🌍 This Week in Web3ForGood

who does money serve?

Feb 20, 2026

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, we’re thinking about civilians caught in financial crossfire, about digital economies rooted in cooperation instead of extraction, and about what it means to build tools that expand agency without abandoning accountability.

The future is unfolding in policy drafts, protocol updates, and the quiet choices of builders and communities (like you!) every day.

News, stories, opportunities, and more, below 👇.

WAGMI (we are going to make an impact!)

xx Abeera & Sam

📚 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

🌐 Russia, Sanctions, and Civilians

Headlines this week about moves in Brussels to ban all crypto transactions with Russian entities have us thinking about just how slippery the sanctions story really is. European officials are reportedly drafting a rule to make it illegal for anyone inside the EU to send or receive crypto to or from Russia-linked wallets and platforms. The idea is to close loopholes that allowed sanctioned firms to rebrand and continue moving value.

It’s easy to get behind “closing loopholes,” but the lived reality of sanctions rarely separates governments from the civilians who live under them. Financial siege tools like trade and banking restrictions are sold as ways to squeeze powerbrokers, but food, medicine, remittances, and family support often get caught in the crossfire. Crypto in places like Venezuela and Iran became a lifeline for people trying to preserve value and access global markets when local systems collapsed. In a blurb that we wrote a few weeks ago “Crypto As Freedom Money,” we summarized three essays by Byron Gilliam that argue that sanctions are not victimless and that programmable money can offer agency and dignity in a crisis.

A blanket crypto ban risks cutting off those same avenues of agency for ordinary Russians or for cross-border family support networks. In practice, regulators inside the EU will police licensed exchanges and custodians, but crypto activity can morph into peer-to-peer venues or shift to jurisdictions outside Europe where enforcement doesn’t reach. When formal channels disappear, individuals with the least resources are the ones pushed into informal, opaque methods that are harder to oversee and more risky to use.

This is a reminder that financial tools meant to constrain “bad guys” often squeeze people who had no role in the decisions that sparked the conflict. A policy that fails to account for that trade-off risks deepening harm for the very people whose survival and resilience we say we care about most.

🤝 Digital Solidarity Economies

We’re diving deep into this new journal publication, a special issue on Digital Solidarity Economies (DSE) published by Internet Policy Review. “DSE refers to the diverse practices, technologies, and organisational forms that challenge extractive models of the digital economy by embedding principles of cooperation, mutual aid, and shared ownership into data governance, platforms, and artificial intelligence.”

”Digital solidarity economies are not a local or smaller version of other ongoing movements around labour and technology. On the contrary, digital solidarity economies provide an ample and global framework for expanding and connecting various movements that do not always walk together, such as platform cooperativism, feminist economies, decolonial responses to digital colonialism, intersectional struggles for autonomous infrastructures, digital commons, and free software movements, among others. It emphasises the strength of both grassroots and more institutionalised actors who are fighting for digital sovereignty and autonomy from below, seeking to address the infrastructural, economic, and social dependency on major tech companies, moving beyond traditional policy and regulatory frameworks. This means that public policies and the state-promotion of these initiatives may be intertwined in these struggles from below.” Read the full publication, including more than a dozen papers on the topic, here.

💱 Alignment over Hype: Optimism’s Next Move

The Optimism ecosystem has quietly entered a new phase, one defined less by hype and more by structural evolution. The return of a cofounder, yes, the one behind the “Optimist Prime” handle, signals renewed focus on long term vision. Optimism has always positioned itself as more than just a rollup. It is a governance and coordination experiment. Leadership stepping back in suggests the next chapter will be intentional.

At the same time, Base moving off OP Mainnet raised eyebrows, but it reinforces the broader Superchain thesis. Shared standards and modular alignment matter more than a single execution environment. The ecosystem is expanding, not consolidating. Security and capital depth are strengthening as ether.fi joins the network, adding meaningful weight to shared infrastructure. Governance also approved an Optimism buyback proposal, a clear signal that value accrual and treasury strategy are maturing.

Taken together, these are not isolated headlines. They point to an ecosystem refining its structure, incentives, and leadership. Optimism’s next phase is not just about scaling transactions. It is about tightening alignment across chains, contributors, and capital.

