🌍 This Week in Web3forGood
Values & Superchains
gm gm,
As I (Sam) type this with one hand in the dark, it’s 4am and I have a baby slung over my shoulder fast asleep. This is my first week back to Web3ForGood / the internet after welcoming this baby, my first, and I’m thinking about how technology fits into my life — my family’s life — a lot more lately.
I’m not that far in, but it’s already obvious: raising a person isn’t easy. I started this journey rooted in a lofty vision of tech not being a part of my baby’s life. People have been having babies for millions of years and they’ve survived without smart cribs and vital-tracking socks and poop tracking apps, right?? Our first night home, I bought an electronic wipe warmer on Amazon. A few weeks in and that smart crib was next to my bed rocking my baby to sleep. Anything to make the big transition to the world less scary for my baby. Never mind the new ways I’ve been using technology personally. For all my prior skepticism about AI, I now believe that ChatGPT is truly a life-changing tool for someone with limited time (and often only one hand). Anything to spend more time taking care of the things that matter most.
These are small things, easy decisions I’m privileged to make. Someday I’m going to have to make decisions about big things like screen time and social media and probably virtual reality, storing things onchain, that Apple headset, and whatever else we invent next. It’s easy for me to grasp on to the vision of a totally tech-free childhood and the perceived total protection from the “bad” parts of tech that vision offers. Except now, as I find myself everyday trying to strike the delicate balance between not wanting to hold a smartphone up in my baby’s face but also wanting to photograph every moment to share in the family album app for grandparents who are 1,500 miles away, I’m seeing that, however I feel about it, technology IS going to be a part of my baby’s life, and there are a lot of wonderful things that are possible because of that. To shield my baby from all tech would be a disservice and, frankly, not prepare him for the realities of the world he’s going to live in. My job, I realize, is not to protect him from it, but rather, to teach him how to use it in service of the values that I teach him about too, things like being connected to family, collaborating with others, and following our curiosity.
Our job as citizens is the same. What do we value? Clean water and air? Economic justice? Human rights? What else? Whatever it is that we value most, existing and emerging technology is a tool that can always be used in service of those values to build up a safe, loving world for all, for this generation and the next. We just have to make sure we are willing to take on the hard work of ensuring our values are embedded at every step, nurturing them nonstop along the way.
For the sake of the world my child will grow up in, I hope we are up to the challenge. And for your own sake, I hope you got more sleep than me :).
___
This week’s newsletter is packed with updates, including the final piece in our three-part series on Optimism. Plus, a UBI pilot in Peru from impactMarket + others, Polygon’s database of the value proposition for blockchain, a new nonprofit coalition of innovators working together to accelerate the responsible adoption of Web3, and more. It’s all inside. It’s great to be back.
WAGMI (we are going to make an impact!)
What’s Inside
📣 Latest News
📚 What We’re Thinking About
🚀 Opportunities & Events
📡 On Our Radar
✨ And one more thing
🌊OP Stack and Superchain
This is Part 3 in our 3 part series on Optimism by Tayyab Hussain. Read Part 1 Rollups 101 and Part 2 Being Optimistic for more background info on this important part of Web3 tech.
___
We’ve talked about Rollups and Optimism (the technology, the chain, and the collective), but OP Labs has even bigger ambitions. If you’ve been paying attention to the crypto world, you may have noticed that a few well known crypto companies are launching their own rollups. Much of that is thanks to the OP Stack.
The OP Stack
Optimism originally set out to build their own execution engine (how the code tells the blockchain what to do) called OVM, but for many reasons that ended up becoming a bit challenging for them. Through a series of events, they realized that a modular (think Lego blocks) architecture would be beneficial, and they ended up creating an Ethereum Virtual Machine, or EVM, equivalent execution engine, meaning that an Ethereum developer would have zero differences in building on Ethereum vs Optimism. Because what they had built was made open source, other teams started to learn more about it, and saw how it stably worked for OP Mainnet… and realized that maybe they could adopt it too.
Continue Reading.
