What a week (and weekend) in web3. Starting from the weekend, yesterday there was a Twitter Spaces with about 700+ people listening at any one time (you can see the replay on the link below).
The tag #aussiesfollowaussies followed after and the whole space got behind other Aussies on crypto Twitter (CT). We got 100 extra followers from the event. More like this please!
During the week we had a couple of great events including our Aus DeFi monthly in Melbourne as well as a restaurant and bar opening in The Rocks (in Sydney) which has an NFT component to it and we also know members attended the NFT Sydney Black Out event on Thursday and a whole lot of Twitter Spaces as well as seeing Aussie crypto Twitter grow by leaps and bounds over the weekend. What a week indeed. Makes up for the crappy weather weโve had along the Eastern seaboard. Canโt get any worse can it?
Anyway, first up for the Aus DeFi show rolling into Melbourne, we had an amazing lineup with Nathan Lenga of Zerocap presenting on governance and regulation alongside our very own Arturo. We then had a panel discussion led by NSW Chapter lead, Liya Dashkina who was in town for the day. The panelists included Guylian Louis from Ernst and Young, Ash van der Spuy from Jubi DAO and Olga Bubnova from Bgain. We talked about mainstream adoption, hurdles in the way and how to overcome them as well as more on what regulation means for this space. The video will be out on this later this week.
In Sydney, we were honoured to be part of a new restaurant and bar opening with an amazing view of Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Opera House. It has a bar upstairs open to the public but an exclusive NFT which will give holders more perks than the normal public get. Itโs a continuation of what we see with Starbucks and other web2 firms providing ways to use blockchain technology to provide rewards to patrons or to offer exclusive memberships. The clientele of influencers, business folks, government officials and more was unparalleled. More to come from that one so watch this space.
I didnโt get to go the Black Out event but it sounds like it went amazingly. I was a moderator at the State of Play event at Immutable a few weeks ago and the level of discussion that could be raised there (because of no recordings) was quite interesting so I had no doubt it would be the same here. Hereโs to more of these sorts of events to come.
On Thursday night I did jump into a great Twitter Spaces with The Bread Bros which was a lot of fun sharing thoughts on regulation and how DeFi is more than just trading and investing as well as other mainstream use cases for crypto.ย
This was followed up on Monday with Madam Love and Steffski for their Twitter Spaces learning session where we talked about the journey so far in web3, more on regulation and how people can get involved.
Finally, the week was wrapped up with the opening of the new FTX offices in Sydney. Jamie Kennedy and team have a great new location and who knows, we might just run an event or 2 over there.
Over the weekend we also had a big push for Aussie content, which we love to see.
News
The biggest bit of news was BNB (Binance) and the pausing of the blockchain in order to halt the hack it was going through. According to reports this totals around $586m USD. CZ (CEO) original post on this is here
Further insights here
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And a great take from Rekt on the situation: https://rekt.news/bnb-bridge-rekt/ย
Elsewhere, we saw failed CeFi exchange Celsius share a tonne of details that they probably shouldnโt have
We saw influencers facing fines with big names like Kim Kardashian coming up in the crypto news as the SEC cracks down on her and others who shilled tokens -ย https://www.coindesk.com/layer2/2022/10/04/kim-kardashian-ethereummax-and-the-secs-publicity-grab/ย
Robinhood launched their web3 wallet on Polygon - https://thedefiant.io/robinhood-web3-wallet-goes-live-on-polygonย
OpenSea provided some shortcuts for artists to launch their NFTs with their SeaDrop service - https://thedefiant.io/opensea-seadropย
There was also this news about a group called Monuverse which is preserving some of the worlds greatest monuments and digitising them on-chain - https://cointelegraph.com/news/the-world-s-cultural-heritage-is-being-preserved-one-nft-at-a-timeย
Data
Still trading sideways over here. Itโs likely weโll see more of this especially given how correlated crypto is with tech and growth stocks which are all affected by rising interest rates. Meanwhile weโre focusing on building.