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Hello and welcome back to the TechCrunch Crypto newsletter.
This week, Starbucks killed its Odyssey NFT program launched in 2022, Solana continued to see the potential of memecoin, and India faces more challenges with the crypto space as government agencies crack down on it.
Details below.
This week on web3
- Crypto exchange OKX stops services in India
- Solana kicks off a new round of memecoin frenzy
- How crypto exchange Backpack rose to success after the death of FTX’s major investor
- Starbucks abandons Odyssey NFT program
- Blockchain technology could be the answer to uncovering deepfakes and validating content
Crisp numbers
This week prices in the cryptocurrency market were lower, but still relatively strong compared to previous months.
Bitcoin is down 6.5% on the week to $67,300 and 32% higher on the month at press time. The second-largest cryptocurrency, ether, fell 8.6% on the week to $3,550, according to CoinMarketCap data. The total crypto market cap decreased by 6.3% in the same period to 2.55 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 episodeI interviewed Tegan Kline, the CEO and co-founder of Edge & Node.
The company focuses on building and supporting decentralized applications or dApps and protocols. They were also the original team behind The Graph, an indexing and query protocol, or what some refer to as the Google of web3, which aims to organize open blockchain data and make open data a public good.
Tegan began her career in investment banking before transitioning to the position of executive vice president of a blockchain-powered, AI-analyzed patent marketplace. This launched her career in web3, data and artificial intelligence solutions. Prior to co-founding Edge & Node, Tegan worked as director of international business development for Orchid, a VPN backed by a16z and Sequoia VC.
This episode is part of Chain Reaction’s monthly series that dives into different crypto topics and issues. This month focuses on blockchain and AI integrations.
Tegan and I talk about The Graph network, data indexing and its broader use case for the web, and the “New Age Roadmap” released in November 2023.
We also discuss:
- The graph that implements artificial intelligence solutions
- What dApps will unlock for AI in the long run
- Why AI doesn’t care about encryption
- Making a career leap into web3
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
- Ex-Grindr exec and married couple launch Rails with $6.2M round, for decentralized FTX alternative
- Avalanche Foundation Announces $1 Million Liquidity Mining Incentive Program, Memecoin Rush
- Morph raises $20 million in seed and angel funding for EVM layer-2
- Mantra Raises $11M to Expand Real-World Asset Tokenization in MENA Region
- Ago Raises $2.5M to Make DeFi More Accessible Through All-in-One Platform
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.
- Reddit is pricing the IPO at $34 per share, at the top of the range
- NBCUniversal’s Peacock Will Let You Watch 4 Live Streams Simultaneously of the 2024 Paris Olympics
- Astera Labs’ IPO will reveal how much AI investors want
- After Raising $1.3B, Inflection Is Being Eaten Alive By Its Largest Investor, Microsoft
- Late-stage VCs may be preventing their startups from going public in 2024
