This Week in Web3...

🤯 Solana Labs announced a huge partnership this week. Solana Pay has been added as a payment option on Shopify, allowing users to pay using USDC (and potentially other tokens in the future). Transactions are settled instantly on the blockchain with lower fees (as opposed to credit cards which take days to clear for merchants).

🐸 Developers of the popular memecoin $PEPE transferred 16 trillion PEPE tokens worth almost $15 million to four crypto exchanges, causing major selloffs. The token declined over 20% over the last two days. Three team members went rogue, selling the tokens and then removing their addresses from the team’s multi-sig wallet. These tokens were never expected to be sold.

🖼 New York artist Sam Spratt launches a new web3 game called “The Monument Game”, where players can compete for three Skulls of Luci by co-creating stories around Sam Spratt’s new 1/1 artwork IX. The player tickets sold out in minutes for a total of 695 ETH and the 1/1 artwork sold for 420.69 ETH.

🐵 With Opensea’s decision to no longer enforce royalties, other organizations are exploring alternative options to respecting creator royalties. Rarible has announced they are no longer aggregating listings from Opensea and ApeCoinDAO considers a proposal for a royalty-friendly Opensea competitor.

🥳 Sandy Carter, COO of Unstoppable Domains, dives deep into recent triumphs in web3 in her article for Forbes. If you look closely, you might come across a quote from yours truly. 😉

Quick Headlines

• Artblocks creator SnowFro released a new project called heart + craft on Prohibition, Artblock’s new platform on Arbitrum.

• Uniswap did more volume than Coinbase since the beginning of 2023. Uniswap facilitated $150 billion in trading volume, while Coinbase came out at $145 billion.

• Nate Chastain was sentenced to three months in prison for insider trading. Nate used to control the banners on OpenSea and trade with the advanced knowledge of which projects would be featured.

AI Corner

🎉 Meta just announced SeamlessM4T, their competitor to Google translate. SeamlessM4T is a speech/text translation and transcription model capable of handling 101 languages for speech input and 96 Languages for text input/output.

👨‍💻 White-collar jobs will be among the first impacted by AI, according to IBM chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna. However, he expects that AI will augment work as opposed to replacing people as AI creates some new jobs and our population ages, leading to less people in the working population.

👨‍⚖️ A federal judge in Washington D.C. has made a ruling that only art created by humans can be copyrighted. Art created by AI without human input cannot receive copyright, as it lacks human creativity. As AI’s popularity in art continues to grow, I expect we’ll see more cases like this!

Positive Affirmation for the Week

Be around people who say ‘How are you?’ back and actually mean it.

This Week We’re Bullish On

Sophia Li (@sophfei)

Sophia Li is a journalist and climate advocate who works to make talking about issues like climate justice, human rights, and web3 more accessible and more digestible in the age of social media. She is the co-founder of STEWARD, a web3 collective that aims to fund the climate movement through NFTs. Sophia also serves as the co-chair of the World Economic Forum’s Web3 Sustainability Coalition.

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With gratitude,

Shira