Solana memecoin hype continues, Backpack’s beta phase was a success and Starbucks axes its NFT program

March 22, 2024 ndowd

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This week, Starbucks killed its Odyssey NFT program that was launched in 2022, Solana continued to see memecoin momentum and India faces more challenges with the crypto space as government agencies crack down on it.

Details below.

This week in web3

Crunching numbers

This week the crypto market prices were lower, but still relatively strong compared to previous months.

Bitcoin was down 6.5% on the week at $67,300 and 32% higher on the month, at the time of publication. The second largest crypto, ether, fell 8.6% on the week to $3,550, according to CoinMarketCap data. The total crypto market cap decreased 6.3% during the same time frame to $2.55 trillion.

The latest pod

Chain Reaction is doing a monthly series diving into different topics and themes in crypto. This month we’re focusing on blockchain and AI integrations.

For this week’s episode, I interviewed Tegan Kline, the CEO and co-founder of Edge & Node.

The company is focused on creating and supporting decentralized applications, or dApps, and protocols. It was also the initial team behind The Graph, an indexing and query protocol, or what some have referred to as the Google of web3, which aims to organize open blockchain data and make open data a public good.

Tegan began her career in investment banking before shifting to work as an executive VP of a patent marketplace powered by blockchain and analyzed by AI. This kickstarted her career in web3, data and AI solutions. Before co-founding Edge & Node, Tegan worked as an international business development manager for Orchid, an a16z and Sequoia VC-backed VPN.

This episode is a part of Chain Reaction’s monthly series diving into different topics and themes in crypto. This month’s focused on blockchain and AI integrations.

Tegan and I talk about The Graph network, indexing data and its broader use case for the internet, as well as its “New Era roadmap” that came out in November 2023.

We also discuss:

The Graph implementing AI solutions
What dApps will unlock in the long term for AI
Why AI doesn’t care about crypto
Taking a career jump into web3

Subscribe to Chain Reaction on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite pod platform to keep up with the latest episodes, and please leave us a review if you like what you hear!

Follow the money

Former Grindr exec and a married couple launch Rails with $6.2 million round, for its decentralized FTX alternative
Avalanche Foundation announces $1 million liquidity mining incentive program, Memecoin Rush
Morph raises $20 million in seed and angel investment for its EVM layer-2
Mantra raises $11 million to expand real-world asset tokenization in MENA region
Ago raised $2.5 million to make DeFi more accessible through all-in-one platform

This list was compiled with information from Messari as well as TechCrunch’s own reporting.