🌍 This Week in Web3forGood
DePIN, Women in Crypto, Politics
gm gm,
There’s a study from Pantera Capital circulating around the X-verse this week about salaries at crypto companies with a stat that caught many people’s attention:
“At non-crypto companies in the U.S., a woman generally earns 84 cents for every dollar a man earns. In crypto, women earn about 15% more than men based on median base salaries, translating to $1.15 for every dollar a man makes.”
Awesome, right? Yes! Maybe? Not everyone is convinced about the validity of the data. But good news, Pantera Capital is taking the critique seriously and is launching a v2.
*If you work in crypto, add your voice to the v2 survey. In exchange, you’ll receive access to the full, anonymized dataset.*
Another interesting stat from this week: “Very Liberal” people in America are actually the most likely to report owning Bitcoin, which is very different from the mainstream stereotypical image of the libertarian, right-wing conservative Bitcoin fan (like @deana observed IRL at the Bitcoin Nashville conference last week). It’s an eye-catching headline, but in our opinion, the story behind the headline is even more interesting.
“According to the study, which interviewed 3,538 people in the U.S., the largest cohort of bitcoiners belongs to the very liberal category, with 21%. The exact other side of the spectrum, very conservative Americans, come in second with 17%.” If you check out the chart in the article, the range is mostly evenly distributed across the political spectrum with a slight uptick on both extremes. In other words, crypto is definitely not just something only right-wing conservatives care about. There are MANY use-cases and ideas about this technology across the political spectrum, as we hope we’ve been highlighting here for you every week.
Speaking of politics… Molly White launched a website that tracks cryptocurrency spending in the 2024 race. It’s good! We know Molly is a crypto skeptic, but regardless, this tool is a great use case of the benefit of blockchain’s transparency.
What are you tracking this week? Send us a DM and let us know.
WAGMI (we are going to make an impact!)
What’s Inside
📣 Latest News
🔍 TLDR: DePIN
📚 What We’re Thinking About
🔈 Podcasts & Spaces
🚀 Opportunities
🎪 Events
📡 On Our Radar
✨ And one more thing
📣 Latest News
University of Wyoming Launches First Bitcoin Research Institute
California DMV puts 42 million car titles on blockchain to fight fraud
Global Policy, Regulation, and Adoption News
Russian parliament passes bill to allow cross-border payments with cryptocurrency
Slovenia launches EU's first digital sovereign bond via BNP Paribas
Bank of England to carry out CBDC, Digital Ledger Experiments
El Salvador proposes using cryptocurrency for trade settlements with Russia
Project Updates
🔍TLDR: DePIN
New to Web3? Welcome! TLDR is where we offer a simplifed explanation of a term used often in this newsletter. If there's anything you're curious about, reply and let us know.
Imagine if your favorite apps, like Uber or Airbnb, weren't run by a single company but by everyone who uses them. That's the idea behind Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks (DePIN). Instead of one company owning and controlling the network, DePIN spreads control across all users worldwide. This means that the infrastructure, like the servers, storage, or even physical devices like drones or sensors, is owned and operated by the community. You get to use the service directly without needing a middleman, making it harder for any one entity to dominate or control the network. Plus, your data stays more private and secure.
How does this work? When you contribute to a DePIN, such as by providing resources like storage or bandwidth, your contribution is added to a blockchain, ensuring transparency and security. This makes it nearly impossible for anyone to tamper with the network's infrastructure.
Many DePINs have their own digital tokens. You can earn these tokens by participating in the network—like sharing your internet bandwidth or offering your storage space. It’s like getting paid for contributing to the network's infrastructure. This creates a new, exciting way to participate in the physical world’s infrastructure, driven by the power of blockchain, giving you more control, privacy, and the opportunity to earn rewards.
Examples of DePIN include Helium, which is a decentralized wireless network, and Filecoin, a decentralized storage network.
TLDR: Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks (DePIN) are networks that operate on decentralized infrastructure, such as blockchain, rather than being controlled by a single, centralized entity. In DePIN, the infrastructure is distributed across multiple nodes or devices owned by users worldwide, ensuring greater transparency, security, and user control. Participants have ownership of the infrastructure, enhanced privacy, and are often able to earn rewards through platform-specific tokens for their contributions. This model aims to create a more democratic and user-driven infrastructure network.
