Unity / Web3 Gaming Storefront — Unity, a video game software development company with an active game developer community, introduced a new asset storefront for web3 gaming. As a part of the toolkit, Unity is adding support for 13 different blockchain-based SDKs, from chains and products including Solana, Tezos, MetaMask, Immutable X, Flow, and others — more
Silvergate Bank / Clients Flee — Crypto-friendly Silvergate Bank announced Wednesday that it would need to delay its annual 10-K filing. On Thursday, Coinbase, Circle, Paxos, Crypto_com, Bitstamp, Cboe Digital Markets, Galaxy Digital, and Gemini all announced they would suspend ACH transfers and other business operations with Silvergate — more
Coinbase / Suspends Binance USD — Coinbase will suspend trading of Binance stablecoin BUSD on March 13th because the asset doesn’t meet listing standards. A Coinbase spokesperson said, “Our determination to suspend trading for BUSD is based on our own internal monitoring and review processes.” Customers can withdraw BUSD, but cannot actively trade the stablecoin — more
Coinbase / Purchases One River Digital — Coinbase is buying crypto asset manager One River Digital Asset Management, a subsidiary of hedge fund One River Asset Management which was founded in 2013. Coinbase previously backed One River Digital in its Series A fundraising round alongside Goldman Sachs. Greg Tusar, Coinbase’s head of institutional product, said “This is about wanting to bring more institutional capital into the world of crypto” — more
Tax Bit (🤝) / Cash App Integration — Cash App has integrated with crypto tax and accounting software TaxBit. As of Feb. 28, Cash App users can now keep track of their Bitcoin transactions for tax reporting purposes using TaxBit — more
Axelar (🤝) / Introducing The Axelar Virtual Machine — Axelar, an inter-chain communication layer that allows dApps to interact with assets on any chain, launched the Axelar Virtual Machine. The first two products include the Interchain Amplifier (a simple, permissionless way to connect your chain with the Axelar network and its interconnected chains) and the Interchain Maestro (automated multi-chain dApp deployments) — more
Polychain Capital / Raising $400M — Polychain Capital, a crypto investment firm with ~$6.6B under management as of March 2022, is reportedly in talks with potential investors to raise a fourth fund totaling $400M — more
Starbucks Web3 Loyalty Program / BofA Sees Signs of Success — A team of analysts at Bank of America said the Starbucks’s Odyssey program, a web3-enabled royalty program, is seeing “encouraging signs” as their approach is "more holistic than the industry’s prior NFT forays”. In addition, Starbucks recently announced a limited edition drop of “stamps” (NFTs) that will be available for purchase on March 9th. This marks the first collectibles sale (previously stamps had to be earned) — more
Peloton / Web3 Fitness Community — Peleton, an exercise equipment and media company with a market cap ~$4.5B, announced a new web3 fitness membership platform called Swagger Society. The membership NFT, launching in the coming months, will act as a lifetime, all-access pass, granting holders entry to a community led by their favorite instructors without reliance on centralized platforms — more
Cointelegraph / Phaver x Lens Partnership — Crypto news platform, Cointelegraph, has partnered with Phaver, a web3 social protocol built on Lens Protocol and Polygon. The partnership will grant the 200k users on Phaver and other Lens apps to access daily Cointelegraph content — more
Portal / $5.3M Raised — Portal, a web3 wallet infrastructure startup using multi-party computation, raises round from Slow Ventures, Haun Ventures, Acrew Capital, Chapter One, and others — more
EtherFi / $5.3M Raised — EtherFi, a decentralized and non-custodial liquid staking platform, raises round co-led by North Island Ventures, Chapter One, Node Capital, and BitMex founder Arthur Hayes — more
Avalon / $13M Raised — Avalon, a gaming studio building a new interoperable metaverse environment, raises round led by Bitkraft Ventures, with participation from Hashed, Delphi Digital, Mechanism Capital, Coinbase Ventures, and others — more
Term Labs / $2.5M Raised — Term Labs, a startup that aims to allow lenders and borrowers to set their own rates and durations, raises round led from Electric Capital, with participation from Circle Ventures, MEXC Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, and others — more
Insrt Labs / $2.2M Raised — Insrt Labs, a protocol that lets users gain “fractional NFT spot exposure combined with passive yield farming”, raises pre-seed round co-led by Hashkey Capital and Infinite Capital, with participation from Sky9 Capital, Polygon's head of DeFi Hamzah Khan, and others — more
