Chain Reaction - 1st August
Another amazing week in the world of web3 but we do have to start off with an important message of thank you to the large than life, Steve Vallas, who finished up as CEO of Blockchain Australia on Friday. I shared this post on LinkedIn about it (https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6958597891787546624/) and the same but split up in a thread on Twitter so feel free to have a read (also yes, vale is used when people have passed on but it literally means “farewell” and I’m a fan of alliteration).
They really are big shoes to fill over there, but whoever steps into that place, no doubt we’ll be reaching out and working on ways to bring industries, regulators and community together.
Additionally, we also had our Sydney meetup on Wednesday 27th July. We had amazing interviews from NFTY Private Investment, Koinly, OSL and dHedge. We also heard from Collective Shift, NFT Sydney and Liya Dashkina and Jake Denny about NFTNYC experiences. Thanks to Nick Bishop, Chris Sinclair, Nate De La Cruz (all the way from London) and Katerina Ali for helping pull this together and the full video can be seen here
Speaking of videos, we also put out the replay from our Women in Web3 event from 2 weeks ago
Putting the NotCentralised hat on, we announced put out feelers of interest for a StarkNet focused event looking at how layer 2 tech works and creating an education series around it. More news is coming on a set date for that but here’s our tweet seeing if there was interest (I think it’s safe to say there is):
A lot has been happening in the space as well and meetings with both web3 and even web3-interested clients (aka web2), has seen some great progress in my work at NotCentralised. We met a big institution that’s quite forward thinking in how they see web3 capabilities providing ways to enhance web2 inefficiencies. Like us, they see that both sides can learn from each other and we’re keen to see more corporates see things similarly as the learn about the possibilities of blockchain tech.
News
Looking at the news we saw companies with big lots of BTC on balance sheet feel the effects of the price dip with Tesla seeing a potential $460m impairment charge - https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/07/20/tesla-could-face-a-460m-impairment-charge-on-its-bitcoin-holdings-in-q2/
Babel Finance lost a lot on prop trades, $280m to be precise, as more news comes out about their collapse. Unhedged trades are never a great thing, especially this year with prices dropping as much as they did - https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/07/29/babel-finance-lost-280m-trading-customer-funds-report/
Finally, it was interesting to see the alt-coin Shiba (SHIB) being put to good use as the tokens gifted to Vitalik Buterin (founder of Ethereum) were used to fund the first Ph.D. Fellowships in AI Existential Safety - https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/07/21/vitalik-buterin-thanks-shiba-inu-community-as-grant-program-begins/
Data
Diving into the data and its another week seeing green for crypto, but how long will that last.