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

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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 extra challenges with the crypto house as authorities companies crack down on it.

Particulars under.

This week in web3

1. Crypto change OKX ceases companies in India
2. Solana is ushering in a brand new spherical of memecoin mania
3. How crypto change Backpack climbed its method to success after its main investor FTX died
4. Starbucks ditches its Odyssey NFT program
5. Blockchain tech could possibly be the reply to uncovering deepfakes and validating content material

Crunching numbers

This week the crypto market costs have been decrease, however nonetheless comparatively robust in comparison with earlier months.

Bitcoin was down 6.5% on the week at $67,300 and 32% larger on the month, on the time of publication. The second largest crypto, ether, fell 8.6% on the week to $3,550, based on CoinMarketCap knowledge. The whole crypto market cap decreased 6.3% throughout the identical time-frame to $2.55 trillion.

The newest pod

Chain Response is doing a month-to-month collection diving into completely different subjects and themes in crypto. This month we’re specializing in blockchain and AI integrations.

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

The corporate is concentrated on creating and supporting decentralized purposes, or dApps, and protocols. It was additionally the preliminary staff behind The Graph, an indexing and question protocol, or what some have known as the Google of web3, which goals to arrange open blockchain knowledge and make open knowledge a public good.

Tegan started her profession in funding banking earlier than shifting to work as an govt VP of a patent market powered by blockchain and analyzed by AI. This kickstarted her profession in web3, knowledge and AI options. Earlier than co-founding Edge & Node, Tegan labored as a world enterprise growth supervisor for Orchid, an a16z and Sequoia VC-backed VPN.

This episode is part of Chain Response’s month-to-month collection diving into completely different subjects and themes in crypto. This month’s centered on blockchain and AI integrations.

Tegan and I speak about The Graph community, indexing knowledge and its broader use case for the web, in addition to its “New Period roadmap” that got here out in November 2023.

We additionally talk about:

• The Graph implementing AI options
• What dApps will unlock in the long run for AI
• Why AI doesn’t care about crypto
• Taking a profession soar into web3

Subscribe to Chain Response on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favourite pod platform to maintain up with the newest episodes, and please go away us a evaluation if you happen to like what you hear!

Observe the cash

1. Former Grindr exec and a married couple launch Rails with $6.2 million spherical, for its decentralized FTX different
2. Avalanche Basis pronounces $1 million liquidity mining incentive program, Memecoin Rush
3. Morph raises $20 million in seed and angel funding for its EVM layer-2
4. Mantra raises $11 million to broaden real-world asset tokenization in MENA area
5. In the past raised $2.5 million to make DeFi extra accessible by means of all-in-one platform

This checklist was compiled with info from Messari in addition to starcrypto’s personal reporting.

What else we’re writing

Need to department out from the world of web3? Listed below are some articles on starcrypto that caught our consideration this week.

1. Reddit costs IPO at $34 per share, the top quality
2. NBCUniversal’s Peacock will allow you to watch 4 livestreams directly for 2024 Paris Olympics
3. Astera Labs IPO will reveal how a lot traders need in on AI
4. After elevating $1.3B, Inflection is eaten alive by its largest investor, Microsoft
5. Late-stage VCs could also be stopping their startups from going public in 2024