Few and Far / $10.5M — Few and Far, an NFT marketplace building on the NEAR blockchain, raises round from Pantera Capital, with participation from Cypher Capital, Huobi Ventures, Hypersphere, Metaweb, Mantis Partners, and others — more
Web3 needs our Feynman / David Keyes x Sepana (🤝) — “Bottom line: web3 needs our Richard Feynman — someone who brilliantly breaks-down incredibly complicated science and math into language that the rest of the world can grasp and love. And we need him fast. To spread the revolution to the masses, we must first make the revolution comprehensible.” — more
HIGH FREQUENCY Vol 1, "Feel Good" by Black Dave / Noise DAO (🤝) — “Last week’s genesis drop sold out in minutes and we couldn’t be more stoked to keep the party rolling. Strap in, because Black Dave is about to take us on the ride of our life with his emphatic, lightning rod of a track—“Feel Good.” — more
Founder of Blur (🤝) Reveals What's Next / Rosie Perper — “Blur co-founder Pacman, who recently revealed himself to be 24-year-old Tieshun Roquerre, spoke to CoinDesk about the creator royalty dilemma, taking zero platform fees and building long-term value for traders.” — more
Beyond Hype: Understanding the Impact of Airdrops on NFT Marketplace Performance / J. Hackworth x Rabbithole (🤝) — “The NFT marketplace is evolving … LooksRare, X2Y2, Sudoswap, and Blur have decreased OpenSea's NFT Volume market share from 99% to 50-30% depending on the week. While OpenSea may have been one of the darling companies of the web3 era, there is one thing that it's lacking that all of its competitors have: a token.” — more
Notes on Speculation & Crypto Markets, 2019-2022 / Ben Roy — “After years of doing the thing: reading blog posts & technical white papers, trading coins and NFTs, making money and losing a lot of it, 2x-ing my way through 100s of podcasts, and scrolling through Discord and Twitter for an eternity… I want to compile some of the lessons I’ve learned about the trading & speculation side of crypto. The mission here is to collect my own thoughts and pay it forward.” — more
Some personal user experiences / Vitalik Buterin — “Good user experience is not about the average case, it is about the worst case. A UI that is clean and sleek, but does some weird and unexplainable thing 0.723% of the time that causes big problems, is worse than a UI that exposes more gritty details to the user but at least makes it easier to understand what's going on and fix any problem that does arise.” — more
Simulating Token Economies: Motivations and Insights / 6th Man Ventures — “The challenge of understanding tokenomics is the challenge of understanding mechanism design. In economics, game theory is the study of strategies and incentives present in a game. In mechanism design, the inverse is studied, where a set of desired incentives and strategies inform the design of the game itself.” — more
An Intro to Zero-Knowledge Machine Learning / dcbuilder.eth — “Zero-Knowledge machine learning (ZKML) is a field of research and development that has been making waves in cryptography circles recently. But what is it and why is it useful? First, let's break down the term into its two constituents and explain what they are.” — more
“Leela vs the World”: World’s 1st On-Chain AI Game / Modulus Labs — “We’re so psyched to be finally bringing you the World’s 1st On-Chain AI Game. “Leela vs the World” pits you and the greater community, all members of the human player team, against a hyper-intelligent AI bot in a deadly game of chess…” — more
CoinDesk x Art Blocks (🤝) Engine / Generative Ticketing — CoinDesk teams up with Art Blocks Engine to launch a 1,000-piece NFT collection by crypto artist Fahad Karim called Microcosm. The back-end reward systems are managed in partnership with Passage Protocol (🤝). “The three-year NFT ticket offers widening rewards for holders, refashioning the typical live event ticket model” — more
StoryCo (🤝) / The Storyline Newsletter — “From here-on-out, the Storyline will be your go-to place for anything and everything storytelling related across the worlds of Web3, Hollywood, AI, and internet and meme culture. This will also be the forum in which we share updates on The Disco Ball production and other internal goings-on at StoryCo.” — more
Glass Protocol (🤝) / Rising Tides — “We're thrilled to announce some monumental changes to Glass that will solidify our commitment to this space. When everyone else is jumping ship, we're doubling down … We’re coming back to Ethereum. We’re coming back to Arweave. We’re moving to zero fees.” — more
