| Brought to you by: | | | RIP, Web5? | Jack Dorsey's decentralized bitcoin/Web development project has come to an end. | The project, TBD, dates back to 2021 and appeared intended to serve as the development arm of a broader and at-times amorphous bitcoin initiative within Block, formerly square. TBD sat alongside a hardware play, BitKey, and Block's mining business. | Fast forward several years and, well, TBD is no more. | "Within our emerging initiatives, we are refining our investments based on our progress. We are scaling back our investment in TIDAL and winding down TBD," Dorsey wrote in a shareholder letter this week. "This gives us room to invest in our bitcoin mining initiative, which has strong product market fit and a healthy pipeline of demand, and Bitkey, our self-custody wallet for bitcoin." | Along the way, TBD promised to re-re-reinvent the internet with its so-called Web5 identity initiative. The idea was to build it atop Bitcoin, and in 2023, TBD released a toolkit for developers to build decentralized identity apps. | Precisely what drew the cuts isn't clear, but it probably boiled down to dollars and cents: Block is trying to shrink costs and maybe Dorsey didn't see TBD's loftier ambitions supporting those aims. | As for what Block is sticking with, the mining and hardware wallet businesses make sense. Bitcoin prices are cracking new all-time highs — accumulating more coins and creating ways to store it outside of centralized platforms makes a good bit of sense. | TBD's end is an unfortunate stumble in the never-ending quest to build meaningful identity solutions on the Web. It's hard to look around — AI content and fake social media accounts abound — and not see a need for such tools. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like there's much money to be made, at least not now. | One can dream. | And now, on to the roundup: | — Michael McSweeney | | Brought to you by: | | Navigating the crypto world doesn't have to be complicated. With Uphold, you can buy, sell, exchange, store, and even earn on your assets — all in one simple platform.
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| Exclusive to US users: Earn up to 4.9% APY on your USD with the USD Interest Account on Uphold. Turn idle funds into passive income while you plan your next trade. | | | | | | | | Jack's back from vacation, and he's got the skinny on recent developer movers in the Solana space, plus some details from the network's validator ecosystem. Read on. |
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| | | | | | Jerome Powell threw down the veritable gauntlet this week when asked about Donald Trump. But there's more to chew beyond the headlines, and the Forward Guidance team has the goods. |
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| | | | | | If you're looking for the top post-game debrief about Polymarket and the US presidential election, Byron's got you covered, especially when it comes to some of the juicier details about France's victorious whale. |
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| | | | | | Here's a toast to the Ethereum all-core devs for their 200th call (I'm over here raising my cup of tea). Macauley and Donovan broke down the call and what's on tap for the blockchain network. |
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| | | | | | What a week, and I'm not exactly talking about the election. The folks over at Empire called it the MAGA trade — that is, the market jubilation forged by the former-president-turned-president-elect's victory in the US election. Read the play by play. |
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