🌍 This Week in Web3ForGood
what if it all works out
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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It is easy, especially in this corner of the internet, to lead with what could go wrong. The risks, the failure modes, the blind spots… all important critiques!, and we spend a lot of time on them for good reason.
But a politics of caution alone does not get anyone anywhere new. We read an article this week (linked below) about a politics of abundance, and it struck a chord, because the future doesn’t get built on warnings alone.
Somewhere between “what could go wrong” and “what could go right,” there is a solution waiting to be implemented. That’s the conversation we hope to surface here.
News, opportunities, events, all below. Thanks for being here 💛.
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
🪪 Digital Public Infrastructure
We’ve been thinking a lot about Digital public infrastructure (DPI) this week, mostly in response to two unrelated articles that we recently read. UCL’s Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose wrote about mapping DPI-like systems across 210 countries, and the UK’s Ada Lovelace Institute published a careful diagnosis of the trust problem the UK’s proposed digital ID scheme has to solve. There’s no mention of blockchain or zero-knowledge proofs in either piece, and we can’t help but wonder if either type of tech will play a roll in the final outcome, especially given the outlined concerns. TBD!
DPI is expanding faster than its legitimacy is being earned, and though DPI is not inherently a web3 concept, web3 tools that could help close that gap seem to notably be missing from the public conversation. We get it, anything touched by crypto isn’t exactly a PR darling right now.
Still, a digital ID, as the Ada Lovelace authors argue, is not a neutral administrative upgrade. It restructures the relationship between a person and the state. Legitimacy has to be earned. That means citizens need to understand what data is collected, control what gets shared, and trust that the system cannot be turned against them. Conventional DPI architectures, built on centralized databases and traditional cryptography, struggle to deliver on all this.
Bhutan is one early example of what it could look like to bring web3 tools into this work. In October 2025, Bhutan became the first country to anchor its National Digital Identity on the Ethereum blockchain. Its 800,000 citizens now hold self-sovereign identity wallets that use zero-knowledge proofs to verify things like age or citizenship without exposing the underlying data. The country is small and the governance context is unusual. Still, the architecture is doing something the standard DPI stack cannot. A Bhutanese citizen can prove they are over eighteen without handing over their birthdate, and the state cannot alter the record of who accessed what.
The lesson is not that every country should copy Bhutan. It is that web3 tools answer specific, well-documented failure modes of conventional digital ID, and leaving them out of policy debates means leaving real solutions on the table. The next time DPI comes up in a working group, a funder meeting, or a policy brief, it is worth asking why blockchain and zero-knowledge proofs are not in the room.
Plus:
💰 MiniPay + Squid: Wealth Access, Made Mobile: “Since launch, uptake has exceeded expectations on both sides. The gold Mini App has seen over 164,000 purchases from more than 88,000 unique users, with traction spread across West Africa, Southeast Asia, East Africa, and Latin America. Those 88,000 holders make Celo the leading network for omnichain Tether Gold, a milestone that caught the attention of the Celo Foundation.“ (The Squid Blog)
🎲 Prediction markets have an inescapable insider trading problem: “The social value of prediction markets derives from financially incentivizing insiders to divulge confidential information, but this collapses trader confidence in the market over time.“ (Murmurations II)
🌱 Effective Altruism focused on bednets while a malaria vaccine was stuck for 35 years. The case for Abundance: “Abundance, at its core, is responsive governance
Abundance asks: Is the government actually delivering on what it set out to do? What are the unintended consequences of current methods?“ (Positive Sum)
📣 Latest News
Stablecoin transfer volume drops 19% even as supply keeps rising: RWA.xyz
MiniPay Contributes up to $1 Million CELO to Back Mini App Builders & Launches Roadshow
Global Policy, Regulation, and Adoption News
Australia draft payments vision eyes stablecoin interoperability
UK regulator clears path for tokenized funds within existing rules
Reports / Project Updates
🔈 Watch & Listen
Green Pill - VDAO - Episode 12 - The Hidden Risks of Stablecoins (And Why Decentralization Matters)
Crypto Altruists - Episode 249 - 2,000 Years of Decentralized Coordination: What Web3 Can Learn from Savings Circles, with JUKUMU TZ & The Solar Foundation
🚀 Opportunities & Calls to Act
Apply: The Centre for Public Impact is hiring a City Lead - LATAM.
