SBF sentenced, Worldcoin hit with another ban order and big web3 pre-seed rounds are back

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch

Welcome to TechCrunch Crypto, formerly known as Chain Reaction.

This is the last edition of this newsletter. I want to personally thank each of you for reading this and if you would like to stay in touch, you can follow me on X here for future updates.

With that said, the show goes on. This week, Sam Bankman-Fried, the former FTX CEO who was found guilty on seven counts related to money laundering and fraud in November, was sentenced, Borderless Capital acquired CFT Capital, Worldcoin faces another ban in Europe and more.

Details below.

This week in web3

1. Sam Bankman-Fried gets 25 years in prison for fraud and money-laundering at FTX
2. Web3 investment firm Borderless Capital acquires CTF Capital to bring AI and quant expertise
3. Worldcoin hit with another ban order in Europe citing risks to kids
4. A new web3 network is being built right now that wants to end Big Tech’s control of your data
5. 0G Labs launches with whopping $35M pre-seed to build a modular AI blockchain

Crunching numbers

This week the crypto market prices were a bit more chipper, with the top cryptocurrencies being green on the week.

Bitcoin was up 7.4% on the week, around $71,300 at the time of publication. The second-largest crypto, ether, increased 2.6% on the week to $3,550, according to CoinMarketCap data. The total crypto market cap increased 6.4% during the same time frame to $2.67 trillion.

The latest pod

Chain Reaction is doing a monthly series diving into different topics and themes in crypto. This month we’re focusing on blockchain and AI integrations.

For this week’s episode, I interviewed Scott Dykstra, CTO and co-founder of Space and Time.

Before diving into web3, Scott spent almost eight years at the cloud analytics and data platform Teradata where he held roles of senior architect, director of cloud solutions and worked his way up to VP of the firm’s global cloud.

As for Space and Time, the company aims to be a verifiable compute layer for web3 that scales zero-knowledge proofs, or ZK proofs, on a decentralized data warehouse. Zero-knowledge proofs are a cryptographic action used to prove something about a piece of data, without revealing the origin data itself.

Space and Time has indexed data both off-chain and on-chain from Ethereum, Bitcoin, Polygon, Sui, Avalanche, Sei and Aptos and is adding support for more chains to power the future of AI x blockchain.

This episode is wrapping up Chain Reaction’s monthly series diving into different topics and themes in crypto. This month’s focused on blockchain and AI integrations.

Scott and I discuss Space and Time’s origin story, how data warehouses work in Web 2.0 versus web3 and the importance of data transparency.

We also dive into:

• Blockchain and AI potential
• Its OpenAI and blockchain data developments
• Future use cases for data and on-chain AI
• Advice throughout the bull and bear markets

Subscribe to Chain Reaction on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite pod platform, and please leave us a review if you like what you hear!

Follow the money

1. web3 gaming-focused startup Illuvium raised $12 million in a Series A round to expand its offerings
2. Avalanche-based Gunzilla raised $30 million to help release its new game, Off The Grid
3. OrdinalsBot raised over $3 million to build out its Bitcoin blockchain-focused data layer
4. Reya Network raised $10 million for its trading-centric modular layer-2 blockchain
5. Crypto-powered online casino MyPrize raised $13 million

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

What else we’re writing

Want to branch out from the world of web3? Here are some articles on TechCrunch that caught our attention this week.

1. Liquid Death is just one of many VC-backed beverage startups ready to disrupt Coke and Pepsi
2. New study of unicorn founders finds most are ‘underdogs,’ and female founders are rising
3. Facebook snooped on users’ Snapchat traffic in secret project, documents reveal
4. Nvidia could be primed to be the next AWS
5. New Summit is raising a new $100 million fund to back climate tech and underrepresented fund managers