🌍 This Week in Web3ForGood
what's changed since 2022
Web3forGood is a weekly publication that celebrates and critically analyzes how emerging web3 technology could be used to make the world a better place.
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Web3forGood is 4! 🥳🥳
We’re sharing out reflections, below. Plus, scroll to the bottom for a roundup of headlines from our very first few editions, published in March 2022 (toilet paper NFTs for medical debt? Ethereum taking the first steps to be PoS? Yes, please!).
Whether you’ve been here for 4 years or 4 days, thanks for being a part of this.
WAGMI (we are going to make an impact!)
What’s Inside
📚 What We’re Thinking About
📣 Latest News
🔈 Watch & Listen
🚀 Opportunities & Calls to Act
🎪 Events
📡 On Our Radar
✨ And One More Thing
📚 What We’re Thinking About
🎂 Four Years of Web3forGood
This week, Web3ForGood turned four (!), which feels extra special when you consider that four years in this space is genuinely a long time.
In the past four years, we have published 200+ editions, through bull markets and bear markets, through hype cycles and crashes, through a global pandemic hangover and a geopolitical landscape that has shifted under everyone’s feet. We started this newsletter because we believed that emerging technology could be used to make the world a better place, and we wanted a place to think and learn about that together. That belief has not changed, but almost everything surrounding it has.
When we first pressed send on March 10, 2022, the energy in the crypto space was electric in a way that is hard to describe if you weren’t there. NFT sales were in the billions of dollars. We were writing primers for nonprofits on why they should accept crypto donations. We were tracking stablecoin pilots in Afghanistan and Ukraine, marveling at the fact that a girl who had lost her job under the Taliban could receive a payment through a crypto wallet. The technology felt like a secret the right people hadn’t discovered yet, and our job was to find those people and connect the dots. It was exciting and a little wild and full of a particular kind of optimism. It was fun.
Then, the news got dark. Crypto winter arrived and stayed for a while. A lot of projects we had covered evolved or even disappeared. The NFT market, which had once felt like a new frontier for creative fundraising and community building, deflated quickly. The industry was forced to do some real reckoning, and, honestly, it needed to. We kept writing through it all, because we continued to believe that the potential of the underlying technology exceeded the negative hype surrounding it. W still believe that.
What we watched transpire during the harder years is what grounds us the most now. Stablecoins, which we were explaining from first principles in early editions, became infrastructure. Mercy Corps Ventures published pilots showing faster aid delivery in Syria and lower transaction costs for merchants in Cameroon. The GENIUS Act passed, for better or for worse. Mainstream financial institutions stopped asking whether to engage with blockchain and started asking how. The boring, unglamorous work of building real rails for real people took precedence. Public goods funding protocols grew into working mechanisms. We tried out being a part of Gitcoin rounds. We received a retroactive grant from Optimism. We covered PGFs and RetroPGFs from Octant, Filecoin, Giveth, and more. Projects like Public Nouns and Monthly Earth Day showed us that the most meaningful experiments are often the ones that look random from the outside but are genuinely trying to figure out new ways to organize people around shared values. We found our own community in these past four years, in places online and off, at events like ETHDenver and Funding the Commons and in groups like SheFi and Kernel. “Community” is a buzzword that gets thrown around a lot in this industry, but it’s also no joke here. It’s exactly this community that has sustained us through the harder/stranger weeks of writing this thing every single week.
And then there is AI. We’d be amiss if we didn’t bring that up. The AI conversation has dominated the last year for us and, we would argue, makes the blockchain conversation more important rather than less. AI systems are centralizing fast, raising serious questions about trust, ownership, and who controls the infrastructure that is increasingly mediating daily life. Blockchain offers some of the most credible answers to those questions, from verifiable proof of personhood to agent-to-agent payments to transparent records of digital provenance. The convergence of these two technologies is one of the defining challenges of this moment, and the people in the web3 world have been thinking about it longer and more carefully than almost anyone else out there.
Four years ago, Web3forGood was writing about potential. That was the framing, because that is what we had. We had whitepapers and pilots and early signals and a lot of pure excitement. Today the framing has shifted. The potential has been demonstrated across enough use cases and enough contexts that the question is no longer whether this technology can do good things. The question is whether we will build those things, who will build them, and for whom.
The shift from potential to urgency is the biggest thing that has changed since we started. The weight of the world has gotten heavier around the stories we tell. The geopolitical stakes of financial technology are clearer. The capture of crypto by bad-faith actors has made the narrative battle feel more real. Potential alone feels insufficient in a way it simply did not when we started writing in 2022.
