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Let Tim Cook (Metaverse-less AR)

Plus: 99% NFT Collections Going to Zero, Twitter Borrows Web3 Creator Playbook

Happy Friday! Welcome to The Web3 Marketer, where I help brands and marketers stay ahead of the web3 curve. Every week, I bring you top stories on web3 & digital collectibles across consumer & loyalty.

Today's write-up is 997 words, a 4-minute read.

This week’s TL;DR:

  1. Apple Vision Pro vs Meta Quest strategy

  2. NFT collections mostly underwater

  3. Twitter creators to own subscribers

  4. Metaverse tokens labelled securities

PLUS: Starbucks, Luis Vuitton, PUMA, Warner Bros., GameStop, Naomi Osaka, Zaha Hadid, and more!

📅 Upcoming events: Fans Love It, Istanbul (Jun 10); Metaverse Beauty Week (Jun 12-17); Christie’s Art+Tech Summit, NY (Jun 19-20); Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity (Jun 19-23); Non Fungible Tokyo (Jun 22)

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The Big One

Apple’s Vision headset focus on AR and productivity is a stark contrast to Meta’s Quest VR strategy

Apple finally unveiled the $3499 VisionPro headset, while carefully repeating terms “magic” and “spatial computing”, and avoiding “metaverse”, “web3”, “AI”.

According to Mark Zuckerberg’s companywide note, it’s 1) nothing that Meta hasn’t explored before and 2) a fundamentally different approach to Meta’s ambition to get people connected and active instead of sitting alone on a couch.

The initial public reactions are surprisingly not as bad as the prevailing metaverse/VR market skepticism. Also, the memes are excellent.

The Takeaway: We won’t be able to judge the success or failure of Apple’s Vision for quite some time: it’s set to launch in 2024, and like with any of its products, the ultimate breakthrough will hinge on steady iteration and support from third-party developers.

For deep dive:

By the Numbers

Most NFT collections to date are underwater, volumes hit a 2-year low

New NFT mints have been on a decline since summer, with NFTs minted in May being 65% lower than that in April, and the lowest it's been since June '21 per Nansen Analytics. Read more 

The Takeaway: 99% of NFT collections do not provide intrinsic value or utility (think most websites on the internet), and therefore their long-term value should go down (to zero). It’s the 1% that is promising and exciting.

Bold Strokes, Long Marches

Twitter will allow creators to ‘own’ their subscription followers

The ability to “own” the audience (e.g., directly email followers and move them to another platform) is the most valuable asset in the creator economy. It has also long been the main selling point of web3-based platforms trying to win over web2 creators. Read more 

The Takeaway: Unprecedented in big tech, this proposal was welcomed with much excitement by Twitter creators and is likely to convince some of them to try out the company’s subscription product.

Food for Thought

Metaverse tokens branded as securities in SEC suits against Coinbase and Binance

As part of the Binance and Coinbase suits, the SEC labeled several cryptocurrencies as securities, including Sandbox’ SAND and Axie Infinity’s AXS native tokens. Read more 

The Takeaway: Since the announcement, the tokens are at 17-20% discount, which reflects only mild consumer pessimism. Axie founder’s Tweet suggests the builders take the suit rather lightly.

Top Headlines

🛍 Consumer & Mainstream

💍 Fashion & Luxury Goods

🎬️ Entertainment, Culture & Media

🏈 Sports

🤖 Metaverse

Marketer intel

🛠️ MarTech

🤳 CreatorTech

💰️ Deals

  • Lens Protocol raised $15M to expand the decentralized social layer.

  • HyperPlay raised $12M to build a web3-native game store and launcher.

  • Argus Labs raised $10M to build SDK for interoperable game worlds.

  • M80 raised $3M to expand the ‘web3-enabled" esports organization.

  • Walmart is launching an accelerator for web3 commerce apps.

🗃 Additions to the Web3 Tools database (311 total)

  • GodMode: growth marketing platform for web3

For the Weekend

  • What It Takes to Build a Billion-User Platform (Matthew Ball)

  • Is VeeCon The Next SXSW? (Forbes)

  • Zuzalu: Secret Pop-up City of Vitalik Buterin’s Dreams (The Information)

  • Western Luxury Brands Are Losing China’s Gen Z (JingDaily)

  • The Fall of Sam Bankman-Fried (🎙️Bloomberg)

  • VeeFriends, NFTs and the Importance of IP (🎙️Apple Podcasts)

Meme of the Week

That’s all. See you next week!

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Author Bio

Kuba Szewczyk is an NFT Product Strategy Lead at ConsenSys, helping build NFT tools for brands and creators. He previously worked at Bain & Co. Digital Assets and earned Harvard MBA.

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