Welcome to TechCrunch Crypto, formerly known as Chain Reaction.
This is the latest version of this newsletter. I want to personally thank each of you for reading this and if you want to stay in touch you can follow me on X here for future updates.
With that said, the show goes on. This week, Sam Bankman-Fried, the former CEO of FTX who was found guilty of seven counts related to money laundering and fraud in November, was sentenced, Borderless Capital acquired CFT Capital, Worldcoin faces another ban in Europe and many other.
Details below.
This week on web3
- Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison for fraud and money laundering at FTX
- Web3 investment firm Borderless Capital acquires CTF Capital to bring AI and quant expertise
- Worldcoin has been hit with another banning order in Europe, citing risks to children
- A new web3 network is currently being created that wants to end Big Tech’s control of your data
- 0G Labs launches with $35M pre-seed to build a modular AI blockchain
Crisp numbers
This week crypto market prices were a bit chipper, with the top cryptocurrencies in the green for the week.
Bitcoin is up 7.4% on the week, around $71,300 at press time. The second-largest cryptocurrency, ether, rose 2.6% on the week to $3,550, according to CoinMarketCap data. The total crypto market cap rose 6.4% over the same period to $2.67 trillion.
The last pod
Chain Reaction does a monthly series that dives into different topics and issues in crypto. This month we focus on blockchain and AI integrations.
For this week's episode, I interview Scott Dykstra, CTO and co-founder of Space and Time.
Before diving into web3, Scott spent nearly eight years at cloud and data analytics platform Teradata, where he held roles as senior architect, director of cloud solutions, and rose to the company's vice president of global cloud.
In terms of Space and Time, the company aims to be a verifiable compute layer for the web3 that scales zero-knowledge proofs or ZK proofs to a decentralized data store. Zero-knowledge proofs are a cryptographic operation used to prove something about a piece of data, without revealing the source data itself.
Space and Time has indexed both off-chain and on-chain data from Ethereum, Bitcoin, Polygon, Sui, Avalanche, Sei and Aptos and is adding support for more chains to power the future of AI x blockchain.
This episode concludes Chain Reaction's monthly series diving into various crypto topics and issues. This month focuses on blockchain and AI integrations.
Scott and I discuss the origin story of Space and Time, how data warehouses work in Web 2.0 versus web3, and the importance of data transparency.
We also dive into:
- Blockchain and AI capability
- OpenAI and blockchain data developments
- Future use cases for on-chain data and AI
- Advice on all bull and bear markets
Sign up to Chain reaction on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite pod platform and leave us a review if you like what you hear!
Follow the money
- Web3 gaming-focused startup Illuvium has raised $12 million in a Series A round to expand its offerings
- Avalanche-based Gunzilla has raised $30 million to help launch its new game, Off The Grid
- OrdinalsBot raised over $3 million to build the data layer that focuses on the Bitcoin blockchain
- Reya Network Raises $10M for Transaction-Focused Modular Layer-2 Blockchain
- Online crypto casino MyPrize raised $13 million
This list was compiled with information from Messari as well as reports from TechCrunch itself.
What else are we writing?
Want to escape the web3 world? Here are some TechCrunch articles that caught our attention this week.
- Liquid Death is just one of several VC-backed beverage startups poised to disrupt Coke and Pepsi
- New study of unicorn founders finds most are 'outsiders' and female founders on the rise
- Facebook compromised users' Snapchat traffic in secret project, documents reveal
- Nvidia could be the next AWS
- New Summit Raises New $100M Fund to Support Climate Tech and Underrepresented Fund Managers