We began as optimists sharing possibilities. We are still optimists. But we have grown up alongside this industry, watched it stumble and self-correct and stumble again, and come out the other side more clear-eyed about what it actually takes to make good technology serve good ends. It takes builders who care. It takes readers who stay curious and critical. It takes people who show up, week after week, and refuse to cede the narrative to the loudest or the most funded.
Two hundred editions. Four years. We are still here because you are still here, and because the work is nowhere near done.
WAGMI. We are going to make an impact.
Plus:
🤖 An AI avatar is running to represent Indigenous voters in Colombia: “If elected, Redondo and Rincón will occupy seats reserved for Indigenous people, and defer to the digital platform to seek consensus from their communities on all legislative matters.“ “To ensure transparency, the platform uses smart contracts on blockchain.” (Rest of the World)
📚 State of Bitcoin Literature in Africa: What We Know, What We’re Missing, and Why It Matters: “Using Nigeria as a case study, the paper argues that blockchain’s impact is shaped less by its technical features and more by the strength of the institutions that govern it.“ (Africa Bitcoin Institute)
🪙 Which money do AI agents prefer?: “4,378 of 9,072 total responses selected Bitcoin as the preferred monetary instrument — more than any other option. No prompt mentioned Bitcoin or suggested any specific currency.“ But also :”For payment scenarios — services, micropayments, cross-border transfers — stablecoins captured 53.2% of responses versus Bitcoin’s 36.0%. Even the most Bitcoin-favoring models deferred to stablecoins for transactional use. Fiat trailed at just 5.1%.” (Is this because AI knows special about Bitcoin or because it’s just reflecting back to us what it sees in the world?) (Bitcoin Policy Institute)
🌱 “I think that we in Ethereum should conceptualize ourselves as being part of an ecosystem building “sanctuary technologies”: free open-source technologies that let people live, work, talk to each other, manage risk and build wealth, and collaborate on shared goals, in a way that optimizes for robustness to outside pressures.” (@VitalikButerin)
📣 Latest News
Global Policy, Regulation, and Adoption News
Reports and Project Updates
🔈 Watch & Listen
Crypto Altruists - Episode 242 - Special Live Episode – Impact Onchain: Bridging the Gap for Nonprofits and Changemakers
🚀 Opportunities & Calls to Act
Apply: The Digital Public Goods Alliance Secretariat is hiring: DPGs for Climate Action Technical Coordinator, Validation and Enrichment of Data on Digital Public Goods, Research Consultant for DPGs and Rapid Response to Urgent Global Challenges, Senior Backend Developer, and Technology & Human Impact Communications Specialist/Writer.
Apply: Bitcoin Magazine is hiring a Broadcast News Anchor and Lead Broadcast Analyst.
Learn: Values-Aligned AI is a two session on-ramp to AI. “The goal isn’t to become someone who’s “good at AI.” It’s to find out whether this tool can support the life you’re already trying to live.”
🎪 Events
🆕= New to the roundup this week
Virtual
Making Digital Public Infrastructure Work for Women and Girls — co-hosted by Co-Develop, the Centre for Digital Public Infrastructure and UN Women — is happening March 17. 🆕
Joining Forces for Blockchain Standardisation 2026 from the International Association for Trusted Blockchain Applications is happening March 18.
Becoming Unstoppable: Financial Freedom Webinar from Human Rights Foundation is happening March 23-25.
IRL
Funding the Commons SF: Intelligence at the Frontier is happening March 14 in San Francisco.
The Flourishing Track at Funding the Commons is happening March 14-15 in San Francisco.
Foresight Institute Node Open House (Berlin) is happening March 19 in Berlin.
Touch Grass: A Retreat for Builders from Bread Collective is happening March 26-29 in Skamokawa, WA.
Stable Summit is happening in March 27-28 in Cannes, France.
The Ethereum Community Conference (EthCC 9) is happening March 30 - April 2 in Cannes, France.
Foresight’s San Francisco AI Node: Launch Salon is happening April 1 in San Francisco.
Paris Blockchain Week is happening April 15-16 in Paris.
Horizons in Ethics & Emerging Technologies (HEET 2026) is happening April 16 in Torino, Piemonte, Italy.
RightsCon 2026 is happening May 5-8 in Zambia.
Bitdeer X ACJR Awards are happening May 7 in Miami Beach.
