3 Things: Web3 Bootcamp for Lawyers, Mandarin Language Toys for Kids, P2E Wordle

Happy Sunday and a very warm welcome to all the new subscribers! I’m thrilled and honored to have you as readers and truly appreciate your thoughts and feedback 🙏. Each edition of 3 Things will contain a dive into 3 rabbit holes I’ve found myself going down recently. Subscribe to get each week’s edition straight to your inbox and if you enjoy it, please share (I suck at self-promotion so can use your help)! This past week I’ve been thinking a lot about:

• Web3 Bootcamp for Lawyers

• Mandarin Language Toys for Kids

• Play-to-Earn Wordle

1. Web3 Bootcamp for Lawyers

Getting up to speed on the web3 space is daunting even for the most technical engineers or financial analysts. Understanding terms like layer 1 blockchains, layer 2 scaling solutions, airdrops, cold storage, NFTs, Dapps, DAOs, gas, staking, and many, many more concepts is no easy feat in this constantly evolving ecosystem. Add on the fact that much of this entire space is currently unregulated, and you get lots of people looking for legal guidance when it comes to everything from buying and selling tokens on exchanges, taxes on your crypto, dealing in NFTs, and most importantly issuing or receiving tokens for a company. In 2017 during the first ICO boom, hundreds of companies started minting and selling tokens across the globe to raise funds and bypass the traditional fundraising process, creating a tremendous amount of legal uncertainty in the process. No one knew how to answer questions like: “Were these public sales of unregistered securities?”, “Were the sellers engaging in money transmission?”, or “How will these sales be taxed?”, etc. Some companies chose to locate their headquarters abroad in places like Bermuda or the Cayman Islands; others banned US citizens from participating in their token sales. Ultimately the need for a standardized, compliant transactional framework became clear and Protocol Labs, Cooley, AngelList, and CoinList joined forces to adapt the widely used SAFE (Simple Agreement for Future Equity) into a new agreement called the SAFT (Simple Agreement for Future Tokens) to guide token raises.

Aside from the SAFT, there have been very few legal frameworks put in place to date when it comes to the myriad cryptocurrencies and types of tokens. As more and more people and institutions start adopting crypto, holding tokens, and using decentralized applications, all kinds of professionals are going to need to understand what that means for their industry and how to guide their companies or clients. While there are dozens of bootcamps and courses (even some from major universities) to train web2 engineers to become blockchain developers, there is shockingly little for non-technical professions. Pretty much every lawyer I know has been scrambling to get up to speed by asking their peers, madly Googling, and desperately hoping that regulatory bodies provide more clarity. A company can focus on lawyers and offer crypto bootcamps getting them up to speed on blockchain 101 as well as the current regulatory landscape and guidance leveraging case studies. Different cohorts can focus on different types of lawyers such as tax attorneys, entertainment lawyers, and corporate lawyers (especially those that work with startups or financial institutions like VCs and hedge funds). On top of bootcamps, the company can provide a paid community where lawyers can ask questions of their peers or other experts, get access to template docs and guides, and share how they’ve been handling various situations. After lawyers, there are numerous other non-technical disciplines where this model can be repeated.

2. Mandarin Language Toys for Kids

While I definitely don’t need to read Principles for Dealing With the Changing World Order to know that the US is on the downswing and China will take its place as the dominant global leader, the book is hammering home the point quite well and definitely making me think about what the future will look like. One “joke” I often make is that the population of China is ~1.4B people but in the US, we often refer to “the billion people in China”… so the rounding error is literally LARGER THAN THE ENTIRE US POPULATION! Hard to really wrap your head around that magnitude. For the last ~100 years, the USD has been the world reserve currency and English has been the dominant language of business and culture. With the changing world order, that will inevitably shift. For native romance language speakers, tonal languages like Mandarin are extremely difficult for adults to master with any level of proficiency. Language acquisition in general is significantly easier the younger you are and it’s somewhat shocking that our schools today still focus mostly on languages like Spanish, French, and German when it comes to teaching a second language.

Now that I am a parent, the one very Type A thing that I intend on doing is teaching my daughter English, Spanish, and Mandarin from infancy. As a native English speaker, I’ve got that part covered and our current childcare situation checks the Spanish box which will be important if you are living in the US as one in three people will be Spanish speaking by 2050. While I took 2 years of Mandarin in college and can have basic conversations as a fun party trick, finding a way to ensure she gets fluency in Mandarin is a bit trickier. You could look for immersion schools, tutors, or in-person programs but that is not particularly scalable. On the other hand, the children’s toy market is a whopping $141B and continuing to grow year-over-year. Over the last few years, more and more toys for kids are focused on education, ranging from STEM subscription boxes like KiwiCo to learn-through-play products from Lovevery (which recently raised $100M Series C at an $800M valuation). A company could focus specifically on educational toys for American or European children to learn Mandarin. You could offer a subscription digital product (think YouTube channel type content for different age groups) paired with a physical box that grows with each child and provides the right tools to help them learn the language. At a certain age, you could even match the kids with a “pen pal” in China to help them practice their skills and form new relationships.

3. Play-to-Earn Wordle

If you haven’t played Wordle yet, you’ve likely been living under a rock the past few months 😂. The simple word game where you get 6 tries to guess a 5 letter word caught fire early this year. Welsh software engineer Josh Wardle launched the game late last year without much fanfare and had about 100 players as of November 2021. By the first week of January 2022, the number of players had exploded to above 2 million and the site was pretty quickly purchased by The New York Times who already has a rabid crossword puzzle userbase. By mid February, there were over 350 clones and variations on Wordle as everyone was trying to capitalize on the trend and current excitement. A few of my favorites include Nerdle (number based puzzle), Octordle (8 Wordle puzzles) and Evil Wordle (the original game’s evil twin).

Casual mobile gaming is a gargantuan industry raking in over $116B annually. Last year smartphone owners downloaded 83 billion mobile games which means the average person downloaded 21 games in 2021 alone! Another major trend in gaming right now (or GameFi as some are starting to call it) is the concept of Play-to-Earn (or P2E) games which are blockchain based games that reward players with NFTs or tokens for playing and achieving certain milestones. These crypto rewards can be used in-game but can also be transferred to a wallet and sold externally for real monetary value. The most popular among the P2E games is Axie Infinity but many more are gaining traction and even large game studios like Ubisoft are entering the market. Given the fact that hundreds of millions of people already do crossword puzzles and sudoku daily, and now millions more have jumped on the Wordle bandwagon, I think there is an opportunity to create casual mobile P2E word games. Starting with something like Wordle… maybe you have to stake tokens to guess a certain letter and get paid when you guess the word correctly. Given most of these games are meant to be quick and daily, you could create a sticky behavior and passionate player base who would likely play many different games. Wordle also made it fun and easy to share your results on social media so piggy backing off that trick could help create some quick virality.

That’s all for today! If you have thoughts, comments, or want to get in touch, find me on Twitter at @ezelby and if you enjoyed this, please share with a friend or two!

~ Elaine