Plus:

🔮 The Truth Machine Era is Here: “There are pundits who worry we are hyper-financializing capital markets to the point that it resembles a casino, and while I have some sympathy for those arguments, prediction markets are one of the few places, unlike trading 2x/3x leveraged ETFs or 0DTE options, where a retail investor can genuinely outsmart institutional market makers. “ (Jeff Park)
💸 The $8 Million Middle Finger - Coinbase & Crypto’s Refusal to Read the Room: “Are we cypherpunks, ushering in a new private money system because the 2008 financial crisis obliterated trust in banking & monetary systems? Where’s the revolutionary messaging that a space with these messages would otherwise embrace? Where’s the ‘show, don’t tell’ of a better world we wish to put in place? And Coinbase’s previous eyebrow-raiser was the sponsoring of the first ever Presidential military parade. Not very libertarian of them to embrace war as a celebration.“ (Marvyn Paul)
🤖 Why AI Needs Crypto: “We never needed incentive alignment with our tools before. AI creates the problem. Crypto isn’t the only place where solutions can come from, but it’s well-suited, because coordinating incentives between parties who don’t trust each other is the thing blockchains were built to do.“ (@Flynnjamm)
🪴 Exploring sustainable funding for digital public goods: “Scanning the horizon for new mechanisms, the Venture Fund is piloting Drips, a decentralized app built on a blockchain platform that enables holders of digital assets to support open-source projects of their choice.“ (UNICEF Office of Innovation)
⚡ Telegraphic money: New rails, same logic: “Creating its own stablecoin allows Western Union to control the ledger, too, cutting banks out of the payments business entirely. In short, it’s the 1871 playbook all over again. Could it work? There are a lot of stablecoins, so it’s hard to say. But whatever happens with USDPT, the history of Western Union suggests we’re at the beginning of a once-in-a-century shift in how money moves.“ (Byron Gilliam for Blockworks)
🧭 “I do not claim to represent the whole Ethereum ecosystem. Ethereum is a decentralized protocol. The whole concept of “permissionlessness” and ‘censorship resistance’ is that you are free to use Ethereum in whatever way you want, without caring about what I think, or even what anyone else in the Ethereum Foundation or even any Ethereum client developer thinks.” (@vitalik)

📣 Latest News

Global Policy, Regulation, and Adoption News

Reports and Project Updates

Bread Updates - Distribution cycle #19, Artizen Fund, & Upcoming Webinar
Filecoin News 121

🔈 Watch & Listen

Crypto Altruists - Episode 239 - GoodDollar - Inside the GoodBuilders Program: Funding, Mentorship, and Building Impact with G$
Boys Club - Octant v2 is Almost Here!
new renaissance capital - Bitcoin and Freedom Tech in Iran with Ziya Sadr & Frank Corva

