GM folks! ✨

Welcome to the 22nd Issue of This Week in Web3. As always, you get Web3 updates that matter with a side of discussions, jobs, reads, resources & more in a glance!

Let's dive into what we have covered this week:

• Bullish crypto prices hike?

• Sports for Bitcoin adoption?

• Dive deeper into web3

• Funding, jobs and bonus reads

Estimated reading time: 3:20 minutes

This week in crypto

Price change (7d)

a man of faith and optimism indeed ✨

Weekly Web3 Wrap

Major updates from the web3 world 🌐

• Martin Shkreli, who was convicted for running a Ponzi scheme, now promotes the Web3 project Druglike, a drug discovery software.

• The SMBC, one of Japan's largest banks, has announced entering into NFTs and Web3 platforms.

• Readers can now sign up for any Mirror publication using their wallets and get an email reminder when new content is posted.

• Harmony’s core team is proposing a hard fork to mint additional tokens in order to reimburse victims of a June security exploit.

Why did crypto prices hike amidst the cold market?

On July 27, the price of many top crypto assets surged with notable gains following the Federal Open Markets Committee (FOMC) decision to raise interest rates in the US yet again.

The Fed’s attempts to reel inflation by increasing interest rates are usually associated with a pullback of investment activity across markets.

However, everyone's confused if this pump will have enough momentum to sustain upward.

Pav Hundal, an analyst at Australian crypto exchange Swyftx, said,

“The best gauge of what’s to come is the underlying economic data, and for now at least, it does look like some inflationary pressures are easing, with gas prices falling alongside futures prices for staples like corn and wheat, as well as some shipping costs.”

“But if the macro landscape starts to show signs of resilience, we could see the crypto market cap stabilize at the $1 trillion point and rally from there,” he added.

Can sports fuel mass adoption of Bitcoin?

• NFL defensive end Alex Barret and WWE superstar Summer Rae declare they are receiving compensation in Bitcoin.

• Brazilian UFC fighter Luana Pinhero collaborates with Bitwage to convert a portion of her salary into Bitcoin.

• New York Yankees partner with NYDG to offer its employees Bitcoin as compensation.

What is happening? And why in this economy?

1. Long term vision

Athletes are looking beyond the recession.

By converting portions of their salary into BTC, athletes who are immersed in the sports industry also become included in the Web3 ecosystem. This, in turn, acts as branding for a possible lifetime income.

2. In for fundamental benefits

In an interview, Nicolau brought up the former president of Brazil, who seized balances from people’s savings accounts in 1990, to highlight how nobody can seize the BTC in his non-custodial wallet. He said, “If anything happens in the world, our money is saved in our wallet.”

3. To keep the talent

According to Bloomberg, the U.S. job market is the tightest it has been in decades, and so the recent move to offer BTC by the Yankees can be seen as them developing a competitive edge against other employers.

4. Education for Bitcoin

Bitcoin is the oldest and largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, and its mass adoption can be fueled by education, not a deep technical understanding of the code but rather the basic concepts and mission.

What do you think, can sports onboard "the next billion people to Web3"?

This week's newsletter is brought to you by Celo

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Dive deeper into Web3 basics with The Product House 🚀

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Work in Web3

• Join Phantom as their Software Engineer (Frontend). 🛠

• Take Bebop to the moon as their Marketing Manager. 📋

• Elevate the experience at Monax Labs as their Project Manager. 🗂️

This Week in funding

• Cryptocurrency trading platform Crypso, has raised $3 million in its seed funding round, led by Hashed Emergent, Athera Venture Partners, Better Capital and Whiteboard Capital.

• Artfi, a Web3 fine art fintech startup, raised $3.26 million at a valuation of $100 million in a funding round led by Sheikha Hend Al Qassemi and several angel investors.

• Web3 platform Strive, offering products for retail investors in the crypto market, raised $500,000 as a part of its pre-seed funding from 100X.VC, Lets Venture, and GrowX Ventures, among others.

Hey, you made it here! Here, sip the last of that Sunday coffee with some bonus reads: 

That’s a wrap for This Week in Web3, see you next week! 🚀

If you’re an early-stage Web3 builder going from 0 to 1, holler at our creative-capital studio Spacekayak and let’s create something extraordinary through design! ✨