🌍 This Week in Web3ForGood
decentralization & the pope
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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This week, someone who is a really big deal had something very important to say about power and technology. Shoutout to the pope. We read Magnifica Humanitas (aka Pope Leo XIV's new encyclical) and found him making a case for decentralization that would sound right at home in this newsletter… read all about it, below.
Alongside that, we're tracking the Ethereum Foundation choosing values over market value as it slims down, and a new kind of prediction market from Hyperliquid that has us curious (optimistic??).
One more thing: Ma Earth's Funding Round 3 closes this weekend, with $500K in matching funds available for 100 grassroots nature projects worldwide. If you know a community doing the work, send them this way before the deadline.
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
🕊️ Decentralized Pope
If you’ve consumed any form of media content this week (and if not, kudos to you), you are probably aware that the pope had something to say about AI this week. But were you also aware that Magnifica Humanitas, aka Pope Leo XIV’s new encyclical on artificial intelligence, explicitly celebrates an idea that is a cornerstone of web3 philosophy? Multiple times, he returns to something called the principle of subsidiarity, which calls for strengthening the fabric of associations and communities while avoiding further centralization of power. In plain terms, this means that decisions should be made as close as possible to the people they affect, and that higher authorities should support local communities rather than replace them. Ok, so the pope never says blockchain or decentralization… but he doesn’t NEED to, because the point is the same. People should be able to participate in the systems that dictate their lives.
Pope Leo argues that, in the digital age, the “highest level” is not the state, but actually a handful of major economic and technological actors that set the terms of everyday life by deciding who gets access, what is visible, and which opportunities exist. His response is that these processes cannot be imposed from above in a unilateral way. He calls for transparency about algorithms, fairer access to data, independent checks, and avenues for people to participate. He names the problem perfectly. What he does not do, because it is not his job to, is name the tools that could solve it.
This is where we get excited, because we know that this is the exact problem that web3 tools were built to solve. The tools exist and people are building with them right now. Gitcoin runs funding rounds where the amount a project receives is driven by how many people back it rather than how much any single donor gives, which pushes money toward whatever the community actually wants instead of whoever has the deepest pockets. Octant hands allocation power to its community through onchain votes, and its upcoming epoch opens that participation to anyone with ETH and uses zero-knowledge proofs so people can vote without exposing their identity. Funding the Commons builds the rails and convenes the people working to fund shared public goods from the ground up. Every one of these is a working attempt at enabling exactly what Pope Leo is calling for: decisions made close to the people affected, power spread out instead of concentrated, and transparency built into the mechanism rather than promised from above.
We want to be careful not to overclaim. The pope is not endorsing crypto, and he is clear that subsidiarity does not mean the state disappears. Public institutions still have a role. So though this is not the pope shilling DeFi, but it is a convergence; one of the most influential moral voices alive is championing the same philosophy that animates much of web3.
For an industry that is often told it’s solving problems nobody has, it’s genuinely invigorating to see the underlying principle that we care about so much show up in a 245-paragraph letter from the Vatican. Distribution of power, aka decentralization, is more than a fringe crypto talking point; it’s part of the larger conversation about what technology owes to human dignity and something worth fighting for.
🧭 The Ethereum Foundation Is Finding Its Footing
The Ethereum Foundation (EF) has had a rough few months. At least nine senior contributors have left or announced departures in 2026, which has mostly been perceived as sparring from a foundational identity crisis. This isn’t completely wrong. Former EF researcher Dankrad Feist recently proposed a new $1 billion organization with a mandate explicitly tied to ETH’s price… which gets right to the heart of the issue. Should the foundation chase market value and growth, or stay loyal to the harder-to-measure values it was built on?
Over the weekend, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin published a long post laying out where he thinks things are headed. He framed the EF as choosing longevity over breadth by focusing only on the activities critical to Ethereum staying censorship-resistant, open, private, and secure. Those values now have a name btw, CROPS, and they were written into the foundation’s mandate back in March.
In a further push to emphasize the importance of decentralization Vitalik emphasized that the foundation is just one node with a defined purpose alongside other nodes; it is not and should not be the center of Ethereum. Overall, the changes are a deliberate bet that Ethereum’s edge is that it runs as a values project first and a financial instrument second.
What happens next is genuinely up in the air. A leaner foundation with fewer researchers is a real loss of capacity, and the people who left are not easily replaced. Still, the direction is clear, and it is a familiar one for anyone who has followed Ethereum from the start. The mission was always supposed to outrank the market. The foundation has made that clear, even at a moment when it would have been easy to chase the money instead.
🔮 A New Referee for Prediction Markets
Prediction markets let people bet on whether something will happen, and someone has to decide who won once the event plays out. Until now that job fell to an outside service called an oracle, a separate system that reports back to the blockchain on what happened in the real world. Hyperliquid just cut that middleman out. Earlier this week, it launched markets where the 24 operators who already run its network vote directly on whether a real-world event occurred, settling the bet on-chain without any outside reporter involved. These operators are the computers, and the people behind them, that keep the blockchain running. Now they have a second job as the referee. Worth noting, the article says they lean on automated news-reading software to guide these votes, so how much of each call is human judgment versus a machine scanning headlines is not really spelled out. It is a direct shot at Polymarket and Kalshi, the two biggest names in the space, and a genuinely different idea about who gets to certify the truth.
