This Week in Web3–Pixelated owls creating FOMO on twitter, Cnegative taking climate action on-chain and more!

GM ✨

Kabl3 has made it to your mailbox on time like always! Now, let's get you on track with what's been happening in the Web3 world.

Here's what we have in store for you today 👇

• What is the BSTN token?

• Weekly Web3 Wrap

• Learn with Kable Recap

• Why climate action needs initiatives like Cnegative

• Interesting reads from this week

This week in crypto 📈

Weekly web3 wrap 🗞

Near-Based DeFi Protocol Bastion to Launch BSTN Token at a $180M Valuation

Bastion, Near protocol’s largest decentralised finance protocol, launched its token on 21 April 2022 on Trisolaris, a decentralised exchange.

BSTN will give holders the ability to provide input into developing the protocol and vote on fee models, gauges, and staking. Trisolaris users holding BSTN in their wallets will be able to earn yield for providing liquidity. BSTN tokens can also be staked in the Bastion app or Aurora Realm, a lending market for Near ecosystem assets.

What is Bastion?

Bastion is a liquidity foundation for the NEAR ecosystem. It allows Stableswap and Lending to stack yields with its own stablecoin $USN in the NEAR ecosystem. $USN will launch in the coming weeks, and Bastion will also be creating loyalty-based NFTs.

Here's what Bastion’s new features for $USN include:

🌱 Leveraged yield farming

💹 Interest rate swaps

📑 New assets listings

⌘ Inter-realm yield optimisers

Purpose of $BSTN

• The Bastion Token can govern the development of the Bastion Protocol by allowing holders to vote on key parameters such as fee models, gauges, and staking.

• It will align incentives between stakeholders in the Bastion ecosystem, such as liquidity providers, traders, lenders, borrowers, and partners.

Why should you get started?

• Staking & Rewards: You can use your $BSTN to provide liquidity in the BSTN/NEAR LP farms on Trisolaris or stake them in the Bastion Kingdom (the hub of the token) and receive TRI rewards. If you HODL $BSTN tokens for longer than 1 month and reach a Diamond Hands rank, you receive an extremely rare and tradable diamond statue dedicated to the most loyal supporters.

• Security & Growth: Bastion has partnered with Rift Finance to create a trading pool for the NEAR-BSTN tokens. The pool will be seeded with $1.8 million in funds. This ensures liquidity in the short term and organic growth in the long term. Bastion is allocating their own $180 million of fiat funds to the pool, alongside $125 million in TRI tokens from Trisolaris. These are available for liquidation across all of Aurora's products and any other bridge partners.

• Isolated Pools: Bastion has created Isolated Pools called Realms. Realms allow Bastion to list more assets without exposing the entire TVL of the protocol to new risks. One downside of it is liquidity fragmentation. Bastion will have USDC in all the Realms to tackle this, creating a common currency of exchange between all the Realms while still containing value-at-risk to the isolated pool rather than the entire TVL of the protocol.

• Seamless interest-rate swaps: A yield optimiser allows investors to automatically invest in the most profitable investment option across all DAOs. This leads to a market-efficient interest-rate rebalancing, liquidity management, and risk control across DAOs.

• Fixed-Rate Lending: The emergence of new fixed-rate lending primitives using interest rate swaps opens the door to a new class of DeFi instruments. This allows users to loan out their assets at a set rate and duration.

• Collateral Tokens: Bastion aims to create a new generation of collateral tokens (cTokens) by revolutionising the asset management process in DeFi. Bastion believes that making cTokens available on multiple lending markets will encourage more widespread use and allow users to choose a protocol based on its utility rather than its yield. This move will allow Bastion to become a key player in the DeFi ecosystem.

So, are you getting started with Bastion by staking your $BSTN? This will increase your rewards when you lend through stablecoins on the platform and unlock some cool features. The list of what else you can do with your BSTN is growing; check out Bastion on Twitter.

More web3 news you should know about:

Coinbase Launches NFT Marketplace Beta

Coinbase NFT has launched in beta. The platform will allow users to collect and showcase several Ethereum-based NFTs, with users able to access any collection on the Ethereum Virtual Machine. There will be no transaction fees on the platform for a limited time, after which there will be a low single-digit fee. Users will be able to create Instagram-like profiles for their display NFTs.

Ridley Scott’s production company is producing a movie about Ethereum

The legendary director Ridley Scott and his production company Scott Free, makers of Alien, Gladiator, and Blade Runner, will create The Infinite Machine movie about Ethereum. The announcement was made this Thursday on Twitter by their official handle.

The Launch of JPG: An NFT Index

Index Coop, a DAO that creates on-chain indices for the cryptocurrency market, has released an index fund for non-fungible tokens. Called “JPG”, the index exposes holders to high-value NFTs—such as CryptoPunks, Bored Ape Yacht Club, Meebits and Fidenza—without requiring them to hold the digital art themselves.

Instead, the index exposes holders to DeFi projects that fractionise ownership over NFTs—such as NFTX, WHALE and Jenny DAO.