📣 Latest News
impactMarket, Ammer Cards, Celo, and local NGO Agape Hand launch UBI pilot program in Peru
PlanetWatch streams 10 billionth AirQuality data point on Algorand
GoodDollar proposes the deployment of new bridging technology built by Good Labs Foundation
Visa Taps Solana and USDC Stablecoin to Boost Cross-Border Payments
Industry Leaders Announce Groundbreaking Tokenized Asset Coalition
El Salvador to introduce Bitcoin education in schools by 2024
📚 What We’re Thinking About
💦 Enter the era of "Liquid Democracy" — a revolutionary approach, empowered by blockchain, that will redefine accountability, transparency, and participation in democratic institutions. (Crypto Altruism)
🧪️ BioDAOs, such as VitaDAO, are using intellectual property non-fungible tokens (IP-NFTs) developed by Molecule to secure biotech IP and R&D data rights on Ethereum. (Molecule)
❤️️ As they work towards finding a cure for heart disease, The Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute is utilizing Filecoin to safeguard and share research data. (Filecoin DeStor)
🌲 “Standing for Transparency and Accountability:” Gainforest explains why they declined Shell’s Gitcoin funding. (GainForest)
📚 How universities in California are teaching crypto. (Crypto Council for Innovation)
🗣 AI tools, from ChatGPT to Google Translate, are useless to billions of people in the Global South who don't work in western languages. Researchers and startups from Africa and other parts of the world are changing that. (DW News)
⚒️ Bitcoin mining startup Nodal raises $13m to turn trash Into BTC. (Decrypt)
🌱 Someone tokenized $350,000 worth of soybeans onchain. (@leese_kyle)
🏛 Recap: earlier this summer, FOUND3R, a U.S. grassroots coalition of web3 entrepreneurs, builders and innovators focused on shifting the web3 narrative in Washington, hosted a town hall event in NYC. (Decential)
☀️ 23 days of innovative builders, brands, artists, and creators celebrating the digital future: Onchain Summer Highlights. (Base)
🏞 Infographic: Web3 and Sustainable Development. (ImpactScope)
🪙 Crypto can be the gateway to better financial literacy. (Decrypt)
🌍 #SBSEarth brought together sustainability experts, academics, web3 builders and more for a full day of virtual talks. Recordings are online now. (@SBS__Tech)
🔈 Podcast: The Web3 Nonprofit - Make-A-Wish-International. (Crypto Altruism)
🚀 Opportunities & Events:
Attend (IRL): Funding the Commons is happening this weekend, September 8 and 9, in Berlin.
Attend (Twitter Space): Givepact is hosting “Mental health & crypto with the Sharp Index & Dr. Resa Lewiss” to recognize #SuicidePreventionMonth on September 11.
Attend (IRL): America Wins with Web3: Web3 Hackaroo & Town Hall, hosted by FOUND3R, is happening on September 11 in Austin alongside Permissionless.
Attend (Virtual): The Simplified Decentralized Future is a 14-days Virtual event starting September 11 and hosted by Secret Network Africa.
Attend (Twitter Space): Gitcoin Citizens Round #2 is coming next week. Join Gitcoin’s Space on Tuesday September 12 at 1pm ET / 5pm UTC to learn more.
Attend (IRL): EthSafari is happening September 18-24 in Kenya.
Attend (IRL): Flowcarbon’s CarbonSmart Summit is happening September 19 in NYC during Climate Week.
Attend (IRL): DeSci Boston is happening October 21 and 22 at BU.
Attend (IRL): LabWeek23, a decentralized conference by Protocol Labs Network, is happening November 13-17 in Istanbul.
Join: FOUND3R is a nonprofit, nonpartisan coalition of entrepreneurs, builders & innovators working together to accelerate the responsible adoption of Web3, decentralization and blockchain technology.
📡 On Our Radar
The Tokenized Asset Coalition champions the adoption of public blockchains, asset tokenization and institutional DeFi to dramatically alter the way capital is formed, invested and managed on-chain, paving the way for a more open, fair and transparent system for investors.
Decential Media is a Web3 media company to capture the culture of crypto through people, not prices.
✨ And one more thing…
TheValueProp by Polygon Labs is a public database that highlights the fundamental value proposition for blockchains through use cases, across networks, and around the world.