🌍 This Week in Web3forGood
A weekly roundup of the ways web3 could make the world a better place.
Welcome to Week 15,
It’s been a crazy week all around - while summer is heating up, the crypto winter really seems to be upon us. And with the Fed raising interest rates by 0.75 percentage point, the highest since 1994 to curb inflation - the market is definitely feeling it. Yet, the builders keep building, the Regens are still at it, and the Gitcoin Grants are still staying strong!
Things are definitely getting harder, the layoffs are not a great sign but, here’s to ploughing through and sharing what’s happening in the Web3ForGood space this week.
Let us know if you’re in town for NFT.NYC!
WAGMI (we are going to make an impact)!
Xx Abeera & Sam
What’s Inside
🌊 Deep Dive: Fighting volatility with stablecoins (but not always?)
🕊 Tweet of the Week
📣 Latest News
📚 What We’re Thinking About
🚀 Opportunities
📡 On Our Radar
🌊 Deep Dive: Fighting volatility with stablecoins (but not always?)
In many parts of the world, stable forms of money are not commonplace, particularly in areas of hyperinflation as we have seen in Venezuela and Zimbabwe. These fluctuations are further amplified within cryptocurrencies, which are subject to massive volatility. As cryptocurrencies have plummeted this week, and Bitcoin at $21,045 as I type this, stablecoins were supposed to be protected from this volatility. Yet, the collapse of TerraUSD, the fourth largest stablecoin has brought all of this into question.
Stablecoins are designed to combat the volatility of traditional cryptocurrencies by pegging their value to that of a fiat currency like the US dollar. In theory, as long as the value of the asset a stablecoin is tied to remains stable, the coin also remains stable.
A perfectly engineered stablecoin is the key to achieve all three essential properties of a currency:
Medium of exchange (ability to trade goods and services without bartering)
Store of value (means of maintaining wealth over time)
Unit of account (measurement unit to define and compare market values)
However, this approach means stablecoins sacrifice some of the independence of other cryptocurrencies. The faith in the asset that makes it stable comes from the fact that one entity—the US government for the US dollar, for instance—controls the majority of the supply and acts as custodians for the reserve assets.
Continue Reading on Medium.
🕊 Tweet of the Week
📣 Latest News
📚 What We’re Thinking About
Following up on the ImpactDAO conversation from last week: How Crypto can regenerate the world (Forbes)
Web3/Ed3 And Immersive Technologies Signal A New Era For K-12 Education (Forbes)
Companies with a woman in the founding team made up only 17.7% of venture-backed Blockchain startups (Blockworks).
Could creating a virtual world build a more sustainable one? (EY).
McKinsey report “Value Creation in the Metaverse” shows the metaverse may be too big to ignore (VentureBeat).
Supply chains are increasingly global, and with the changing economic environment and rising interest rates, the world now more than ever needs cost-efficient means of settling instant B2B payments across borders — stablecoins can be a powerful solution (Blockworks).
🚀 Opportunities
Attend: Tour of Web3 We3 Speaker Series
Attend: Metaverse Pride in Decentraland
Apply: DoinGud is hiring a Local Community Leader (New York)
Apply: StoryDAO is hiring a Head of Community (Remote)
___
📡 On Our Radar
Hope Endures NFT Collection benefits schools in Haiti and is dropping soon on Snowcrash. Minting an NFT from the Hope Endures collection will contribute to the rebuilding of two schools in Haiti that were destroyed almost a year ago in the earthquake.
Nothing contained in this newsletter should be construed as financial or investment advice. This newsletter is for informational educational purposes only.