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

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Howdy and welcome again to the TechCrunch Crypto publication.

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 area as authorities businesses crack down on it.

Particulars under.

This week in web3

1. Crypto exchange OKX ceases services in India
2. Solana is ushering in a new round of memecoin mania
3. How crypto exchange Backpack climbed its way to success after its major investor FTX died
4. Starbucks ditches its Odyssey NFT program
5. Blockchain tech could be the answer to uncovering deepfakes and validating content

Crunching numbers

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

Bitcoin was down 6.5% on the week at $67,300 and 32% greater on the month, on the time of publication. The second largest crypto, ether, fell 8.6% on the week to $3,550, in keeping with CoinMarketCap data. The total crypto market cap decreased 6.3% throughout the identical timeframe to $2.55 trillion.

The newest pod

Chain Response is doing a month-to-month sequence 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 functions, or dApps, and protocols. It was additionally the preliminary group behind The Graph, an indexing and question protocol, or what some have known as the Google of web3, which goals to prepare open blockchain information and make open information a public good.

Tegan started her profession in funding banking earlier than shifting to work as an government VP of a patent market powered by blockchain and analyzed by AI. This kickstarted her profession in web3, information 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 sequence diving into completely different subjects and themes in crypto. This month’s targeted on blockchain and AI integrations.

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

We additionally focus on:

• 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 bounce into web3

Subscribe to Chain Response on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favourite pod platform to maintain up with the newest episodes, and please depart us a overview should you like what you hear!

Observe the cash

1. Former Grindr exec and a married couple launch Rails with $6.2 million round, for its decentralized FTX alternative
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 develop real-world asset tokenization in MENA area
5. In the past raised $2.5 million to make DeFi extra accessible by all-in-one platform

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

What else we’re writing

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

1. Reddit prices IPO at $34 per share, the top of the range
2. NBCUniversal’s Peacock will let you watch 4 livestreams at once for 2024 Paris Olympics
3. Astera Labs IPO will reveal how much investors want in on AI
4. After raising $1.3B, Inflection is eaten alive by its biggest investor, Microsoft
5. Late-stage VCs may be preventing their startups from going public in 2024