🚀 Opportunities & Calls to Act

Apply: Logos is hiring a Campaign Director.
Apply: The Digital Public Goods Alliance Secretariat is hiring a Finance and Administrative Coordinator (contract).
Apply: a16z New Media is hiring several positions.
Apply: Gray Area is a San Francisco-based nonprofit cultural incubator, committed since 2008 to the integration of art, technology, science, and the humanities. The Gray Area Internship Program offers a comprehensive experience at the intersection of art, technology, science, and humanities. The ideal candidate is adaptable and eager to actively engage in diverse departments such as Events and Facilities, Education, and Communications/Media.
Apply: The Bitcoin Policy Institute’s Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program is an 9-week online research opportunity designed to advance the Institute’s mission by fostering research talent in the fields of peer-to-peer rights, national security strategy, and monetary policy. Selected students will participate in virtual research workshops, receive mentorship, and engage in independent study. Their research outputs will contribute to policy discussions and industry insights.
Submit: WFP has opened a Request for Information (RFI, market research) on prepaid cards to enable better operations for vulnerable population during emergencies. It includes stablecoin-based card solutions.
Learn: To help human rights organizations stay financially free and operational under these conditions, Human Rights Foundation is hosting a free, three-day Financial Freedom webinar series. In these live sessions, participants will learn about Bitcoin from a user’s perspective — what it is, as well as how to open a Bitcoin wallet, accept donations, and send payments. The webinars will introduce the recommended tools and resources needed to start immediately. Participants will also have the opportunity to ask questions in the live Q&A session with the instructors.
Learn: Gray Area’s Creative Code Intensive is a 12-week course in creative technology, offering a comprehensive introduction to foundational and advanced tools for programming interactive experiences. Guided by expert instructors, participants gain technical skills and creative inspiration to design, prototype, and install an interactive experience or artwork in a public showcase attended by the creative community, technology industry, and museum professionals.
Volunteer: Logos Circles are self-organised groups that take action to solve issues that matter locally. They are a form of parallel governance: instead of reforming broken or rigged institutions, they build better ones that live on or are sustained by the network. Circles respond to local needs, build trust on the ground through solving problems, and experiment with real-world applications of Logos tech and values. We are looking for Volunteers that are passionate about the use of technology to provide alternate forms of governance.
Funding: Octant has opened up creator grants to help educate the public and users about migrating from v1 to v2. There are different categories of grants from micro-grants to bigger-sized ones, depending on the proposal and type of content you’re proposing. Octant will be accepting applications on a rolling basis for the next few weeks. There’s no deadline though first applicants definitely get reviewed first.
Share: The Ethereum Foundation is looking for builder stories from India.
Fellowship: The Internet Society’s Early Career Fellowship offers project management, advocacy, and diplomacy know-how, providing the foundation for fellows to become future champions of the Internet. A cohort of 15 fellows is selected once a year to participate in the six-month program. Fellows can develop their knowledge and skills through seminars, events, courses, discussion sessions, and project work. They will also have networking, mentoring, and collaboration opportunities. The program culminates in a final project presentation by each fellow at a closing symposium.
Fellowship: The Digital Minds Fellowship at Cambridge University is a fully funded, intensive programme for 15 exceptional participants working on the philosophical, empirical, and strategic challenges surrounding digital minds.

🎪 Events

🆕= New to the roundup this week

Virtual

Beyond The Bank: Building Financial Solidarity For Underserved Communities hosted by Bread Cooperative is happening February 26. 🆕
AI Lawyering in Practice: How Global Firms Are Integrating AI is happening March 5. 🆕
Becoming Unstoppable: Financial Freedom Webinar from Human Rights Foundation is happening March 23-25. 🆕

IRL

The International Association for Safe & Ethical AI (IASEAI)’s second annual conference (IASEAIʼ26) is happening February 24-26 in Paris.
DWeb Camp Unconference + Meetup @ c-base is happening February 28 in Berlin.
Parallel Society is happening March 6-8 in Lisbon. 🆕
ETHMUMBAI is happening March 12-15 in Mumbai. 🆕
Funding the Commons SF: Intelligence at the Frontier is happening March 14 in San Francisco.
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.
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. 🆕
Edge Esmeralda is happening May 30 - June 27 in Healdsburg, California. 🆕 (link fixed)
The Oslo Freedom Forum is happening June 1-3 in Oslo, Norway.
ETHConf is happening June 8-10 in NYC.
DWeb Camp 2026 is happening July 8–12 in Alte Hölle - Brandenburg, Germany.
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. 🆕
Devcon 8 is happening November 3-6 in Mumbai, India.

Recurring

Monthly Earth Day is a global event that happens on the 22nd every month, not just once a year. Get involved next on February 22. This weekend! 🚨

📡 On Our Radar

Logos is a social movement & private-by-default tech stack built to revitalise civil society.
dOrg provides web3 development services to projects seeking real-world impact. They have been operating as a DAO/Builders co-op since 2019.
AKASHA Foundation is a non-profit developing systems for freedom of mind and human connection.
Hubs Network is a collaborative network for social impact that creates and connects Multidisciplinary spaces that acts and sets impulses to reinvent society futures.
Loyal Agents is a research collaboration to enable a marketplace of secure, trusted consumer-centric agents.
CodeCarbon is a lightweight software package that seamlessly integrates into your Python codebase. It estimates the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) produced by the cloud or personal computing resources used to execute the code.
The AI Now Institute produces diagnosis and actionable policy research on artificial intelligence.