Oh. What. A. Night. Late September back in …. 2022 (and before we begin, enjoy the day off for folks in NSW). Last week we ran our first event with the folks at Stone & Chalk and it was a great evening. We had about 90 - 100 join us for this occasion and we shared the stage talking regulation, law, AI, soulbound tokens, investing in the VC/web3 space and much more. Thanks to Liya, Nick, Joey, Mitch, Steph, Ray, Arturo, Aaron and John who were up on stage and Chris and the crew who helped setup and run the AV as well as to our friends at Stone & Chalk including Ben, Linh, Jacqui, Alex and their CEO Michael (see Tweet below).
Check out our Twitter thread for photos:
and also check out the replay video here:
Additionally, the podcast came out from my chat with the folks at Digital Village (Chris Sinclair and Luke Fabish). We spoke regulation, mainstream adoption, the modern renaissance and more. If you didn’t already know, Chris is our main man when it comes to audio visual and has put so much into the quality of production for Aus DeFi events so it was great to interview with him. You can check out the link https://open.spotify.com/episode/0FtOUCI0xIGbYsErAQ5u2h:
News
Deals from the past week were neatly summarised in this post from Ashley Xu - https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ashley-xu-au_crypto-web3-blockchain-ugcPost-6979725858722766850-kOCL?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop
They included bug bounty platform Immunefi raising $24m and crypto analytics firm Messari raising $35m.
Additionally, we also saw a landmark case with artist Kris Kashtanova being granted the first known registered copyright for AI art. Thanks to Raymond Sun for highlighting this and more details available here: https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2022/09/24/nyc-artist-granted-first-known-registered-copyright-ai-art/4081664063008/
More details on the layered diffusion technique common to artworks like this is here https://www.louisbouchard.ai/latent-diffusion-models/
In Metaverse news, it looks like Pixelmon (and the famous Kevin) are back - https://decrypt.co/110542/nft-game-pixelmon-attempts-comeback-after-70m-horrible-art-reveal
If you don’t know who they are you might remember this image of what the artwork looked like (image on the left is Kevin)
We’ll see if 2nd times a charm for this project. It could go the way of many other famous non-web3 games that improved over time after an initial botched release (No Man’s Sky anyone?).
In regulatory news we saw roundtables announced about the RBA and investigations into use-cases for CBDCs (such as this one by former Blockchain Assocation CEO, Steve Vallas)
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6980320688645582848/
Will be interesting to see how this plays out but we certainly need more discussions (and actions) to get us towards mainstream.
We also saw bitcoin mining of a different kind in Guatemala where it’s being driven by cooking oil and diesel engines. Check this out
and finally, it appears Disney is getting into the NFT space with the job posting of a corporate lawyer to help them engage in the full product life cycle of digital assets. A sign of the times as we become more mainstream.
Data
Not much movement in the major cryptos last week with BTC still below $20k USD and ETH around $1.3k USD.
In other data related news we look at the report from last month showing how crypto analytics firm Chainalaysis was able to assist in the recover of $30m USD in seized funds from the Ronin Bridge hack by North Korea’s Lazarus group. They show some insights including the Storyline mode from their app which shows how stolen funds were moved across chains and it’s what assisted authorities in being able to disrupt a crime as it occurred. More here: https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/axie-infinity-ronin-bridge-dprk-hack-seizure/