🌍 This Week in Web3ForGood
freedom and accountability
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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Several of the conversations we care most about are converging right now. Questions about crypto as a tool for freedom and survival are intersecting with policy debates, cultural flashpoints, and renewed interest in collective governance. Together, they point to a maturing phase for the ecosystem.
Much of what we’re sharing this week reflects that tension. Crypto continues to surface in moments of geopolitical pressure and everyday necessity, while lawmakers and builders alike slow down to think more carefully about structure, accountability, and coordination. These are necessary conversations if web3 is going to move from experimentation toward real impact.
Below are the stories, reflections, and signals that stood out to us. We hope they help clarify where things stand and where us thoughtful builders, funders, and practitioners should focus next.
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
🕊️ Crypto As Freedom Money
This week, Byron Gilliam published three powerful mini essays for The Block that beautifully articulated the value of crypto beyond speculation. He asked what the goal of crypto should be, explored crypto as resistance money, and argued that sanctions increasingly function as sieges and stablecoins are an escape for civilians. Collectively, the essays paint a picture of who money ultimately serves when systems break down and power hardens.
It’s easy to focus on how “the bad guys” use crypto, but recent research on Iran’s central bank and its usage of crypto from UK-based blockchain intelligence firm Elliptic illustrates that even that story is less clear cut. Elliptic argues that stablecoins and public blockchains may actually hinder sanctions evasion because every transaction leaves a permanent, traceable record. Flows can be monitored in real time. Addresses can be flagged and frozen. Unlike opaque banking networks or cash-based systems, blockchain infrastructure creates visibility that regulators and compliance teams can act on. In other words, crypto does not erase accountability; it reshapes it.
The same transparency that constrains states also empowers people. In Venezuela, stablecoins became a tool for families to preserve value and access essentials when the local currency collapsed. In Iran and other sanctioned economies, crypto offers individuals a connection to global markets that does not depend entirely on failing or exclusionary institutions. Sanctions are designed to pressure governments, but lived reality shows they often squeeze civilians first. Financial siege warfare turns food, medicine, and safety into bargaining chips. When people gain access to neutral, programmable money, they gain room to survive and thrive.
Freedom, in this context, does not mean absence of rules. It means access, agency, and dignity within systems that are transparent and accountable. Crypto, at its best, offers both resistance and visibility. It allows people to move value without permission while making abuses easier to detect and constrain. When framed this way, crypto stops being a loophole and starts looking like infrastructure for human resilience. Everyone deserves food, water, safety, and the ability to survive wars they did not choose. A financial system that helps make that possible belongs in any serious conversation about freedom.
🧭 The CLARITY Act
Momentum for the US bill slowed this week after it reached the Senate, where new language around yield-bearing stablecoins triggered real disagreement. Major OG backer Coinbase pulled support, arguing the draft risks locking crypto into a bank-first model before alternative financial rails are fully understood. Reports of tension with the White House followed, though all sides say negotiations are ongoing. The pause is frustrating, but it reflects unresolved questions rather than political abandonment.
Clear rules tell builders, funders, and nonprofits what tools they can safely use and where experimentation is welcome. Lawmakers are now debating how to protect consumers and financial stability without flattening genuinely new models like programmable money and open financial access. The delay slows certainty, but it also signals care. Getting this right shapes whether crypto can responsibly support remittances, public goods funding, and inclusive finance at scale. Our thoughts? Slower progress is better than no progress.
🎭 $TRUMP, One Year Later
Remember our deep dive on the $TRUMP memecoin from last year? That story has continued to evolve in ways that matter for the broader narrative about culture, money, and policy. After an explosive launch and early frenzy, the coin now sits well below its peak price even as it remains one of the largest memecoins by market cap, and the Trump family has profited over $1billion. Notably, the project’s first year has left U.S. crypto policy in limbo, with lawmakers debating ethics and regulation while the coin’s existence highlights unresolved questions about influence and accountability in digital asset markets.
The memecoin saga has forced a collision between culture and regulation and opened space for important questions about where experimentation ends and responsibility begins. What $TRUMP has revealed is not just volatility and hype but a spotlight on how quickly political and financial systems intersect in crypto. That dynamic makes memecoins more than a buzz-driven asset class. They have become a catalyst for policy conversation and an example of why transparent, fair, and inclusive frameworks matter if crypto is going to deliver on social impact goals rather than just spectacle.
🤝 Long Live DAOS
Big vibes happening in the DAO world right now. Vitalik Buterin has been talking publicly about why Ethereum needs to refocus on decentralized autonomous organizations and return to their original spirit of collective governance and cooperation. He argues that today’s DAOs too often operate like token-vote treasuries that are slow, prone to capture by a few large holders, and far from the bold experiment in decentralized coordination that inspired Ethereum’s early community. That drift has left many people disillusioned and turned their attention elsewhere.
Vitalik’s message is not a rejection of DAO innovation but a rallying cry to build different and better models that fix real governance problems and unlock the potential of decentralized decision-making. He highlights how DAOs can play roles that markets and companies struggle with on their own: building reliable oracles, settling disputes on-chain, managing shared infrastructure, and preserving long-term project continuity. For social impact builders who love DAOs as instruments of shared purpose and participatory governance, this is good news. It signals a renewed emphasis on tools that help communities coordinate, allocate resources transparently, and sustain collective action in ways that reflect values and not just capital.