ETHCluj is happening May 13-14 in Cluj-Napoca, Romania.
ETHGlobal Prague is happening May 30 - June 1 in Prague.
Edge Esmeralda is happening May 30 - June 27 in Healdsburg, California.
The Oslo Freedom Forum is happening June 1-3 in Oslo, Norway.
Foresight Institute’s Vision Weekend United Kingdom 2026 is happening June 5-7 in London.
ETHConf is happening June 8-10 in NYC.
DWeb Camp 2026 is happening July 8–12 in Alte Hölle - Brandenburg, Germany.
Crypto Commons Gathering is happening August 16-22 in Reichenau an der Rax, Austria.
Valley of the Commons is happening August 24 - September 20 in the Austrian Alps.
Boston Blockchain Week is happening September 8-10 in Quincy, MA.
The Gathering is happening September 11-15 in Portugal.
Responsible Tech Summit: Embedding Accountability in the AI Era is happening October 29 in NYC.
Devcon 8 is happening November 3-6 in Mumbai, India.
The Africa Bitcoin Conference is happening December 2-5 in Blantyre, Malawi. 🆕
Recurring
Monthly Earth Day is a global event that happens on the 22nd every month, not just once a year. Get involved next on March 22.
📡 On Our Radar
Flourishing Systems Foundation catalyzes the emergence of life-aligned systems through translational research, transformative education, venture incubation, and community co-creation.
The GSR Foundation is on a mission to understand and eliminate the myriad barriers to tech inclusion.
✨ And One More Thing
These are links that we shared in our first few newsletters, published in March 2022. Remember when…
Medical debt for low-income families is being erased via the sale of toilet paper NFTs. The project started out as a joke, but since launching has contributed over $90,000 to the nonprofit RIP Medical Debt. The organization used the funds to purchase debt in bundled portfolios and wipe medical debt worth $7 million dollars.
Founder Andrew Wang discusses how his NFT project Reli3f raised $1 million for Ukraine humanitarian aid in 30 seconds, his work advising politician Andrew Yang on his Web3-oriented political lobbying DAO, and more in this interview. Notably, Yang’s involvement is a high profile push for Web3 on the Hill involving the masses, and not just the big players.
Thwarted by the Taliban and blocked by banks wary of violating US sanctions, NGOs are using cryptocurrency to deliver much-needed financial aid to starving Afghans. Code to Inspire is a non-profit that pays recipients in BUSD, a stablecoin tied to the US dollar, and women then convert it to afghanis, the local currency. Refugees can take their assets with them without risk, and humanitarian agencies can bypass banks and provide cash to those in need.
Ethereum has talked about shifting its underlying consensus mechanisms from Proof-of-work (PoW) to Proof-of-stake (PoS) for a while now. Finally, it has passed a major test in making that shift. Currently a single PoW Ethereum transaction can consume as much power as the average US household uses in more than a week! Hence, the anticipated transition to PoS, which it “promises will use 99% less energy, allow the network to scale, and help it reach 100,000 transactions per second,” is a positive response to the criticism of how energy extensive blockchain technology can be.
US President Joe Biden’s Executive Order on digital asset innovation – directing federal agencies to study the industry and report on regulatory authority – is a major win for the industry in the United States. The focus is no longer on whether crypto will survive, but rather on how to encourage responsible innovation and what role US leadership can and should play.
Creative women all over the world are turning to NFTs as a creative outlet, including women in the Middle East. From avoiding censorship to achieving equity, this article delves more into how Arab women creators are using the technology to their advantage.
Ukrainian refugee flees to Poland with $2,000 in bitcoin on a USB drive. “I couldn’t withdraw cash at all, because the queues to ATMs were so long, and I couldn’t wait that much time.”
Crypto-native fundraising takes off as the wealthy of Web3 choose to donate crypto instead of cash. Why? Tax incentives are a big part of it.
$60,000 selling 5 singles and a music video as NFTs vs $300 from Spotify: for unsigned artists, NFTs provide an opportunity for young, diverse creators to make a living without a record label.
Could Seed Club, a DAO that builds and invests in communities, be the “Y Combinator For Web3?”
St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital has received $1 million in digital currency donations in the last 9 months. ($)
According to ConsenSys CEO and Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin, the transition to Ethereum 2.0 “will lay to rest Ethereum’s carbon footprint problem, that all goes away.” Proof of Work, Proof of Stake, what’s the difference and why does it even matter? It’s all in the weeds of Ethereum 2.0.