This week we announced our national online event running across Australia next week. We’ll have a special guest and presenters from the 7 cities we’re in. This will be on Zoom and registration is here (https://www.meetup.com/australian-defi-association/events/292902371/). First come first serve for this one as zoom has 100 limit on its rooms but we will record and share if you miss out. There's also an IRL meetup for those in Adelaide - check it out here https://www.meetup.com/australian-defi-association/events/292969020
Also, we had the Canberra Women in blockchain event run by our very own Jordan Franklin. Check out the tweets about it here https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7054944840366612480/
We also had Blockchain Sydney running their event this week with Hedera and Soulbis presenting - see some photos here https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7054610295259856897/
Over in Brisbane we saw the Web3 Brisbane crew do their boat trip, check out some highlights here https://twitter.com/LinaneAmber/status/1649784822024540163
Adelaide, our Chapter Lead (Melbourne) from Sensand (our awesome sponsor), had this write up on one of our late 2022 events in Melbourne - check it out here https://www.linkedin.com/posts/adelaide-cochrane_despite-recent-events-it-is-still-an-exciting-activity-7053537342153789442-eYCL?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop
Finally, before we get to the other news, we saw a new podcast from our Getting to know the Community Series, this time with Steve Vallas, Blockchain APAC founder and good friend of this community.
News
There was some major news in the US with SEC Chairman Gary Gensler receiving a grilling from various Senators. Check out the livestream commentary from the folks at Bankless here
And the appropriate tweets coming out after it like this from Tom Mitchelhill
https://twitter.com/thecryptojourno/status/1648441424357261312
And Sassal https://twitter.com/sassal0x/status/1648338351832064003
A great take from Ryan Selkis from Messari here too
https://twitter.com/twobitidiot/status/1648732457448120321
There were calls to remove Gensler as well by Congressman Warren Davidson https://news.bitcoin.com/us-lawmaker-introducing-legislation-to-remove-sec-chairman-due-to-long-series-of-abuses/
The fallout is that we might even see Coinbase operations move out of the US with a clear sign this may happen being the indication from their CEO Brian Armstrong https://www.coindesk.com/business/2023/04/18/coinbase-could-move-away-from-us-if-no-regulatory-clarity-ceo-brian-armstrong/
Closer to home, if you missed the Hong Kong Web3 Festival then don’t panic, it was covered well by the folks over at Bullish as Head of Research, Sylvia To wrote about it and shared here https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sylvia-to_2023-web3-festival-hong-kong-activity-7053105153435963392-UEyN/
Our very own Ryan McCall, founder of Zerocap, was also there and shared his thoughts here which are worth checking out https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ryanmccall1_theres-been-a-lot-of-buzz-online-recently-activity-7053573442985496577-lq6K?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop
Great video here with Sidney Powell from Maple Finance on The Defiant talking about their approach to lending, real world assets and tokenisation, regulation concerns/KYC and more. If you’re interested in debt capital markets on chain then check this out
Also important not to get tricked out there, even if its on the anti-crypto side and there seemed to be something in the news with a group called DCMA apparently working with the IMF to release a global CBDC called Unicoin (is it April fools still?). Some Twitter sleuth dug around like many of us did but this piece of investigative work takes the cake
https://mobile.twitter.com/krippenreiter/status/1647453494771699715
Also, if you missed it last week, a16z Crypto put out their State of Crypto report and there was a podcast to go along with it that was recently shared - check it out https://web3-with-a16z.simplecast.com/episodes/state-of-crypto-trends-data-index-2023
A few weeks ago, the folks at Bankless went all AI on us andhad Eliezer Yudkowsky on the show who was quite negative about the outcomes of crypto for mankind (and with a show entitled ‘We’re all going to Die’, you can see why). To find the counterbalance to that, they bring on Robin Hanson who brings up a more optimistic view
MICA finally passed yesterday with stablecoin provisions in 12 months and rest coming in 18 months but still some questions on how this will be implemented in detail. https://www.ledgerinsights.com/mica-stifle-stablecoins-eu/
We started off seeing projects like Niantic (Pokemon Go) move away from using NFTs as part of their game (to the praise of its community). This is sad and just goes to show that there’s much more work to be done from web3 gaming to not be seen as the “scourge upon gaming” (as 1 commentator put it). See the community post here: https://community.ingress.com/en/discussion/21379/thank-you-for-all-your-support-trading-post-ingress-community
Also, if you wanted to check out the videos from the Aus Crypto Convention last year, you can now as they’ve been releasing them on their YouTube channel here https://www.youtube.com/@australiancryptoconvention680/videos
ABOUT AUS DEFI ASSOCIATION
The Australian DeFi Association (Aus DeFi) is a non-profit community organization dedicated to increasing education and awareness of blockchain technology, specifically decentralized finance (DeFi) and web3-based projects. Their goal is to empower the Australian community with the knowledge and tools to participate in the decentralized economy, and to promote the adoption and growth of blockchain technology in Australia. They strive to provide a more grassroots approach to promoting blockchain technology compared to other industry-focused organizations in Australia, and to provide a platform for community members to learn about and engage with this emerging technology.
You can watch our recorded meetups and interviews here on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ausdefiassociation3956/videos
SPONSORS
We also thank all of our sponsors who help us run and organise and keep this association going. We could not do it without them so check out their details here
NotCentralised - https://www.notcentralised.com/
Sensand - https://sensand.com/
Stone & Chalk - https://www.stoneandchalk.com.au/web3
Fireblocks - https://www.fireblocks.com/
Adiuvo Legal - https://adiuvolegal.com.au/home
Block Earner - https://blockearner.com.au/
Digital Village - https://digitalvillage.network/
Klyp Co - https://klyp.co/