🌍 This Week in Web3ForGood
banking as privilege, last mile rails, predictionmarkets as influence
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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Financial systems were built for some people and not others. That is not a radical claim; it’s just true, and it shapes everything about why blockchain tech matters and who it matters for. This week, we are sharing a piece that makes that case better than we ever have, and we think it is worth your full attention.
We’re also in the middle of a genuinely uncomfortable reckoning with prediction markets. We have been covering them for over a year now, and a story broke this week that pushed us further toward a conclusion we have been resisting. These tools may be less about revealing truth than about shaping it, and if that is the case, the impact community needs to be paying attention before that capacity gets used entirely by people with very different intentions.
As always, there is a lot more below, including news on stablecoins going mainstream in ways that are exciting and complicated in equal measure. Plus, new events, job, and some very cool projects on our radar, all below.
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
💰 Banking As Privilege
If you read one tweet about crypto this week, it should be this.
Most conversations about blockchain are shaped by people who have never needed it.
If your bank works, your currency is stable, and your money moves freely, crypto might look like nothing more than a casino, but that perspective is incomplete.
For billions of people, blockchain is about access. It’s about being able to send money without losing a week’s wages in fees. It’s about holding value in a currency that still works tomorrow. It’s about participating in a financial system that never included you in the first place.
The question is not whether blockchain has value. Billions of people have already answered that with their daily behavior. The question is whether the people building the next generation of these tools are paying attention to where they already work, and designing for those users rather than the ones who never needed them to begin with.
🛤️ Last Mile Rails
Digital assets are moving from the margins into everyday financial infrastructure. Rather than operating as a parallel system, crypto technologies are increasingly improving how money moves globally, especially across borders where traditional payments are slow and expensive. Many of these changes happen quietly in the background, powering remittances, business payments, and new financial services. Mastercard’s Crypto Partner Program reflects this shift by bringing together crypto companies, payment providers, and financial institutions to coordinate innovation and develop standards for integrating digital assets into global finance. For everyday people, this could mean faster international payments, lower fees, better exchange rates, and easier ways to send or receive money worldwide.
Stablecoins are often promoted as a breakthrough for humanitarian payments, enabling funds to move across borders instantly, transparently, and at lower cost. For aid organisations facing slow banking corridors and high transfer fees, this promise is compelling. Moving money internationally is only part of the challenge, though. Humanitarian payments succeed only when people in remote villages, refugee settlements, or conflict-affected areas can actually access and use those funds. The real barriers often lie in the last mile, covering identity verification, liquidity, connectivity, and secure distribution systems. Stablecoins may improve global settlement, but meaningful impact requires combining digital payment rails with trusted identity and resilient local infrastructure to ensure funds reach those who need them most.
🌀 Prediction Markets as Influence
We have been writing incessantly about prediction markets lately (see: here, here, and here, for examples). Their catapultation into mainstream adoption keeps giving us new things to think about, and to be honest, they continue to make us deeply uncomfortable.
This week, this is the story that has made us revisit the topic yet again: “Gamblers trying to win a bet on Polymarket are vowing to kill me if I don’t rewrite an Iran missile story.” Here’s the TLDR: Emanuel Fabian, a military correspondent for the Times of Israel, published a routine field report about an Iranian missile. Shortly after, gamblers with millions of dollars wagered on a Polymarket contract tied to whether Iran struck Israel that day flooded his inbox with messages, bribes, and eventually death threats, demanding he change key details of his story. He filed a police report. The market remains unresolved.
Again, we have been covering prediction markets with open-mindedness for over a year. We are open to their potential, because we believe that tools are only as good as the people who build and govern them. The optimistic case for prediction markets is that they surface truth by aggregating what informed people actually believe. What we have increasingly been seeing is that, in practice, what they may actually be better at is shaping reality rather than reflecting it. The journalist in this story held his ground, but how many others have not, or will not.
