Gm. Tbh, it’s one of those days and we feel the same.
Welcome to Issue 20 of The Quest Digest, where we break down Silicon Valley news for you every week, in 3 minutes.
Minecraft says no to NFTs
Minecraft developer Mojang has declared that it won’t support NFTs. The company believes “NFTs are not inclusive of all our community and create a scenario of the haves and the have-nots”.
The company also mentioned that the speculative and profiteering nature of NFTs was “inconsistent with the long-term joy and success of our players” and will not allow any blockchain technologies to be integrated in the Minecraft client and server applications, or NFTs created to be associated with the game’s brand.
Our Take
Since the announcement, many Minecraft based NFT projects have taken a hit with a prominent Polygon-based project called NFT Worlds seeing their price floor drop by 66%.
Many web3 integrated users have seen the announcement as a backward step in innovation, potentially leading to painful downstream effects in the long run once and if blockchain gaming adoption picks up. For these people, Minecraft is probably ngmi.
But at the same time, there is an argument to be made in protection of users less educated in the web3 space where the industry has been ripe with hacks, scams and regulatory hiccups in the past year.
Zuck says Meta and Apple are ‘in a competition’
Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg claimed in an all-hands earlier this month that the company and Apple were in a deep philosophical competition on the direction of the internet and metaverse.
Mark believes that his company is approaching building the metaverse in an open way, with an open ecosystem and interoperability with Android, whereas Apple has been characteristically silent with their unannounced hardware project. Zuck also noted his lack of surprise at Apple’s non-participation in the Metaverse Open Standards Group that was formed recently.
Our Take
Despite Facebook’s poor rep in the past for shady activity, Zuckerberg appears to be making investments in trying to push forward an open metaverse.
Arguably, this is to drive greater adoption of devices as he claims the company’s north star getting “a billion people into the metaverse doing hundreds of dollars a piece in digital commerce by the end of the decade.”
It will be interesting to see which of the two philosophies will win, or if they can intermingle.
Shopify lays off 1,000 people
Shopify is laying off 10% of its workforce, affecting 1,000 employees. CEO Tobi Lütke says the company “has to go through a reduction in workforce” where recruitment, support, and sales will be mostly affected.
Impacted employees will receive (1) 16 weeks of severance pay plus one added week for every year the employee has been at the company, (2) career coaching to help affected employees find another job, and a (3) “kickstart allowance” to replace the company laptop employees must return to Shopify.
Our Take
Before the pandemic, ecommerce growth had been steady and predictable with COVID-19 causing a surge in ecommerce adoption rates.
Tobi says Shopify had to make a call if the surge was temporary or a new normal, with his bet eventually not paying off.
For many of the companies seeing layoffs such as Netflix, Peloton, etc. we can definitely see a trend of false tailwinds caused by the pandemic that were short-lived.
🔥 Press Worthy
Alphabet’s profit slips as CEO warns of ‘economic headwinds’
Netflix acquires animation studio Animal Logic
OpenAI expands access to DALL-E 2
Tesla dumps 75% of it’s Bitcoin holdings
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The Quest Digest is written by Hannah Ahn and edited by Brent Liang, two dropouts who hate long tech newsletters. You can sign up to our next issue below.
I'm a fan of fine distillation. Hit me again, please.