Hello and welcome back to the Web3 Rewind! Per usual with the industry, lots has happened this past week so without further adieu, let’s dive into this week’s news.

The Latest

One of the things I’ve learned that I like about being an editor, as opposed to only being a reporter during my career, is getting exposure to so many varying stories about crypto that are taking place all over the world. Comedy festivals in the metaverse courtesy of Decentraland and a startup called Decentral Comedy (we really need to work on more imaginative names, said the guy who co-founded DeCential Media). A project to vet teams that are proposing to sell tokens to raise development funding, coming out of Dubai and inspired by Islamic sharia law. A moving conversation on love and positivity with web3 artist Ruben Rojas.

And there was this gem that I learned this week – fintech infrastructure provider Broadridge has had a blockchain-based repurchase market up and running for a year and a half that processes $1 trillion in trades per month. That absolutely blew me away. First, that I’d never heard of it, and then that it’s doing such staggering volume. Banks UBS and Societe Generale are members of the Broadridge market, which joins another repo market built on a version of Ethereum that JPMorgan created in 2021. Some stocks are being settled using blockchain in a project by Pasos Trust Co. You can buy digital shares of a U.S. Treasury fund that pays yield through a coin, courtesy of Arca.

The public blockchain space has shown itself to be incredibly resilient in the face of scams, fraud and theft over the years. Yet the enterprise space, where companies adapt their business using a shared ledger, is going strong as well. Trillions of dollars are being entrusted to smart contracts by the world’s most sophisticated banks. That’s not small potatoes, and bolsters the Broadridge finding that 60 percent of the 500 finance executives they surveyed believe blockchain will be the foundation of the global financial world within 10 years. No matter what happens, it’s gonna be fun, don’t you think? – Matthew Leising, editor in chief, Decential Media.

Number go down dept.

Silvergate Short Squeeze Looks Inevitable — But How Likely Is It?

Silvergate, like many other neobanks, has been caught up in recent news cycles with potential fallout from FTX. Per Blockworks, Silvergate is one of the most shorted stocks on the market, with short interest at 72.8 percent, according to Seeking Alpha. Shorting a stock is when an investor borrows shares to sell in the hope they will fall in value to be bought back at a profit (sell high buy low also works).

This situation, in tandem with the US Department of Justice’s (US DOJ) probe, presents significant potential for a short squeeze, where those who are currently shorting the stock may be forced to cover their positions and buy back the shares, should the price go higher. While analysts disagree about the timing and impact of a potential short squeeze, what is agreed upon is that this squeeze would not be like the GameStop debacle. — Parker Dresdow, Decential Media

Quick Bits

Blur Overtakes OpenSea as Ethereum NFT Trading Skyrockets

• NFT marketplaces have seen a lot of action this week as the up-and-coming NFT marketplace Blur surpassed the trading volume of the largest OpenSea/ Blur generated “$460 million worth of Ethereum NFT trades over the past seven days—a 361 percent increase over the previous span,” according to Decrypt.

• Decrypt attributed the gain to how Blur has purposely shifted the NFT mindset from holding to frequent flipping and trading, similar to that of DeFi tokens. Users on Blur are lured into this method through the promise of tokenized rewards for bulk trading, which Decrypt notes is mostly being done by whale traders on the platform.

Meta Targets Chinese VR Market as It Revamps Horizon Worlds Metaverse

• Meta (read: Mark Zuckerberg) is not giving up on its “hoop dreams” of wide virtual reality and metaverse adoptions, as the company is reportedly in discussions with Chinese software firm Tencent to distribute its Meta Quest headset. If the deal goes through, Tencent would be in direct competition with ByteDance’s Pico headset, which is certainly an alluring thought for the company until you consider that Meta’s Quest headset sales fell “48 percent year-on-year,” according to BeInCrypto.

• Meta has been met with a variety of challenges, such as slower-than-anticipated adoption, complaints of fake users, looming promises of regulations and scrutiny for targeting teens and promoting poor mental health. Still, the company seems hell-bent on pressing forward. The only question that remains is will their persistence pay off?

AI-powered crypto search engine Kaito raises $5.3M to improve browsing with AI, ChatGPT

• If you’ve ever been frustrated by digging through Twitter, Google, and pages upon pages of reports just to find out some new information about the crypto landscape, then you might want to start looking into Kaito, a new AI-powered search engine aimed at becoming Google for crypto.

• The platform is an aggregator that sifts through everything from reports to podcasts and Twitter spaces to deliver information and even present it as facts vs. opinions for users. The company is offering two models: one free, generally available product and an institutional subscription-based product. They’re currently using the funding to accelerate product development, according to TechCrunch, but even in its current state it’s clear to see the value the product could provide.

France pilots in-store crypto payments as Binance partners with Ingenico

• Despite oodles of bad press and a torrent of regulatory inquiries, France moved forward in allowing Binance to roll out Binance Pay. Binance Pay will cooperate with Ingenico, a point-of-service and credit card company to bring crypto to consumers.

• Per Cointelegraph, the “program accepts more than 50 cryptocurrencies. Initially, merchants will be paid in cryptocurrency; however, a crypto-to-fiat solution allowing merchants to receive fiat payments is set to pilot in Q2 of 2023.” Should this trial go well, Binance will have the potential to expand into other European markets where it already has a foothold, such as Italy and Spain.

Latest Podcasts

Decent People Podcast With Geoff Golberg

On the latest DeCent People podcast, Geoff Golberg talks about his experience taking on one of the giants in the field, as he has battled Twitter for years over the social media platform's refusal to police and delete inauthentic and fake accounts on its site. We unpack how web3 might help make social media more responsive and authentic and Geoff's 2019 Twitter ban that was only reinstated earlier this year.

You can download and subscribe to the podcast here on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or Amazon Music and Audible.

Lights Camera Crypto With Sarana Haeata

On the latest episode of Lights Camera Crypto, Co-founder of Aslan Ruby Digital Art Studio Sarana Haeata opens up about initially refusing "the call" to be an artist, discovering digital art due to circumstance and how her Māori background influences her perspective as a human and storyteller.

You can listen and subscribe Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Big Brother and the Hodling Company With Dev Moore

On the latest episode of Big Brother and the Hodling Company, we sit down with Dev Moore, Co-Creative Director of FELT Zine, an experimental internet artist collective that produces web3 and metaverse projects. He’s also a net artist, curator, and creative technologist.

You can listen and subscribe Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

And last but not least

India expands national payment network to Singapore: What’s in it for crypto?

With the partnership between India’s Unified Payments Interface and Singapore’s PayNow system, Indians will be able to more quickly and effectively transfer money to and from home.

With around 30 percent of Singapore’s population consisting of ex-pats, the need for more fluid payment systems is apparent, especially in the remittance market. This partnership also comes on the back of India's Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) rollout in November of last year. According to Cointelegraph, “the digital rupee project has logged 770,000 transactions involving eight banks.” The impact of India fully embracing crypto can not be overstated as their economy is not only developing at a rapid rate but so too has their presence grown in the greater Asian market. —PD

Out of the Ether: Special NFT Edition

Have you read the definitive history of Ethereum? No? Well then get your special edition of Out of the Ether while you can. There are only 1,000 that were printed and each copy is an NFT that can be registered on the Lukso blockchain’s Universal Profile protocol.