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Hello and welcome back to the TechCrunch Crypto newsletter.
To kick things off, here’s a shameless plug: I went to Yahoo Finance last week for a roundtable discussion with Grayscale CEO Michael Sonnenshein, CoinDesk Indices CEO Andy Baehr, and crypto-centric host Matt Kohrs of Matt Kohrs show.
We discussed spot bitcoin ETFs, digital asset regulation, and what the next era for cryptocurrencies could look like. Watch here.
It’s been an eventful week in the crypto world: the price of bitcoin hit a new all-time high on Tuesday, Spain’s data protection authority temporarily banned Worldcoin, and Binance created a crypto perfume to celebrate International Women’s Day.
Curious? See more below.
This week on web3
- Bitcoin Hits New All-Time High Passing $69,000 For First Time Since November 2021
- Binance has created a crypto fragrance in a sensational bid to attract women
- Worldcoin has been hit with a temporary ban in Spain over privacy concerns
- OpenSea’s partnership with Coachella is a sign that NFTs can be more than profile pictures
- Binance to cease Naira services amid ongoing regulatory investigation in Nigeria
Crisp numbers
As mentioned, this week the crypto space hit all-time highs for bitcoin. But the granddaddy of cryptocurrencies has since fallen about 3%, from around $69,000 to $67,000 at press time. However, bitcoin is up 6.5% on the week and 56% on the month. The second-largest cryptocurrency, ether, rose 9.7% on the week to $3,800, according to CoinMarketCap data. The total crypto market cap rose 7.7% over the same time period to $2.53 trillion.
Smaller tokens have also gained a lot of traction in the past week. Solana-based dog-themed memecoins have seen renewed interest after the hype picked up in December. Bonk and dogwifehat rose 15% and 115%, respectively, on the week. Separately, Dogecoin and Simba Inurose 19% and 125%, respectively, over the same time period.
Which begs the question… who let the dogs out?
Our favorite “Crypto Twitter” post.
Sorry for the language, but if you didn’t realize how big some memecoins get… maybe now you will. When this X post was written, dogwifhat (WIF) had a market cap three times the size of Spirit Airlines.
For what it’s worth, it has since gone down, but dogwifhat (WIF) has a market cap of $1.8 billion, which is still 213% higher than Spirit Airlines.
Image Credits: IcedKnife on X (opens in new window)
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 episodeI interviewed Dee Goens, the co-founder of Zora.
Zora is a platform and protocol that helps developers and creators bring their ideas to the chain and Ethereum through an open and shared environment. The platform has minted more than millions of NFTs and has over $300 million in secondary sales and around 1 million unique collectors, according to its website.
Goens previously worked at Coinbase for 2.5 years doing risk management, operations and brand partnerships. Prior to that, he analyzed emerging technology risk with a focus on blockchain at KPMG.
As we just finished our NFT series for February, Goens is the perfect guest to transition from this topic to AI and blockchains, given Zora’s focus on bringing AI to the chain.
In a first for Chain Reaction, we also cut this podcast on the Zora platform, which you you can see here.
Jacquelyn and Goens discuss how Zora envisions blockchain and AI working together, the roles they can play for NFT creators, and what platform developers and community members want most.
Sign up to Chain reaction on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite pod platform to catch up on the latest episodes and leave us a review if you like what you hear!
Follow the money
- Zama’s homomorphic encryption technology earns it $73 million at a nearly $400 million valuation
- Taiko raises $37 million to build web3 infrastructure for a censorship-free internet
- Karma3 Labs raises $4.5 million to improve web3 trust with ratings and recommendations
- Utila raised $11.5 million in seed round for crypto business platform
- Security infrastructure startup Firewall raises $3.7 million to make smart contracts mainstream
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.
- Elon Musk Sues OpenAI and Sam Altman for ‘Betrayal’ of Nonprofit AI Mission
- And…Twitter’s ex-CEO sued Elon Musk
- Roku disables TVs and streaming devices until users agree to new terms
- A database leak leaked 2FA codes for the world’s tech giants
- When your capital table makes your startup uninvestable
- Aim to launch its own version of Amazon Prime, starting at $49/year
