#224 - China's Crypto Whitepaper 🇨🇳

Plus, DRC-20 & the $1 AI girlfriend

Author

joe hitchcock
May 30, 2023

GM and welcome to Decentra Daily.

We're the newsletter for the NFT-curious. Crypto confusion? AI anxiety? Web3 wondering? Don’t trip, we got you!

Today,

  1. China’s crypto whitepaper 🇨🇳

  2. First details of Meta’s Quest 3 🕶️

  3. DOGE Ordinals, anybody? 🐕

  4. The $1 per minute AI GF 👧

D-Daily takeaway 🥡
No significant changes among the top collections.

What's this? 🤔
Our floor price index tracks the biggest, most influential pfp projects, art collections, and gaming assets.

1. Here’s what China’s timely crypto whitepaper says

As the US continues to crack down on crypto companies, and Hong Kong gears up to officially authorize crypto trading on June 1st, a “Web3 Innovation and Development White Paper” has appeared on social media.

The whitepaper is said to be from Beijing’s government tech committee, the Municipal Science and Technology Commission.

It covers the current state of the web3 landscape, describing the space as the “culmination of modern science and technology” and “inevitable.”

According to a summary posted in a CZ Twitter thread on the topic, the whitepaper has sections on:

  • AI, blockchain, and the computing tech underlying web3

  • VR and future web3 interfaces

  • current figures in the space, inc. Nvidia, Gavin Wood, & Beeple

  • Chinese tech companies with web3 projects, inc. ByteDance and Baidu

While the whitepaper says that the US is currently web3’s global home, it notes that 30 Chinese provinces and cities are developing pro-web3 policies, and Beijing stands in a leading position to welcome web3 companies and services.

News of the Chinese government’s interest in web3 comes at the same time as crypto and NFT companies have begun appearing in national Chinese media.

Over the weekend, Cryptopunks appeared on Hunan TV, when singer & actress Karen Mok wore a Cryptopunks dress.

Meanwhile, the memecoin ecosystem $FLOKI ran ads on China's biggest sports TV channel, CCTV-5.

2. Tech journalists get a first look at the Meta Quest 3

Meta's latest VR headset, the Quest Pro, came out just last October.

But apparently, the metaverse company is already (nearly) finished work on its next-gen glasses.

Meta is offering tech journalists hands-on demos of Quest 3, the replacement for 2020’s 2nd iteration of its standard model VR headset.

According to one Bloomberg reporter who got to try out the device, the resolution and computing power inside Quest 3 doesn’t differ significantly from the previous version.

But there are a few notable differences from the Quest 2:

  • Quest 3 is lighter and smaller

  • The head strap is built from a more robust material

  • Side panels are made from fabric instead of plastic

  • 3 sensors cover the headset’s front (see image above)

  • there are two color pass-through cameras and a depth sensor

  • You can adjust the headset without having to take it off

  • There’s a faster, more user-friendly menu

That extra pass-through tech should make AR applications more successful on Quest.

Apparently, the front-facing cameras are now good enough to allow everyday actions like making coffee or scrolling your phone without removing the headset.

Why is Meta granting access to Quest 3 already? Most likely, the aim is to position itself as Apple’s main competitor when it reveals its “reality” headset next month.

On the web3 wire

Vitalik’s “pop-up city” in Montenegro 🌆 
Named Zuzalu, the month-long event conceptualized by Vitalik Buterin saw people working in crypto, big pharma, politics, and academia come together to discuss high-concept ideas about future societies.

Crypto exchanges are holding fewer and fewer customer funds 🏦
The amount of Ethereum held on Binance, Coinbase, and other big exchanges has dropped by around 50% since 2020, while the 2.2 million BTC on centralized exchanges is the lowest amount since 2018.

What actually is an L2 Roll-up – and how do they work? 🤔
Tired of the TL;DR explanation of L2 blockchains? Here’s how these efficiency-boosting blockchain protocols actually work.

3. Dogecoin transaction numbers rocket 🚀 thanks to DRC-20 tokens

Earlier this month, a new type of token contract was created for Dogecoin’s blockchain.

Called DRC-20, it’s a contract standard that lets developers inscribe artifacts onto the smallest unit of $DOGE currency, known as Elons (1 DOGE = 100,000,000 Elons).

DRC-20 makes it possible to create tokens for the DOGE blockchain in just the same way that the recent BRC-20 standard allows people to create memecoins on the Bitcoin blockchain.

(Although DRC-20 advocates claim that Doge inscriptions boast faster speeds and lower transaction fees than Bitcoin Ordinals.)

And just like BRC-20 memecoins caused a surge in on-chain transactions, DRC-20 tokens are pushing Dogecoin transaction numbers to all-time highs.

According to this chart, Dogecoin transactions are now far surpassing Bitcoin and Litecoin.

Notable Tweets

4. In case you missed it: the $1 per minute AI girlfriend

Here's an interesting story from a couple of weeks ago:

Among the first wave of content creators to monetize AI is Caryn Marjorie, a Snapchat Influencer who shares flirty SFW content with her +1 million followers.

To scale her business, Caryn partnered with AI audio company Forever Voices to train GPT-4 on 2000 hours of her old Youtube videos.

– The result is CarynAI, a personal bot that can speak like her.

Caryn sells access to her AI clone for $1 per minute via Telegram, giving customers the chance to play pretend, getting a sense of what it's like to interact with her.

You can have everyday conversations, talk about future plans, share your deepest thoughts, or even sext.

Although, when testing out the bot, one journalist said that it “feels like more of an intimacy-ready Siri than a virtual girlfriend.“

Entrepreneur Shan Puri thinks that, at this very moment, the next Zuckerberg is out there somewhere, chugging energy drinks and coding a platform for interacting with AI friends and romantic partners…

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Meme of the day

Have a gud day! 👋