📚 What We’re Thinking About
🔗 The journey behind Celo joining the Superchain. (@superchaineco)
👤 Digital euro could be the ‘most private electronic payment option’, despite many critics calling proposed digital currency a surveillance too (Cointelegraph)
📒 Web3 can fix academia’s broken incentives: Scientific reputation could be determined by a decentralized community of scientists, not the validation of higher institutions. (Blockworks)
🔨 What does it actually take to build a blockchain? Focus on builders, builders and builders. (CoinDesk)
🧑🎤 ‘Song-A-Day’ Man artist Jonathan Mann and Law Professor Brian Frye have sued the SEC to help provide regulatory clarity for digital artists who use blockchain technology and NFTs. (Unchained)
📱 Celo’s Head of Ecosystem Isha Varshney on MiniPay, building for the real world, and what makes a successful dApp. (HackerNoon)
🐘 It’s time to adjust your Bitcoin hodler stereotype. “Very Liberal” Americans are most likely to own Bitcoin, according to a new study. (The Defiant)
🧠 Beyond Public and Private: Collective Provision Under Conditions of Supermodularity. (The Collective Intelligence Project)
🔈 Podcasts & Spaces
Crypto Altruism Podcast - Episode 165 - Zero Knowledge Proofs and the ‘Internet of True Things’
Green Pill Season 4 - Episode 27 - Grants Program Registry W/ Sov & Mahesh
Green Pill Season 4 - Episode 28 - LottoPGF w Nico Gallardo
Boys Club MALWARE - Episode 151 - Bitcoin Nashville & Trump Appearance Debrief
🚀 Opportunities
Apply: Story Protocol is hiring for multiple positions.
Apply: The Collective Intelligence Project is hiring a Founding Engineer.
Apply: Uniswap is hiring a Content Marketer, Head of Developer Relations, and a Technical Product Manager.
Funding: The OpenCivics Collaborative Research Round is designed to foster collaboration among researchers and civic innovators to produce open source research & knowledge production that serves community organizers to access the power of web3 and civic innovation.
Hack: Superhack on the Superchain is happening August 2-16.
Accelerate: The Orange DAO Fellowship Program is a 12-week sprint that transforms vision into victory.
Live: Funding the Commons Residency is a one-month experiment that supports innovation in construction and design oriented toward mechanism designs for Public Goods Funding.
🎪 Events
🆕= New to the roundup this week
Virtual
Givepact’s "Meet the World's First Tokenized Endowment Fund Team” X space with the CEO of Purpose for Profit is happening August 6. 🆕
Onchain Giving Summit is happening August 13-16.
Global Blockchain Business Council’s Blockchain Central at UNGA will have a virtual program for the event on September 23. 🆕
IRL
DWeb Camp is happening August 7-11 in Camp Navarro, CA.
REBOOT: THE NEW REALITY is happening September 4-5 in San Francisco.
SheFi Summit Singapore (Web3 & AI) is happening September 17 in Singapore.
Funding the Commons and Earth Commons are hosting a month-long Public Goods x Climate Builder Residency this October in Chiang Mai.
Network Society Camp is happening October 11-14 in Austin, Texas.
The SolarPunk Summit is happening October 17-21 in Kingsbury, Texas.
LabWeek Web3 is happening November 7-13 in Bangkok.🆕
Recurring
Climate Coordination Network X Spaces happen weekly, every Thursday.
Upcoming X spaces focusing on using Web3 for positive impact in the real world (+ recordings), curated by @civilmonkey.
Monthly Earth Day is a global event that happens on the 22nd every month, not just once a year. Get involved on August 22 and share on X to @HighlyArtistic with the hashtag #MonthlyEarthDay.
Hosting an event that you’d like to see listed? Reply here or send us a DM.
📡 On Our Radar
Crypto Grant Wire is an update feed that details the happenings across Web3 grants, newly announced funds, DAO Governance, insightful thoughts, and tools for grantors and grantees alike.
Group Income is a decentralized and private (end-to-end encrypted) financial safety net for you and your friends.
Daylight is a decentralized physical infrastructure network (DePIN) project focused on energy distribution.
Aleph, Ciudad de Crecimiento, is a month-long pop-up city in Buenos Aires happening this month with the goal of bringing 5-10M people on-chain, boosting the startup ecosystem, and setting a new regulatory standard.
Follow the Crypto is a website that tracks website that tracks crypto spending on political campaigns.
✨ And one more thing
Are you considering applying to Optimism’s Grant Round S6? Here’s a detailed video tutorial about how to do it.