We’ve been pretty honest here about our hesitation to accept prediction markets as a net-positive development for society, and we’ve written before about people using them to threaten others and warp public perception of what is real. The question of who decides what actually happened in the real world is a big deal. Moving that decision onto a transparent, on-chain vote, instead of leaving it with a single service that could be manipulated seems to at least be a step in a more accountable direction. Whether a small group of validators makes a better referee is an open question, especially when the outcome is genuinely disputed rather than obvious. We’re watching this closely.
Plus:
🌱 The Tragedy of Land-Based ReFi: Why the Crypto Ecosystem is Leaving Real Stewards Behind: “If the ReFi movement and the Solar Punk ethos want to be more than a marketing aesthetic, they must shift from speculative sprints to Patient Capital—long-term, predictable support designed for land-based stewardship.“ (Max Zalevski)
🏔️ Switzerland’s First Government Blockchain Project Is Live — and Rewarding Citizens: “One small Swiss municipality is now using blockchain to reward residents for restoring meadows, protecting wetlands, and maintaining local biodiversity.“ (Crypto Citizens Network)
🔬 Crypto Altruists’ Guide to DeSci: How Decentralized Science is Expanding Access to Funding, Participation, and Ownership in Research: “What happens if a community of people—not a grant committee, a journal publisher, or a pharmaceutical company—gets to decide which research is funded and who benefits from it? That’s the question DeSci was built around. Using Web3 tools, it aims to rethink the infrastructure of science from the ground up.” (Crypto Altruists)
📣 Latest News
DTC’s Tokenization Service to connect with the Stellar public blockchain
At $322 billion, the stablecoin market value exceeds the FX reserves of 95 nations
Global Policy, Regulation, and Adoption News
Reports & Project Updates
🔈 Watch & Listen
Crypto Altruists - Episode 253 - Blockchain for Community Resilience: How Ukrainian Ecovillages Are Sheltering Thousands and Restoring the Land with Web3, with GEN Ukraine
Throughline from NPR - Prediction markets are making a 150-year comeback
🚀 Opportunities & Calls to Act
Funding: Ma Earth Funding Round 3 is a collective funding platform for community-led regeneration. The current round offers $500K in matching funds flowing to 100 grassroots nature projects worldwide. Apply by May 31.
Ma Earth@maearthstudioApplications for Round 3 close May 31. There's still time!
4:17 AM · May 28, 2026 · 135 Views1 Reply · 3 Reposts · 9 LikesLearn: Solana Summer School includes 5 weeks of live lessons with Solana Foundation DevRel, office hours, special guest lecturers from the ecosystem, dedicated student resources, and a special invitation for those who complete the program. Open to all current college students.
🎪 Events
Virtual
FtC Town Hall: Ma Earth & Funding Regeneration is happening June 2. 🆕
Regeneration Pollination Solarpunk: World Environment Day is happening June 5.
Fast Forward Virtual Demo Day 2026 is happening June 9. 🆕
Regenerative Technology Playshop ~ Governance & Collaboration is happening June 30.
Regenerative Technology Mutual Aid Innovation Gathering is happening July 15.
IRL
Build, Treat, Heal: A Bay Area Fundraiser for Gaza Medical Aid is happening May 30 in San Francisco.
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.
UNDP’s Scaling Blockchain for Public Good is happening June 3-4 in Paris. 🆕
Solana Career Day NYC is happening June 4 in NYC. 🆕
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.
Decentralised Justice: Law in the Digital Age of Crowds and Code is happening June 9 in Oxford, UK.
FDS-8: New York is happening June 9-11 in NYC.
Neocypherpunk Summit is happening June 14 in Berlin.
Stablecoin Conference 2026 is happening June 15-16 in Mexico City. 🆕
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.
FW:B Fest 5 is happening July 31-August 2 in Idyllwild, CA.
Liberpulco 2026 is happening August 13-23 in Liberland Ark Village, Serbia. 🆕
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.
ETHGlobal Tokyo 2026 is happening September 25-27 in Tokyo.
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 June 22.
📡 On Our Radar
Bitso is Latin America’s leading digital financial services company, evolving from a crypto pioneer into a comprehensive investment platform with a community of over 10 million customers. Bitso offers a secure, regulated, and easy-to-use digital platform to buy, sell, hold, earn yields, and transact with more than 120 cryptocurrencies and over 5,000 global stocks and ETFs—democratizing finance by combining the transparency of blockchain technology with the strength of traditional stock markets.
Mercato Capital provides supply chain finance for Latin America — purchase orders, milestone escrow, and real-economy returns on Stellar.
Bit2Kwacha allows anyone to convert between Bitcoin and Kwacha (Zambian) instantly.
The Guardian Project is a mobile technology team focused on creating open-source, easy to use mobile applications and firmwares focused on providing personal security, anonymity and privacy.
DPGs for Climate Action Collection highlight digital public goods with a proven track record of supporting climate mitigation and adaptation with the goal of pointing governments and organisations toward relevant, proven digital public goods they can adopt.
RegenBank is a cooperative platform where eco-projects sell their credits and part of revenue funds collective promotion — creating a self-reinforcing growth engine for regenerative finance.
Sarafu Network empowers communities through commitment pooling. Commitment pooling enables communities to create, manage and connect their own economic systems, fostering local trade and resilience.
Silvi is building financial and coordination tools to support the trillion tree movement.
ChapSmart lets anyone send money to Tanzania using Bitcoin. They disburse in TZS via M-PESA for family, bills, or other needs.
GrowFi is making planetary regeneration bankable. Seed liquidity, stake shares, earn interest, and redeem harvests from verified projects all around the world.
✨ And One More Thing
