storefronts, Play to Earn, and other Blockchain-related use-cases.

Flipkart is looking to strengthen its in-house innovation capabilities through Flipkart Labs by carving out a team made up of entrepreneurial thinkers. The company is looking forward to bright and curious minds joining it to transform the way India shops.

“We are in the early days of a paradigm shift from Web2.0 to Web3.0, and this evolution of the web/internet built on the concepts of decentralisation, openness, and greater user utility, will have a profound impact across many areas including e-commerce. Web 3.0 is poised to play a strong role in India`s digital acceleration.”

—Naren Ravula, VP and Head, Product Strategy and Deployment

Flipkart Labs will look at innovating in areas like:

  • Customer experience

  • Logistics/supply chain

  • Accelerating digital commerce in the future

  • The Innovation Labs will also include Flipkart Camera.

Flipkart Labs will be housed in the Product Strategy & Deployment (PSD) arm of Flipkart Group. The initiative will help Flipkart collaborate with brands, merchants, startups, and technologists to look at opportunities beyond the company's four walls. We don't know about you, but we feel pretty bullish on an Indian e-commerce giant like Flipkart spreading the web3 word. 😤

More web3 news you should know about:

The 14th Bitcoin ATM was installed at Mexico City's Senate Building on April 26, proving the country's growing interest in cryptocurrencies. The ATM will be operational for the foreseeable future, allowing lawmakers to familiarise themselves with digital currencies before a proposal to legalise Bitcoin is presented to the Chamber. *coughs* The Indian government certainly needs to take notes! 👀

On Monday, April 25, The Crypto Space Agency (CSA) released its Gen-1 NFT Membership token drop, with token holders getting the rare opportunity to become “Cryptonauts” on up-and-coming missions to space. A total of 5,555 NFTs were made available for 0.25 ETH each.

👉Token holders receive priority access to future NFT drops and merchandise, including artwork drops.

👉The NFTs were purchased via payment provider Moonpay, with the option of paying in fiat or crypto through MetaMask.

Haleek Maul's latest music video for his single "Verified," in collaboration with Chiiief Diin, celebrates the artist's love for his home country. The music video for the song was produced by DOOMSDAYX, a Web3 creative tech studio, and financed in part by the production company.

You can also check out the amazing music video on Youtube. Our verdict? A banger fo sho! 💥

Ryan Carson announced earlier this week that he would be moving on from the Moonbirds NFT collection. This invited a lot of criticism, with some stating that it was expected of him after his wobbly tenure with Treehouse, adding that he always intended to cash out on the project and move on to his next venture.

Meanwhile, the Moonbirds team seems to be doing just fine. As of writing, the floor price for bird tokens is down from its all-time high, but it’s still around 30 ETH.

Learn with Kable 👩‍🏫

This Tools Tuesday, we walked you through Mesha—a platform that allows you to team up with your friends and break down the biggest barrier to NFTs—the cost.

Learn how you can split the cost of an NFT with your friends, like a fancy dinner bill! 👇

Tools Tuesday—Mesha

The $USN stablecoin went live on the $NEAR Protocol. Is it any good? We did the research, so you don't have to. Read all about the FAST, CHEAP & STABLE $USN here 👇

Near-native stablecoin $USN

What could Decentralized Social media look like?

As Elon Musk acquired Twitter he also fanned the flames of decentralized social media (DeSo). The theory? Just as bitcoin (BTC) is censorship-resistant money, we use the infrastructure to run censorship-resistant social media applications.

It’s not like it hasn’t been tried before. Let’s go a little back in time ⏪

It’s 2014.

Casey Kuhlman, Tyler Jackson and Preston Byrne proposed Eris—a DAO that was a distributed version of Reddit but it could run on a blockchain – Ethereum POC 3, to be precise. We don’t hear about it now, probably because it sank!

You might think it’s probably because it was 2014; if you asked any common person what was blockchain or DeSo, they’d look at you funny. This idea would definitely work now, right?

Here are some things which make DeSo a litttttle complicated.

  • It isn’t easy to scale DeSo, not back then, not now. There’s too much information for any serious number of nodes to bother mirroring. Blockchain solves censorship but social media is much more than that.

  • It’s permanent. You can’t delete something embarrassing you posted on a drunk night out or any false information.

  • Technology intersects with the law. At present, decentralized social media will be shaped by laws that vary country by country.

Keeping this in mind, here are some factors that need to be accounted for in any DeSo:

1. Illicit content 

Popular platforms like Reddit, Twitter and Facebook, which host user content, take a proactive approach to eliminate any type of illegal material. In most countries, there are set organizations and laws that take care of the hate and unlawful content on the internet.

For example, the IT Act takes care of cybercrime in India; NetzDG or Germany's Network Enforcement Act requires operators of social media services to register with the government and to abide by takedown requests; the French have Law no. 2020-766 against hate content on the internet; or Section 5 of the Defamation Act 2013 in the United Kingdom, which has a notice-and-takedown procedure for alleged defamation similar to the U.S. DMCA.

This is an obstacle for decentralized applications. On hand where the penalties for knowingly hosting material like CSAM are extreme, the crypto industry’s response to this very longstanding internet problem has more or less been to completely ignore it.

2. Intellectual Property 

Social media node operators are like service providers in the eyes of any Copyright Act. Therefore, they will be open to copyright infringement claims. To address any copyright issue, a platform will at least require a decentralized implementation of the the set notice-and-takedown procedure for any third party content hosted on a node.

Also, people might ravage node operators in repeated bad-faith attempts to extort settlements. And vexed copyright enforcement law firms will keep a keen eye on everything.

This might result in decentralized applications that do not support copyrightable subject matter (image or videos) at all!

3. Data protection & disclosure 

Since a node is considered a service provider, it may amass large quantities of subscriber data. They may also be required to hand over records on their computers to the government without a warrant – at least, to the extent that those records pertain to third parties that are within a node operator’s possession and control.

Applications will need to be designed so that they hold as little third-party data as possible on their nodes.

These issues lead us to a common conclusion: Social media requires a degree of censorship and deletion. And it can not be immutable, globally-shared pools of information.

So DeSo won’t/shouldn't look like Bitcoin.

  • Illegal content will need to be removed through content moderation.

  • DeSo might start as an interface of blockchain and present social media, where blockchain is used for registration, verification and public keys.

  • It will also likely limit the kind of data users host to plaintext, everything else might be outsourced. This is low-liability, lighter on bandwidth and will be easier to transmit peer to peer.

  • What moderation exists would be up to the users – they could control what content they see by operating their own whitelist/blacklist of third-party content providers.

Here’s a tweet by FTX’s CEO, detailing his idea of decentralized Twitter.

And here’s Preston Byrnes’ take on the same.

But in the end, it’s all speculation. As technology unfolds, we might see a new solution and a whole new approach to DeSo. And there are some decentralized social media platforms takings shape, like Showtime, which might decide the future. Until then, we just wait and speculate. 🔍

Interesting reads from this week 🤓

Elon Musk, crypto and Twitter are three unlikely but highly intertwined entities. Perhaps no subculture has embraced Twitter’s public square as fiercely as crypto-folk, and the microblogging service has also become a primary conduit for Musk to interact with his crypto — mainly Dogecoin — audience. Given this Venn diagram, what could Twitter look like if it ends up going “full crypto” under Musk’s ownership?

Tip of the week: Stay safe from NFT scams, DYOR before you invest. 👀

Don’t know how? Here's a thread that will help!

That’s a wrap for This Week In Web3!

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wagmi 🚀