SBF Convicted, Worldcoin Faces Yet Another Ban, and Web3 Pre-Seed Funding Sees a Revival

Welcome to TechCrunch Crypto, now known as Chain Reaction.

This is the final edition of this newsletter. I’d like to personally thank each and every one of you for your readership. If you’d like to keep in touch, you can follow me on X for future updates.

The world of crypto continues to move forward despite any setbacks. This week, we have updates on the sentencing of Sam Bankman-Fried, former FTX CEO, who was found guilty on charges of money laundering and fraud back in November. Additionally, Borderless Capital has acquired CFT Capital, while Worldcoin faces yet another ban in Europe.

This week in web3

Crunching numbers

In terms of market prices, the crypto world had a cheerful week with the top cryptocurrencies all showing green.

Bitcoin was up 7.4% to around $71,300 at the time of publication. The second-largest crypto, ether, saw a 2.6% increase, reaching $3,550 according to CoinMarketCap data. The total crypto market cap also saw a 6.4% increase over the same time frame, reaching $2.67 trillion.

The latest pod

Chain Reaction is doing a monthly series on various topics and themes in the crypto world. This month, our focus is on the potential of integrating blockchain and AI.

For this week’s episode, I had the opportunity to interview Scott Dykstra, CTO and co-founder of Space and Time.

Prior to diving into web3, Scott spent almost eight years at Teradata, a cloud analytics and data platform. At Teradata, Scott held roles ranging from senior architect and director to VP of global cloud solutions.

Now, with Space and Time, the team’s goal is to serve as a verifiable compute layer for web3 that can scale zero-knowledge proofs (ZK proofs) on a decentralized data warehouse. ZK proofs are a cryptographic action that can prove something about a piece of data without revealing the origin of the data itself.

In addition to indexing data from Ethereum, Bitcoin, Polygon, Sui, Avalanche, Sei, and Aptos, Space and Time is always expanding to support more chains, setting the stage for the future of AI and blockchain.

This episode is the final installment in Chain Reaction’s monthly series on various crypto topics and themes. This month, we focused on the intersection of blockchain and AI.

Scott and I delve into the origins of Space and Time, how data warehouses function in Web 2.0 compared to web3, and the importance of data transparency.

Some other topics we explore include:

• The potential of blockchain and AI integration
• The latest updates on OpenAI and blockchain data developments
• Future use cases for data and on-chain AI
• Advice for navigating both bull and bear markets

Subscribe to Chain Reaction on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred podcast platform. And if you enjoy what you hear, please consider leaving us a review!

Follow the money

A number of companies in the web3 gaming sector have recently secured significant funding:

• Illuvium raised $12 million in a Series A round to expand their offerings.
• Avalanche-based Gunzilla raised $30 million to support the release of their new game, Off The Grid.
• OrdinalsBot raised over $3 million to further develop their Bitcoin-focused data layer.
• Reya Network secured $10 million for their modular layer-2 blockchain focused on trading.
• MyPrize, an online casino powered by crypto, received $13 million in funding.

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

What else we’re writing

If you’re looking to expand your reading beyond the web3 universe, check out some of these articles from TechCrunch:

• [TechCrunch article 1]
• [TechCrunch article 2]
• [TechCrunch article 3]
• [TechCrunch article 4]
• [TechCrunch article 5]

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