🌍 This Week in Web3ForGood
possibility and responsibility
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 how crypto operates in morally complex global contexts, attention markets as an evolution of prediction markets, politicians and memecoins, and more. We’re at the intersection of possibility and responsibility.
Things that are happening on the global stage (i.e. in Venezuela and Iran) are forcing us all to confront the reality that how tech shapes attention, power, and participation isn’t always black and white. Crypto can simultaneously be a lifeline to an unpopular regime and to the very people it oppresses. What should we do with that information?
Plus, an invitation to imagine what regenerative approaches to tech could look like in 2026 and beyond.
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, Venezuela, and Iran
In authoritarian regimes like Venezuela and Iran, crypto has become part of daily financial life. That’s just the indisputed reality on the ground. People use crypto, espeically stablecoins, to protect savings when local currencies lose value and banks stop working as expected. It’s a practical, not ideological use. Citizens need to pay rent, receive money from family abroad, and want their money to hold value from one month to the next.
At the same time, the exact tools that support ordinary people allow unpopular regimes to sustain themselves. Stablecoins, notably, are a critical tool for moving oil revenue and sanction evasion. This overlap makes it difficult to tell a straightforward story about what crypto is or what it’s for, and it’s why there are so many people in the world vehemently against it.
This uncomfortable contradiction can’t be resolved by choosing a side. Rather than reaching for a clean moral verdict, Cami, founder of The Defiant, offers a more grounded framework. What is emerging in practice, she writes, is a two-layer crypto system. Permissioned assets like stablecoins are increasingly subject to freezes, blacklists, and regulatory pressure, while permissionless networks like Bitcoin and Ethereum remain resistant to protocol-level censorship. That division, The Defiant argues, may be what allows uncensorable money to exist at all, by giving regulators a place to apply enforcement without collapsing the entire ecosystem.
How shoudl we internalize this reality? Dismissing crypto because it can be misused ignores the people who rely on it to get by. Celebrating it without acknowledging harm ignores the ways power adapts to new tools. A more useful approach starts with paying attention to context, incentives, and outcomes. Crypto’s social impact is rarely simple, and the tools designed to increase freedom will always come with tradeoffs. It’s up to us to decide which ones we will accept and in which contexts.
🧠 Attention Markets
Building on last week’s exploration of prediction markets, a recent post from David Phelps of JokeRace pushed the topic further in an interesting direction. The real story, he argues, is not whether markets can tell us “the truth,” but how they shape what we pay attention to in the first place. Prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket matter less as arbiters of truth and more as tools that make people care about events, outcomes, and information. When attention is paired with incentives, he says, the news stops being passive content and starts becoming something people actively engage with.
From there, Phelps outlines a broader category he calls “attention markets.” These include traditional prediction markets, but also newer ideas like mindshare trading, where people can financially back creators, companies, or cultural moments they believe will gain traction over time, as well as opinion markets, where participants do not just express preferences but help determine outcomes themselves. Platforms like noise.xyz, Jokerace, and cue.fun turn attention into a shared, participatory resource rather than something harvested by algorithms.
For social impact practitioners, this framing is useful. If attention really is one of the most valuable resources of the 21st century, then attention markets offer a way to re-route it away from extractive advertising models and toward systems where people are rewarded for caring, persuading, and participating. Not every experiment will land, but the shift from “markets as truth machines” to “markets as tools for collective attention” is an idea worth exploring.
🎭 Memecoin Drama
Look, we don’t want to dwell on this one, but it’s something you should know. A memecoin linked to New York City mayor Eric Adams briefly surged and then unraveled amid allegations of a rugpull, with liquidity pulled shortly after launch. Not good. This is a useful reminder that not every web3 experiment is values-aligned, and that discernment matters as the space continues to evolve.
🌱 State of the State: Regenerative Technology in 2026
As technology continues to accelerate, it is amplifying both innovation and harm — from social fragmentation and mental health challenges to increased extraction, pollution, and power asymmetries.
On January 27, the Regenerative Technology Project is convening State of the State: Regenerative Technology in 2026, a free virtual gathering to reflect on where the tech sector stands today and what it would mean to move toward regenerative approaches.
The conversation explores ideas such as regenerative AI, stewardship-based digital systems, indigenous and place-based wisdom in technology design, and the broader question of how we might reimagine the technology stack itself.
Plus:
💰 Russian boomers want their pensions paid in crypto, government body reveals: “The issue of cryptocurrency pensions was one of the Pension and Social Insurance Fund of Russia’s most popular requests last year.” (DL News)
📣 Latest News
Global Policy, Regulation, and Adoption News
London Stock Exchange unveils blockchain-powered platform for cash and digital assets
Pakistan to Explore Stablecoin Remittances via Affiliate of Trump-Linked World Liberty Financial
Senate Banking Committee Delays Markup of Key Crypto Bill as Industry Support Frays
Florida becomes latest state to pursue bitcoin reserve ahead of 2026 session
Ripple Gets Green Light From FCA to Scale Crypto Payments in the UK
Tennessee Demands Polymarket, Kalshi and Crypto.com End Sports Prediction Markets
Reports and Project Updates
🔈 Watch & Listen
Crypto Altruists - Episode 234 - Geo - Community-Governed Knowledge for the Open Internet
Green Pill Podcast - Network Nations Episode11- Let a Thousand Societies Bloom with Vitalik Buterin
🚀 Opportunities & Calls to Act
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.
Learn: Are you interested in joining an online cohort to learn how to build products with AI focusing on creating regenerative solutions? Regan Builders Cohort is gauging interest.
Contribute: Devcon 8 planning has begun and there are many ways to contribute 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.
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.
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 January 22.
📡 On Our Radar
Bitchat relays messages directly between nearby phones over Bluetooth, forming a peer-to-peer mesh network that can function even when mobile data and traditional platforms shut down. (From HRF’s Financial Freedom Report: As fears of an election-period Internet shutdown grew in Uganda, hundreds of thousands of people (roughly 1% of the population) turned to Bitchat. The surge in downloads followed calls from Ugandan opposition leader Bobi Wine to download the app in preparation for a blackout, recalling the nationwide shutdown during the 2021 elections that left families, journalists, and activists suddenly isolated. Those fears were confirmed this week, when the regime announced a nationwide indefinite internet suspension beginning at 6:00 pm on Jan. 13, ahead of the elections on Jan. 15.”
Filecoin’s Constellation Program is a phased and modular strategy to enhance decision-making and resource allocation across the network.
✨ And One More Thing
