Welcome to TechCrunch Crypto, previously often called Chain Response.

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s greatest and most necessary crypto tales delivered to your inbox each Thursday at 12 p.m. PT, subscribe here.

Good day and welcome again to the TechCrunch Crypto publication.

To start out issues off, right here’s a shameless plug: I went on Yahoo Finance final week for a roundtable dialogue alongside Grayscale CEO Michael Sonnenshein, CoinDesk Indices managing director Andy Baehr and Matt Kohrs, host of the crypto-centric Matt Kohrs present.

We mentioned spot bitcoin ETFs, regulation of digital property and what the following period for crypto might appear to be. Watch here.

It was an eventful week within the crypto world: bitcoin’s worth hit a brand new all-time excessive on Tuesday, Spain’s information safety authority briefly banned Worldcoin and Binance raised eyebrows after making a crypto fragrance to have fun Worldwide Ladies’s Day.

Curious? Try extra under.

This week in web3

Crunching numbers

As talked about, this week the crypto house noticed all-time highs for bitcoin. However the grandfather of cryptocurrencies has since fallen about 3%, from round $69,000 to $67,000, on the time of publication. Nonetheless, bitcoin is up 6.5% on the week and 56% on the month. The second-largest crypto, ether, is up 9.7% on the week to $3,800, in accordance with CoinMarketCap data. The total crypto market cap elevated 7.7% throughout the identical time-frame to $2.53 trillion.

Smaller tokens have additionally gained numerous traction this previous week. Solana-based dog-themed memecoins noticed renewed curiosity after hype rose in December. Bonk and dogwifhat elevated 15% and 115%, respectively, on the week. Individually, Dogecoin and Shiba Inu, rose 19% and 125%, respectively, throughout the identical time interval.

Which begs the query…who let the canines out?

Our favourite ‘Crypto Twitter’ put up

Excuse the language, however when you didn’t understand how giant some memecoins grow to be…perhaps now you’ll. When this X put up was written, dogwifhat (WIF) had a market capitalization 3 times the scale of Spirit Airways’.

For what it’s value, it has declined since, however dogwifhat (WIF) has a market capitalization of $1.8 billion, which remains to be 213% larger than Spirit Airways.

A screenshot of a post on X by user IcedKnife

Picture Credit: IcedKnife on X (opens in a new window)

The newest pod

Chain Response is doing a month-to-month collection diving into completely different matters and themes in crypto. This month we’re specializing in blockchain and AI integrations.

For this week’s episode, I interviewed Dee Goens, the co-founder of Zora.

Zora is a platform and protocol that helps builders and creators deliver their concepts on chain and on Ethereum by means of an open and shared atmosphere. The platform has minted greater than million NFTs, and has over $300 million in secondary gross sales and about 1 million distinctive collectors, in accordance with its web site.

Goens beforehand labored at Coinbase for two.5 years doing danger administration, operations and model partnerships. Earlier than that, he analyzed rising applied sciences’ danger with a spotlight in blockchains at KPMG.

As we simply wrapped up our NFT collection for February, Goens is the right visitor to transition from that subject to AI and blockchains given Zora’s give attention to bringing AI on-chain.

In a primary for Chain Response, we additionally minted this podcast on Zora’s platform, which you can check out here.

Jacquelyn and Goens focus on how Zora envisions blockchains and AI working collectively, the roles they will play for NFT creators and what the platform’s builders and group members need extra of.

Subscribe to Chain Response on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favourite pod platform to maintain up with the most recent episodes, and please go away us a evaluation when you like what you hear!

Observe the cash

Zama’s homomorphic encryption tech lands it $73 million on a valuation of nearly $400 million
Taiko raises $37 million to construct web3 infrastructure for a censorship-free web
Karma3 Labs raises $4.5 million to enhance belief in web3 with rankings and proposals
Utila raised $11.5 million in a seed spherical for its enterprise-grade crypto operations platform
Safety infra startup Firewall raised $3.7 million to make sensible contracts mainstream

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