Ethereum Founder Gets Hacked

Your weekly guide to web3 and AI with Shira

Author

Shira Lazar
September 10, 2023

This Week in Web3...

🚨 Hacking the Ethereum King. Vitalik Buterin’s X/Twitter account was hacked yesterday, resulting in $690K+ in losses from users. The hack involved a malicious link promoting free NFTs to commemorate the arrival of “Proto-Danksharding coming to Ethereum.“ It's not clear yet how his account was compromised.

💵 Visa Taps Solana. Visa announced this week that it will be testing a stablecoin settlement expansion on Solana. The pilot starts with two merchant acquirers and uses Visa’s Circle account to facilitate payment settlements in USDC on the Solana blockchain. This comes immediately after Solana’s Shopify partnership, allowing millions of businesses on Shopify’s platform to leverage Solana Pay with zero transaction fees and instant settlement.

HOT TAKE🔥 While consumers might see the exchange of funds as instantaneous, behind-the-scenes is anything but.

Settlement is the process that happens between banks and other intermediaries when a payment or money transfer starts, a process that is slow and notoriously inefficient.

Crypto could make this process faster and cheaper, especially for international settlements (goodbye multi-day international wire transfers).

🪧 NounsDAO’s rage fork. NounsDAO is heading towards a treasury split. Under the DAO’s newly enacted rage quit rules, if 20% of Nouns NFTs call for a “fork” they can split from the main group and take their share of the project’s 30,620 ether tokens with them. More than 26% of Nouns have voted in favor and the project has launched a fork site to streamline the process for participating in the fork. Holders that initiated the fork sparked the movement as a way to get a share of the overall project tokens instead selling their noun on the market.

296 Nouns in the fork as of Sunday afternoon.

💅 xoxo Gossip Protocol. Winny and LDF launch Gossip Protocol, exploring what it really means to be a web3 content creator. The duo will be creating content across a decentralized social stack of already existing tools, including @Discoxyz, @jokerace_xyz, @Livepeer, @LensProtocol, @guildxyz and @unlonely_app.

Quick Headlines

  • Friend Tech is back in vogue, making more fees than Bitcoin.

  • Zynga, the gaming giant behind mega-hits like Farmville and Words with Friends, launches its first web3 mint on September 13 with Sugartown.

  • Deadfellaz launches a new gaming arm called RIP TCG, a digital trading card game expected in Q1 2024.

AI Corner

💰 dollarbills.ai. Tropical island Anguilla owns the .ai domain space and is raking in cash with the recent explosion of interest in AI. This year, the country is expected to make $30 million selling domains, a 330% increase from last year, and a whopping 10% of the country’s GDP. In the 1990’s, Anguilla was assigned the .ai ending (similar to a .uk or .us) by The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Major tech companies have all snapped up their domains such as X.ai, Stability.ai, Google.ai, Facebook.ai, and Microsoft.ai.

🍄 Doing ‘shrooms. Since ChatGPT launched, tons of books have popped up on Amazon written by $10k/month AI entrepreneurs who use AI to write content. But not all content is created equal: several mushroom foraging guides are giving dangerous advice, offering up mushrooms that cause hallucinations or death. Top tip: tasting mushrooms to see if they are poisonous.

🧠 AI bubble. Despite Twitter’s obsession with the “10 AI tools you must know”, only 18% of American adults have actually used ChatGPT according to new research by Pew Research. Another surprising note from the research is that while ChatGPT usage for work is up 33% from March to July, more Americans are still using ChatGPT for entertainment and learning as opposed to work.

🎶 No longer a one-hit wonder. Ghostwriter, the anonymous creator behind the AI Drake song has released a new song featuring the AI-generated voices of Travis Scott and 21 Savage. Instant hit.

Plus they’ve submitted their AI Drake song for the Grammy’s — I have the details:

This Week We’re Bullish On

Held Mind

Held Mind is Web3's first B2B & B2C recovery & sobriety support & education system. They offer individual support, tailored in-house training & consultation, and other resources & support for mental health, conflict resolution, and sobriety & recovery. Their team of mental health professionals and experts of lived experience supports over 40 projects and brands in the web3 space.

Positive Affirmation for the Week

Don’t talk yourself out of who you are and what you know. ❤️

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With gratitude,

ShiraFrom Bitcoin Setbacks to AI Art Exhibits