Welcome to TechCrunch Crypto, formerly known arsenic Chain Reaction.
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Hello and invited backmost to The TechCrunch Crypto newsletter.
To commencement things off, here’s a shameless plug: I went connected Yahoo Finance past week for a roundtable chat alongside Grayscale CEO Michael Sonnenshein, CoinDesk Indices managing head Andy Baehr and Matt Kohrs, big of The crypto-centric Matt Kohrs show.
We discussed spot bitcoin ETFs, regularisation of integer assets and what The adjacent era for crypto could look like. Watch here.
It was an eventful week in The crypto world: bitcoin’s value deed a caller all-time precocious connected Tuesday, Spain’s information protection authority temporarily banned Worldcoin and Binance raised eyebrows aft making a crypto perfume to observe International Women’s Day.
Curious? Check retired much below.
This week in web3
- Bitcoin hits caller all-time precocious passing $69,000 for first clip since November 2021
- Binance made crypto perfume in a baffling effort to woo women
- Worldcoin deed pinch impermanent prohibition in Spain complete privateness concerns
- OpenSea’s business pinch Coachella is simply a motion that NFTs Can beryllium much than floor plan pictures
- Binance to halt naira services amid ongoing regulatory probe in Nigeria
Crunching numbers
As mentioned, this week The crypto abstraction saw all-time highs for bitcoin. But The grandfather of cryptocurrencies has since fallen astir 3%, from astir $69,000 to $67,000, astatine The clip of publication. Still, bitcoin is up 6.5% connected The week and 56% connected The month. The second-largest crypto, ether, is up 9.7% connected The week to $3,800, according to CoinMarketCap data. The total crypto marketplace cap accrued 7.7% during The aforesaid clip framework to $2.53 trillion.
Smaller tokens person besides gained a batch of traction this past week. Solana-based dog-themed memecoins saw renewed liking aft hype roseate in December. Bonk and dogwifhat accrued 15% and 115%, respectively, connected The week. Separately, Dogecoin and Shiba Inu, roseate 19% and 125%, respectively, during The aforesaid clip period.
Which begs The question…who fto The dogs out?
Our favourite ‘Crypto Twitter’ post
Excuse The language, but if you didn’t recognize really ample immoderate memecoins become…maybe now you will. When this X station was written, dogwifhat (WIF) had a marketplace capitalization 3 times The size of Spirit Airlines’.
For what it’s worth, it has declined since, but dogwifhat (WIF) has a marketplace capitalization of $1.8 billion, which is still 213% higher than Spirit Airlines.
The latest pod
Chain Reaction is doing a monthly bid diving into different topics and themes in crypto. This period we’re focusing connected blockchain and AI integrations.
For this week’s episode, I interviewed Dee Goens, The co-founder of Zora.
Zora is simply a level and protocol that helps developers and creators bring their ideas connected concatenation and connected Ethereum done an unfastened and shared environment. The level has minted much than cardinal NFTs, and has complete $300 cardinal in secondary income and astir 1 cardinal unsocial collectors, according to its website.
Goens antecedently worked astatine Coinbase for 2.5 years doing consequence management, operations and marque partnerships. Before that, he analyzed emerging technologies’ consequence pinch a attraction in blockchains astatine KPMG.
As we conscionable wrapped up our NFT bid for February, Goens is The cleanable impermanent to modulation from that taxable to AI and blockchains fixed Zora’s attraction connected bringing AI on-chain.
In a first for Chain Reaction, we besides minted this podcast connected Zora’s platform, which you can cheque retired here.
Jacquelyn and Goens talk really Zora envisions blockchains and AI moving together, The roles they Can play for NFT creators and what The platform’s developers and organization members want much of.
Subscribe to Chain Reaction on Apple Podcasts, Spotify aliases your favourite pod level to support up pinch The latest episodes, and please time off america a reappraisal if you for illustration what you hear!
Follow The money
- Zama’s hom*omorphic encryption tech lands it $73 cardinal connected a valuation of astir $400 million
- Taiko raises $37 millionto build web3 infrastructure for a censorship-free internet
- Karma3 Labs raises $4.5 millionto amended spot in web3 pinch ratings and recommendations
- Utila raised $11.5 cardinal in a seed information for its enterprise-grade crypto operations platform
- Security infra startup Firewall raised $3.7 cardinal to make smart contracts mainstream
This database was compiled pinch accusation from Messari arsenic good arsenic TechCrunch’s ain reporting.
What other we’re penning
Want to branch retired from The world of web3? Here are immoderate articles connected TechCrunch that caught our attraction this week.
- Elon Musk sues OpenAI and Sam Altman complete ‘betrayal’ of nonprofit AI mission
- And…Former Twitter CEO sues Elon Musk
- Roku disables TVs and streaming devices until users consent to caller terms
- A leaky database spilled 2FA codes for The world’s tech giants
- When your headdress array makes your startup uninvestable
- Target to motorboat its ain type of Amazon Prime, starting astatine $49/year