Yuga Labs / Bitcoin-based TwelveFold NFTs Collection — Yuga Labs, creators of Bored Ape Yacht Club, announced its first Bitcoin-based NFT drop. The collection will consist of 300 generative art NFTs created by the Yuga Labs team. The pieces will be available to purchase in an auction held later this week with all bids made in Bitcoin — more
IYK (🤝) x Kong / HaLo Chip — IYK, a company building tools to help brands, artists, and creators bridge the physical and digital worlds, announced a partnership with physical chip maker KONG. The new HaLo chips enable IYK’s modules a streamlined way to onboard new users by allowing simple access to POAP (🤝) distribution, Beams, and SMS — more
Uniswap / New Mobile Wallet — Uniswap announced a new self-custodial, open-sourced mobile app that allows users to swap tokens, view NFT collections, and explore web3. Apple has delayed the full launch of the product, so Uniswap plans to release its app to 10,000 users via the TestFlight beta platform — more
the402 (🤝) / Introduces User Profiles — the402, a crypto-enabled livestreaming platform, launched a new profile feature for users that can easily display NFT collections, supported 402 channels, and a list of channel subscriptions — more
PROOF (🤝) / Moonbirds Q1 Update — “So, what is PROOF’s purpose now? The proof ecosystem now has one simple purpose: to create unique experiences that allow collectors to connect with artists and champion their art. The entire PROOF ecosystem will be connected by this one goal.” — more
CoinDesk Podcast: Carpe Consensus / NFTs Are Collectible, Tickets, Subscriptions, and… Securities? — “[skip to 7:22] Daisy Alioto, CEO of Dirt Media (🤝), breaks down the rollout of Dirt’s NFT subscription service, building a Web3 community, and the future of media.” — more
NFT Now / Membership Pass — NFT Now, a media platform specializing in NFT content, announced a new community-centric membership model. The Now Network will include experts and builders in the industry and will only be accessible to Now Pass NFT holders. Now Pass holders will have early access to content, gated chats, and IRL experiences — more
Mika Tajima / PROOF (🤝) x Pace Verso: Archive of Feelings — “We’re thrilled to announce our partnership with Pace Verso! PROOF and Pace Gallery will release 'Archive of Feelings', the first solo NFT project from multidisciplinary Grails III artist Mika Tajima, on March 15. The NFT will unlock exclusive PROOF x Pace Verso benefits. All holders of the PROOF Collective Pass will be able to mint one guaranteed NFT for 0.1 ETH” — more
Memo Akten / Vertical Crypto Art: WAVES 2.0 — “24-hour open edition as part of Computational Realism exhibition by VerticalCrypto Art and The NFT Gallery. 0.08 ETH + Primary proceeds of this sale will go to Earthquake rescue and care in Turkey & Syria” — more
Cactoid Labs x LA County Museum of Art / Remembrance of Things Future — “Released on the blockchain in phases beginning in March 2023, Remembrance of Things Future is engineered and curated by Cactoid Labs, conceived and created in support of The Los Angeles County Museum of Art … These historic limited editioned artworks will be followed by long-form generative creations by Monica Rizzolli and William Mapan, as well as collaborations with 0xDEAFBEEF, Tyler Hobbs and other digital practitioners.” — more
Derek Edws / Delegate Cash (🤝) x NFT Liquid Delegation
Snowfro / Harvard Business School Case Studies on Art Blocks (🤝)
404_xyz (🤝) / The Missives Have Arrived 👀
SuperMassive / NFT Paris is BasedAF (🤝)
StemsDAO (🤝) / Stems Remixes On-Chain 🔥
Mona (🤝) / Avatars in AR on Mobile
Pacman / Blur’s (🤝) Network of Market Makers
hildobby / The Scoop on NFT Royalties + Fees
Async Art (🤝) / Charity Auction for Turkey + Syria
Kaito / Gallery (🤝) Features Since Jan. 1st 🔥
Glimmer DAO (🤝) / The Trajectory of the Asia NFT Ecosystem
Cuy Sheffield / Head of Crypto at Visa on the Future of Payments
gmoney / 9dcc NYC Treasure Hunt for an Art Blocks Grail
Jack Butcher / Double Check ✔️ 👀
WarDaddyCapital / Mega Thread on the Checks Ecosystem 🧠
punk9059 / Percent of NFTs Traded by Project
Rai Isla / Referral Links in Action on Sound_xyz (🤝)
iyk (🤝) / Powering Tom Sachs Rocket Factory Activation in Paris
Metav3rse / Yuga Labs Sewer Key Sells for $1.6M
RSTLSS / CrypToadz x RSTLSS Sold Out Drop
John Rising / EIP-4337 x Account Abstraction
🤝 = Collab+Currency Portfolio Company
Curated by @Collab_Currency x @_cutbank
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Gm Gm, Really loving this piece and the work you do here. I also run a web3 news substack for underrepresented creators called Facesofweb3. Would you be open to a recommendation exchange? Our subscribers need to be able to find each other!
Great job, once again!