Create: Octant’s next Creator Cohort is a real bootcamp for digital creators with daily sessions, homework, guest speakers.
Funding: The Scaling Land Restoration Challenge from the World Economic Forum’s UpLink and Mercuria is Aacall for solutions that accelerate and commercialize terrestrial ecosystem restoration. From post-mining recovery and soil rehabilitation to landscape monitoring, this Challenge targets technologies and business models that make land restoration financially viable and attractive to private capital.
Fellowship: Astra is Constellation’s flagship fellowship, built to accelerate AI safety research and talent. As AI advances at unprecedented speed, preparing for its risks is critical. Astra brings exceptional people into the field and connects them with leading mentors and research opportunities. The Fall 2026 cohort of Astra will run from September 14, 2026 to February 5, 2027. Applications close on May 3rd at 11:59pm, Anywhere on Earth!
Partner: Regeneration Pollination is looking for partners for their Solarpunk Series. The next Solarpunk event will be on May 22nd, International Day for Biological Diversity. As a partner, you can be part of the event co-creation, weave your networks more intentionally with other Solarpunks and receive a few highlights in our communications. It’s also easy and fun, reach out via email if you want to get involved (info included in the link, scroll down).
Donate: The Bread Cooperative team has built Etherform, a set of open-source GitHub Actions workflows for Foundry smart contract development. It saves teams the hassle of rebuilding the same security and testing pipelines from scratch every time. They’re rallying the community to donate and support the building of these open tools.
🎪 Events
🆕= New to the roundup this week
Virtual
Regeneration Pollination - First Friday! - Connecting Turtle Island West is happening May 1.
Regen Commons May Community Call is happening May 7. 🆕
Regeneration Pollination Solarpunk: International Day for Biological Diversity is happening May 22. 🆕
Regeneration Pollination Solarpunk: World Environment Day is happening June 5. 🆕
IRL
Stanford Blockchain Governance Summit 2026 is happening May 2-3 in Stanford, CA.
SF DWeb Meetup Everything You Want to Know about DWeb Camp is happening May 5 in San Francisco. 🆕
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.
Featuring the Freedom Tech Track. 🆕
The Philosophy of Brain-Computer Interfaces: A Neurotechnology and Society Conference is happening June 5-6 in Boston.
Foresight Institute’s Vision Weekend United Kingdom 2026 is happening June 5-7 in London.
ETHConf is happening June 8-10 in NYC.
State Capacity in the Digital Era, a panel discussion from UCL IIPP, is happening June 17 in London. 🆕
East Africa Adopting Bitcoin Conference is happening June 24-26 in Nairobi.
DWeb Camp 2026 is happening July 8–12 in Alte Hölle - Brandenburg, Germany.
DWeb Camp Cascadia is happening July 30 - August 3 on Salt Spring Island, BC, Canada.
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.
The Technoprogressive Opportunity is happening September 19-20 in London.
Progress Conference 2026 is happening October 8-11 in Berkeley, CA.
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 May 22.
📡 On Our Radar
Aapti Institute works at the intersection between technology and society to build solutions that enhance societal impact, justice, and equity.
The AI Index from Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered AI provides unbiased, rigorously vetted, and globally sourced data for policymakers, researchers, journalists, executives, and the general public to develop a deeper understanding of the complex field of AI.
Project Cumulus is an international research partnership developing AI-powered weather forecasting systems for agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa.
IceNet uses AI for sea ice predictions and polar resilience.
✨ And One More Thing
Thanks so much for the link. Really great roundup too!