Deep Ventures Monthly Newsletter - August 2024

The weather is getting cooler. The mosquitos are going away. The kids are back in school.

Summer is over and it’s go time again!

In the August edition of the newsletter, we talk about:

• The launch of the WeaveVM testnet by portco Decent Land Labs

• Trump launches World Liberty Financial

• New interviews and video shows with Mike

• And more!

Let’s go!

Portfolio Company Highlights

Decent Land Labs launches WeaveVM testnet, sees great early traction

The Decent Land Labs team launched the WeaveVM testnet in late August, and just a week later hit 10,000 users and 500,000 transactions!

Developers can use WeaveVM to deploy apps and L2s that interface directly with Arweave’s storage to settle and store onchain data without worrying about cost, availability, or permanence.

A testnet DEX named Tapestry Finance was also launched on the chain.

It’s great to see so much activity so soon on WeaveVM!

Read more about these milestones in this tweet thread.

Exa Protocol has been accepted into the Pivot accelerator

Mobile-first distributed file storage protocol Exa has been accepted into the global Web3 venture accelerator Pivot!

Exa will benefit from Pivot’s assistance with product-market fit, tokenomics, funding, and more as they approach their testnet launch and token generation event.

These are exciting times for Exa and we can’t wait to see them hit the market running.

Read more about why Pivot backed Exa here.

Kinto launches on-chain stock trading with Dinari and price feeds with Pyth

Kinto, the safety-first L2 for finance, has partnered with Dinari to launch on-chain stock trading! Users can now get direct exposure to Coinbase, NVIDIA, and Blackrock ETFs via ERC-20 tokens that are backed by the corresponding stock’s shares. Read more here.

Kinto has also partnered with Pyth Network, allowing developers on Kinto to permissionlessly integrate with over 500 real-time price feeds.

The hits keep coming for Kinto!

Industry News

Trump announces World Liberty Financial

In his quest to sway US crypto voters, Donald Trump officially announced his DeFi lending platform World Liberty Financial to “put the power of finance back in the hands of the people" and solve the "rigged" traditional finance system.

Buuuuut the protocol seems to be run by a not-so-top-notch team and seems to have no-so-top-notch tokenomics.

We shall see how this turns out, and if it impacts the Presidential election.

We shall see indeed.

Founder of Telegram arrested in France

The founder of Telegram, Pavel Durov, was arrested in France on August 24 for allowing alleged criminal activity, such as money laundering, drug trafficking and other offenses, on his messaging app.

While Telegram isn’t officially a crypto app, it is the default messaging app where the crypto industry operates and is closely related to the TON ecosystem (whose token dropped 16% in value shortly after the arrest).

There hasn’t been a mass exodus from Telegram by the crypto community, but this situation highlights the need for more decentralized, private messaging alternatives.

Ripple ordered to pay $125M (which was a win)

On August 7, a federal court ordered Ripple to pay a $125M fine and placed an injunction against future securities laws violations.

This was a big win for Ripple, as the SEC seeked $2B from the company.

A ruling in July 2023 stated that Ripple violated federal securities laws through its direct sale of XRP to institutional clients, though the judge also ruled that Ripple's programmatic sales of XRP to retail clients through exchanges did not violate any securities laws.

This court order could potentially lead to a more favorable environment for other cryptocurrencies facing similar scrutiny, but the SEC is expected to appeal. So this saga may not be over.

Read more at Investopedia.

New Content

Mike on Bold Talks Show

I was a guest on Epi Ludvik’s Bold Talks show, where we talked about my background and what we’re building at Deep Ventures. Please give it a view here:

Mik and Mike Crypto Cast

I’ve started a bi-weekly show with my buddy Mikhail from Certik / Network Spotlight community.

We’re calling it the “Mik and Mike Crypto Cast”, which is pretty not creative, so if you have a better name, please let me know!

You can watch the first two episodes below. The conversations get too political for my tastes, but I guess crypto politics is the topic of the day! Stay tuned for more eps!

We hope you enjoyed this edition of the DV monthly newsletter!

Hit me up at [email protected] or @mikewchan on Telegram with your thoughts about the newsletter, what’s happening in crypto, or anything else!

Give us a follow on Xwitter @deepventuresvc, @mikewchan, and @sherm8n and Deep Ventures on LinkedIn.

Talk soon!