Benefits of buying $JPG

💧 NFTs made more liquid

🔒 Decreased (not eliminated) risk

⛽️ Gas efficiency

🍰 Ease of use

Twitter And Stripe Will Pilot Payouts For Creators Using Crypto

Stripe is adding crypto payouts to Connect, its programmatic (API-based) payouts platform, and Twitter will let people get payouts in crypto using this feature.

• Twitter will be the first platform to support payouts in USDC.

• Payouts will take place over the Polygon network.

• Stripe plans to add support for additional rails and payout currencies over time.

Learn with Kable 👩‍🏫

The Azuki team finally revealed details about The BEANZ collection this week. The collection has some cute troublemakers in store for you 👀 and we covered their features in this thread 👇

Why does everyone suddenly have pixelated owls as their PFPs on Twitter? We know the answer; it's Moonbirds! It's the talk of the NFT town, and here's everything you need to know about the NFT PFP Project 👇

Why Does Climate Action Need Initiatives Like Cnegative?

Carbon has always remained an externality because of the loopholes in the approach toward climate action. Earlier this month, Cnegative, a climate action initiative by Spacekayak, shared a detailed thread on the problems that keep carbon equilibrium a far-fetched idea. Here’s what you need to know before we go ahead:

Of course, Web3 solves this (totally unironic joke). Here’s how 👇

Climate Action Needs Decentralization

Corporates and individuals are choosing to offset their emissions and our regulatory systems see carbon offsets as a financial instrument. More finance is flowing toward planet-positive projects, BUT legacy carbon markets are broken.

This is where the voluntary carbon market and web3 jump in. Web3 and the carbon market might not have been an intersection that most would’ve betted on. But it has multiple ways of supporting climate action, mainly because it leverages the potential of blockchain technology—so it cultivates greater transparency traceability and programmability.

Cnegative believes the future of carbon credits is on the decentralized web and is working hard to realise it.

What Does The Cnegative Solution Look Like?

Cnegative aims to put a price on carbon and remove it as an externality. How does it plan to achieve it?

• Combining DeFi & the evolving landscape of Web3 to add an incentive.

• Bringing carbon into the purview of free-market capitalism to overcome legacy market issues.

• Creating the framework for making climate action a public good, so it’s for all.

The Toucan Protocol

Cnegative is leveraging the advancement of Toucan Protocol, which has introduced Base Carbon Tonne (BCT).

All in all, the Toucan Protocol provides liquidity to carbon credit owners. But more importantly, it allows them to use them on the decentralized blockchain marketplace like any other tokenized commodity.

Toucan uses three essential mechanisms, the Toucan carbon bridge, carbon pools, and carbon tokens. Let’s understand how it works. For instance, the initiator could be any carbon credit owner. Think of any business that produces carbon offsets or an international company that purchases credits for offsetting.

1. The user bridges the purchased credits through the Toucan Protocol and retires them from their respective registries (Verra or GS).

2. The Toucan Bridge links these credits to newly created BatchNFTs.

3. The protocol uses the BatchNFTs to mint TCO2 ERC-20 tokens.

4. The user deposits the newly minted TCO2 tokens into the KlimaDAO Carbon pool which issues BCT (Base Carbon Tonne) tokens.

5. The user can now trade these BCT tokens on various decentralized exchanges, use them as collateral, and even make profits through lending protocols.

A Vision for a Healthy Planet

Cnegative aims to make climate action a public good with Web3, which serves as a proxy for innovative economic ideas and your participation in value creation. We're introducing NFTs that give more accessibility to the public & directly impact the voluntary carbon market.

Why NFTs?

NFTs are a trustless verification method for ownership & represent value on the blockchain. And with Cnegative, every NFT purchase is a signal of net positive good for the society—verifiable climate action and a meaningful gain in social capital for the buyers.

When you mint a Cnegative NFT, it takes carbon credits off the marketplace, increases their value, and directly impacts every project part of this larger ecosystem. It means, you also drive up the value of the carbon removal economy. Sounds like a win-win situation, doesn’t it?

Enough explainers, here’s a sneak peek of Cnegative's Genesis NFT Collection:

• Total tokens=888

• Priced at 100 MATIC each

• Wallet limit = 1

• Minting 1 token = Going carbon neutral for the next 18 months!

• $50k+ worth of carbon = 21.3K tonnes of carbon will be eliminated from the atmosphere once the collection sells out

• MINT DATE? Follow Cnegative and stay updated.

We also shared some “Leaner, Greener NFT Projects” in our previous issue. Read it here.

The voluntary carbon market was structured to drive finance to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This market has been pioneering new approaches to fighting climate change. The carbon market is an intermediary solution that should ultimately contribute to carbon emission reduction on a grand scale. It provides incentives to smaller businesses to produce offsets and contribute to reducing emissions.

So, are projects like Cnegative essential? Yes. Are they the only way to fight climate change? We hope not. But, carbon offsetting is far from a standalone solution, and here we are, starting somewhere.

Interesting reads from this week 🤓

Beyond collectibles: How NFTs are revamping the ticketing industry — cointelegraph.com

While the ticketing market has become digital enough over the course of the past few years, aided by the pandemic, it’s still highly centralized.

That’s a wrap for This Week In Web3!

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wagmi 🚀