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

Welcome to TechCrunch Crypto, previously generally known as Chain Response.

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

Whats up and welcome again to the TechCrunch Crypto e-newsletter.

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 beneath.

This week in web3

Crunching numbers

This week the crypto market costs have been decrease, however nonetheless comparatively sturdy 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 accordance with CoinMarketCap data. The total crypto market cap decreased 6.3% throughout the identical timeframe to $2.55 trillion.

The most recent pod

Chain Response is doing a month-to-month sequence diving into totally different matters 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 targeted on creating and supporting decentralized purposes, or dApps, and protocols. It was additionally the preliminary workforce 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 global enterprise growth supervisor for Orchid, an a16z and Sequoia VC-backed VPN.

This episode is a a part of Chain Response’s month-to-month sequence diving into totally different matters and themes in crypto. This month’s centered on blockchain and AI integrations.

Tegan and I discuss 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 talk about:

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 most recent episodes, and please go away us a assessment for those who like what you hear!

Observe the cash

Former Grindr exec and a married couple launch Rails with $6.2 million round, for its decentralized FTX alternative
Avalanche Basis proclaims $1 million liquidity mining incentive program, Memecoin Rush
Morph raises $20 million in seed and angel funding for its EVM layer-2
Mantra raises $11 million to develop real-world asset tokenization in MENA area
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.