They say this is a Bear market but I've seen two announcements this week that actually mean more than any other Web3 VC funding press release.
(1)
PayPal is finally offering a long-demanded feature that will let users move their crypto to external wallets and hardware devices.
PayPal first launched its crypto offering in late 2020, allowing users to buy, sell, and hold four cryptocurrencies—Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, and Litecoin—but not to move the funds to external destinations like MetaMask, Coinbase, or hardware wallets.
The fact users now can do this is significant because PayPal, which also owns the popular app Venmo, is used by hundreds of millions of people across the world to move money, and is increasingly used by merchants as a payment platform.
(2)
And today (per the previous post) Salesforce has announced their new NFT minting cloud platform.
NFT Cloud is billed as an easy-to-use step into the world of NFTs and the budding metaverse, allowing brands to tap Salesforce’s cloud-based tools to build and sell NFTs, engage online communities, and pull data from their offerings. can do.
Adam Caplan, Salesforce’s Senior Vice President of Emerging Technology, said that brands are more likely to use NFTs for engagement and reach – rather than selling collectibles without functional utility.
What does that actually mean then?
As of the end of 2021, there are 426 million active users on PayPal worldwide, and 2.5m users of Venly.
Salesforce has 150,000 customers, is billed as the World's #1 CRM platform and boasts Fortune 500 clients.
That sleeping giant called Web2 is actually doing more to onboard people onto the promise of Web3 while everyone is arguing over whether play-to-earn is the future or not.
Plus there's another factor to consider - companies like Salesforce delivering an easy-to-use and sustainable NFT minting cloud platform are more likely to resolve the issue of interoperability first outside of games, and with clients like Mercedes Benz, ADIDAS, PayPal (yes, them!) and AT&T that's real consumer traction and reach startups can only talk about achieving in their Discord chatter.
Imagine being able to swap and use your ADIDAS NFTs with a Mercedes loyalty program? That goes well beyond what is being touted as 'utility' today elsewhere.
This might be a Bear market for crypto but both PayPal and Salesforce have shown that this industry is already hibernating when it comes to really pushing forward towards mass adoption.