If prediction markets function more reliably as influence infrastructure than truth infrastructure, that design insight is something impact-minded builders should be taking seriously. Financial incentives attached to outcomes change behavior, and that mechanism does not have to serve war profiteers. Could a market structured around verified reforestation milestones create real financial incentives for land stewardship? Could a market tied to clean water delivery outcomes mobilize capital toward accountability? These are not fully formed proposals, but rather, a call to the Web3ForGood community to think about them. We need the impact community to experiment with the influence capacity of these tools before that capacity gets further captured by people with very different intentions.
We do not have a clean answer, unfortunately. Every day, we sit with the discomfort of prediction markets. Perhaps the issue is not the tech itself, but rather, how its being framed and what it is being used for. This will certainly not be the last you read about them in this space.
Plus:
🌱 I Built a Tool That Connects AI Usage to Ecological Regeneration: “Regenerative Compute is built by someone who uses AI tools every day, for people who use AI tools every day. That feels right to me. By someone who cares about having a livable planet for my grandkids, for people who care about that too (and for autonomous agents that recognize the logic of livable planet = extremely important).“(Christian Shearer)
🏛️ Platform Power and the Dangers of Centralized Government Platforms: “This vision of an Agentic State describes an entirely different kind of government platform – one that can be explicitly pro-democratic. The opportunity this presents, which has only become realistic within the last year or so, is to use agentic AI to assemble decentralized interfaces to centralized government resources without building in the oppressive characteristics of centralized digital platforms we’re currently familiar with. This can be done while preserving the many benefits of existing government platforms – such as unified identity services, secure data transmission and storage, improved access to services, and greater resilience to hostile external influences.” (Decentralization Research Center)
🤝 Three strategies for transforming crypto into an engine for humanitarian aid and global finance: “Critics will understandably say blockchain is overhyped. But what we’re seeing in practice is financial infrastructure evolving. Blockchain isn’t replacing banks — it’s augmenting financial systems where they are weakest: conflict zones, low-connectivity regions, and markets starved of access to capital and payments systems.” (Impact Alpha)
🎁 Anthropic employees say they’ll give away billions. Where will it go?: “Whether that money goes towards AI safety non-profits that share Anthropic’s worldview, or towards global health charities that tech employees have hardly engaged with directly, the potential for well-meaning missteps is real. Just because you suddenly come into a lot of money doesn’t mean you automatically know how to spend it wisely. “If you’ve been working really hard at your job, and your job is in a particular sub-sector in tech, you’ve likely not had much time and energy to really understand the issues that are facing the community,” said Kat Rosqueta, the founding executive director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for High Impact Philanthropy. “There’s this ignorance gap that needs to be bridged.”.“ (Transformer)
🌾 Western AI models “fail spectacularly” in farms and forests abroad: ““AI systems built in the West often also fail to account for the contexts of the Global South, including high internet costs, limited bandwidth, and a lack of labeled training data,” said Nakalembe, an assistant professor at the University of Maryland, and Africa program director at NASA Harvest, which uses satellite imagery to improve agricultural production. “ (Rest of the World)
📣 Latest News
Global Policy, Regulation, and Adoption News
SEC Clarifies How Federal Securities Laws Apply to Crypto AssetsPayPal officially enables stablecoin access in 70 countries
Australian Senate committee backs crypto bill requiring platforms to get licensed
Reports and Project Updates
🔈 Watch & Listen
Crypto Altruists - Episode 243 - 3 Million Farmers, 347 Million Trees: Building the Philippines’ First Digital Carbon Office with Hedera
The reDeFined Podcast - Can Bitcoin Defeat Dictatorships? with Obi Nwosu, CEO of Fedi
🚀 Opportunities & Calls to Act
Apply: Convergent Research is hiring a Partner (Policy & Government Programs).
