Another crazy and busy week chalked up in the books and more to come this coming week. Getting this out on a Monday too as I know it’s going to be manic.
So, last week we had the great events down in Melbourne. Not just awesome work related meetings (seeing a bank, Zerocap, BANXA (thanks James) and their awesome space at DAOtown (thanks Kyall) in Cremorne) but also the crew who turned out for the first Aus DeFi monthly event down there (with our partners Sensand). It showed the pent-up demand for web3 events to complement the existing set of NFT ones (run by NFT MELB).
We also launched our web3 calendar which we highlighted at the start of last week and finally have put out. Whilst trying to get it on a subdomain of www.defi.org.au crashed the website, we do have it as an easy to get to link here: https://tinyurl.com/web3calendarAU. We’ll keep adding events to this as we see them.
On a personal note, it was great news for my TradeFlows project as it was recognised as being a new player in the StarkNet ecosystem (amongst some awesome projects in DeFi, NFTs and more).
Across the news we saw further items of interest such as Celsius paying back $800m worth of DeFi loans this week. As Ryan Sean Adams from Bankless points out, this was done not due to courts or arbitration but due to the smart contract code and at least that part of DeFi works better than if this was the collapse of a web2 player.
You can read more about it in this article from The Block - https://www.theblock.co/post/157367/celsius-has-now-paid-off-more-than-800-million-of-debt-to-defi-apps
Elsewhere we saw the contagion of bad loans spread with Defiance Capital also announcing they’re being affected by 3AC - https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/07/15/defiance-capital-has-been-materially-affected-by-three-arrows-liquidation/
There was also the Voyager collapse - https://www.coindesk.com/layer2/2022/07/12/behind-voyagers-fall-crypto-broker-acted-like-a-bank-went-bankrupt/
We also had Vladimir Putin banning crypto payments in Russia - https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/07/15/vladimir-putin-bans-digital-payments-in-russia/
I also saw an interesting video critiquing NFTs. It was interesting because it wasn’t like every other video which just blasts NFTs and crypto in their current state and doesn’t look beyond at the potential for blockchain tech. This talks about the issues with current state NFTs but how there is much more potential for what these digital receipts/tickets of ownership can provide. The comments section talks about the issues of health records being put on blockchains but if that were to happen there’d be different types of blockchains (as they’re not all just public). Even then, the fact that most important records like this are stored on centralised servers makes them far more prone to attack than if they were decentralised. Anyway, check that out here:
So what’s on the rest of this week? Well, by the web3 calendar above, it’s actually quite busy.
First up, myself and Numbers are on ausbiz later today at 1:20pm talking about what it takes for web2 and web3 to come together (sign up to watch online at www.ausbiz.com.au).
Tuesday there’s the Sydney Web Summit (sign up here: https://events.humanitix.com/the-2022-sydney-web3-summit) which includes a bunch of panels, a pitch competition, and is at Fishburners (with KPMG High Growth Ventures, Fractal, GiveTree, NotCentralised and Aus DeFi Association amongst the supporters).
Wednesday is Blockchain Sydney (every 3rd Wednesday of the month) - https://www.meetup.com/blockchain-sydney/events/283334247/
Thursday is a few events including our Women In Web3 event at our studios in Sydney (https://events.humanitix.com/ausdefi-women-in-web3) - thanks Mercari
Thursday is also the Blockchain Australia Young Professionals event on Breaking into Web3 (held at Immutable) - https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/breaking-into-web3-bayp-tickets-348609770207?aff=ebdssbdestsearch
Thursday we also have up in QLD the Aus DeFi networking event which you can sign up for here https://www.meetup.com/australian-defi-association/events/286628975/ - they just ran an awesome event with All Things Blockchain too.
Busy week ahead but I hope it starts off well for you. See you next week!
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