Plus:
🔍 The Wrong Story: What 354,000 Media Mentions Reveal About Bitcoin in 2025: “For the first time, Bitcoin’s biggest media moments weren’t about whether it would survive. They were about how permanent it’s becoming, and whether its infrastructure can handle that permanence.“ (Perception)
🍔 Popular burger joint Steak ’n Shake buys $10 million bitcoin: “The company said on social media that the move is part of a “self-reinforcing” cycle: customers pay in bitcoin, sales rise, and all crypto revenue helps bankroll upgrades, from better ingredients to restaurant remodels, without raising menu prices.“ (CoinDesk)
🤖 Agentic Payments and Crypto’s Emerging Role in the AI Economy: “More broadly, the emergence of agentic payment standards reflects a shift in how crypto will be adopted. Rather than forming a standalone industry, blockchain infrastructure is increasingly being absorbed into existing financial and software systems. In this model, success is not defined by the growth of a separate “crypto economy,” but by how often crypto-native rails quietly power applications that do not identify as crypto at all.“ (Galaxy)
🎲 Prediction markets barely make money; sportsbooks make money: Kalshi’s ‘truth machine’ is financialising differences of opinion (about sports): “The incentives for most bettors to trade on a market just do not necessarily correlate with its research value or usefulness in the “truth machine”. So long as you think you have an edge, a dollar made off of an NBA match-up is the same as a dollar made off the presidential election, and you can probably get that dollar a lot more quickly.“ (Financial Times)
🏛️ Bitcoin May Protect Against a Loss of Federal Reserve Independence: “Whether bitcoin ultimately fulfills this role will depend not only on the level of Fed independence, but also on how courts, Congress, and future administrations navigate the delicate balance between democratic accountability and the institutional insulation necessary to implement effective monetary policy.“ (Bitcoin Policy Institute)
📣 Latest News
Celo Foundation & cLabs are aligning into one unified core contributor organization
Association of Cryptocurrency Journalists and Researchers is back with a new board
Base App Pivots to ‘Trading-First’ Six Months After SocialFi Rebrand
Crypto card spending hits $18 billion annualized as stablecoin use shifts to everyday payments
Global Policy, Regulation, and Adoption News
Bermuda Taps Circle, Coinbase to Build ‘Fully Onchain’ Economy
Portugal joins growing list of countries cracking down on Polymarket
Iran’s Central Bank Acquired $507M in Tether’s USDT Stablecoin: Elliptic
Thailand SEC’s New Three-Year Plan Pushes Tokenization, Crypto ETFs
Reports and Project Updates
🔈 Watch & Listen
Crypto Altruists - Episode 235 - Karma - Funding Impact Without the Chaos: Onchain Attestations, Reputation, and Sustainable Web3 Funding
Green Pill Podcast - Network Nations Episode 12 - From politics to protocols to protocol politics with Santiago Siri
Bread Collective - Vibe Coding Without Technical Experience | Claude Code Tutorial
🚀 Opportunities & Calls to Act
Hack: NEARCON 2026 Innovation Sandbox is a global, virtual-first, builder sprint in partnership with Funding the Commons that support builders experimenting with AI, coordination, and shared infrastructure. The program runs from January 26 - February 16.
Contribute: AthenaDAO is a decentralized community of researchers, funders, and advocates working to advance women’s health research, education, and funding. They are seeking partners and contributors to help with their 2026 goals.
Speak: ETHConf is a 3 day event for founders, industry leaders, and builders who are excited about the possibilities of building on top of Ethereum. Speaker applications are open now.
Apply: Kernel is about slowly building, through repeated interactions with peers, the patterns (both internal and external). The fellowship serves technologists, artists, engineers, researchers, designers, linguists and people beyond these distinctions in furthering specific projects & research via an ongoing, peer-to-peer learning environment. Applications for KB12 are open now.
Hack: HackMoney 2026 is an event bringing together some of the top minds and experts in Ethereum Ecosystem. Join the largest Ethereum developer community to tackle the challenges that will define the next evolution in Web3.
🎪 Events
🆕= New to the roundup this week
Virtual
The State of Regenerative Technology 2026 is happening January 27.
DWeb Virtual Meetup—The Latest in the DWeb Ecosystem is happening January 28. 🆕
Slow Violence, Fast Tech: Reclaiming AI for Civil and Human Rights is happening January 29.
IRL
TOK26: The London Tokenisation Summit is happening January 29 in London.
Protocols for Publishers is happening February 4-5 in London.
Foresight Institute’s Vision Weekend Puerto Rico 2026 AI for X is happening February 6-8 in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico.
ETHBoulder is happening February 13-15 in Boulder, Colorado.
ETHDenver is happening February 17-21 in Denver.
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.
RightsCon 2026 is happening May 5-8 in Zambia.
Edge Esmeralda is happening May 30 - June 27 in Healdsburg, California.
The Oslo Freedom Forum is happening June 1-3 in Oslo, Norway.
ETHConf is happening June 8-10 in NYC.
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.
📡 On Our Radar
Blockchain na Escola (BnE) trains public school teachers in LATAM to provide education about blockchain and web3.
Etarn leverages AI-powered smart toilets to transform human waste into liquid fertilizer and, in the future, generate carbon credits—tackling global challenges while advancing sustainability.
Modal Foundation is a nonprofit dedicated to making open social tech viable at scale.
Esusu bridges traditional African savings practices (ROSCAs) with blockchain technology, enabling transparent group savings, personalised savings, Aave yield integration, and bill payments.
✨ And One More Thing
Couldn't agree more. Loved the point about Byron Gilliam's essays on crypto as resistance money, going beyond speculation. That's the realy potential we need to focus on.