Register/Apply: Become an ARIA Programme Director. ARIA (Advanced Research + Invention Agency)’s opportunity spaces represent areas where we believe transformative breakthroughs may be possible, and where we are already building momentum through the work of our current Programme Directors and their funded portfolios. As an ARIA Programme Director, you will design and lead an ambitious, multi-year R&D programme within or around these spaces. With a budget of ~£50M, you will select, fund, and actively steer a diverse project portfolio that cuts across disciplines and institutions towards a focused goal that will unlock scientific and technological breakthroughs that benefit everyone. Applications will open in August 2026 for a May 2027 start date. Register your interest so you can be the first to hear updates on the application process.
Propose: DWeb is inviting proposals for sessions at DWeb Camp 2026. This call is open until 23:59 CET Friday May 8, 2026. Complex problems require interdisciplinary collaboration to solve. One of the great benefits of DWeb Camp is the chance to weave together many skill sets, experiences and perspectives. So we encourage you to think outside the box! We’d love to see all types of creative activations such as art installations, hands-on demos, readings, games, hackathons, and performances.
Hack: The MIT Bitcoin Hackathon offers 36 hours to learn, build, and ship the next generation of Bitcoin and blockchain applications. In-person at MIT Campus.
Learn: Web3 Owners Club delivers next-generation crypto education designed specifically for absolute beginners - clear, practical, and grounded in real-world use. Both in English and in Bulgarian. If you’re curious about Web3 but don’t know where to start, or you’ve felt overwhelmed trying to make sense of it, Web3 Owners Club is for you.
🎪 Events
🆕= New to the roundup this week
Virtual
Becoming Unstoppable: Financial Freedom Webinar from Human Rights Foundation is happening March 23-25.
Metagov Orientation Call is happening April 8. 🆕
Seminar: “Blockchain Security: Code, Crisis, Community” (BOOK LAUNCH) with Dr. Kelsie Nabben is happening Wednesday April 29. 🆕
IRL
Internet Archive Canada March Community Gathering is happening March 26 in Vancouver. 🆕
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.
Foresight’s San Francisco AI Node: Launch Salon is happening April 1 in San Francisco.
MIT Bitcoin Hackathon 2026 is happening Friday April 10 in Cambridge, MA. 🆕
Paris Blockchain Week is happening April 15-16 in Paris.
Horizons in Ethics & Emerging Technologies (HEET 2026) is happening April 16 in Torino, Piemonte, Italy.
Take Back Tech III is happening April 17-19 in Atlanta, Georgia. 🆕
Stanford Blockchain Governance Summit 2026 is happening May 2-3 in Stanford, CA.
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.
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.
Foresight Institute’s Vision Weekend United Kingdom 2026 is happening June 5-7 in London.
ETHConf is happening June 8-10 in NYC.
DWeb Camp 2026 is happening July 8–12 in Alte Hölle - Brandenburg, Germany.
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.
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 March 22. 🚨 This weekend 🚨
📡 On Our Radar
Web3 Owners Club is on a mission to guide crypto newcomers on their journey to becoming co-owners of the emerging digital and agentic economy. We teach practical crypto knowledge, demystify jargon, and foster a more grounded understanding of Web3.
Dark Forest Operating System is infrastructure for new private internets.
Every AI session uses energy. Regenerative Compute, a project of Regen Network, channels a small monthly amount into verified ecological projects — forests, soil, biodiversity — with permanent, auditable proof.
Convergent Research is a mission control for frontier technology. Academic research groups and startup companies are essential to science and technology development. But there are some projects they just aren’t suited for. Convergent Research’s Focused Research Organizations (FROs) are a new type of scientific institution designed to fill this gap.
1inch is the DeFi ecosystem building the future of finance. A community of engineers, designers and problem solvers who believe in the power of Web3 to transform the way the world works - and to offer fair and universal access to finance, for everyone.
The Cari Network, developed alongside five regional banks, is building a new platform to bring tokenized deposits onchain.
✨ And One More Thing
