I went down the rabbit hole and found...

🎣w3.catch-of-the-week - CW02/25

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Vicktoria Klich & Quinn Wilhelm
January 10, 2025

GMGM and welcome to the 🎣 w3.catch-of-the-week! here’s your w3.agent who scanned 1 million shitposts on Twitter, searched through 3 billion GitHub codes, and tracked 5 trillion onchain transactions - just to give you a crisp overview of which topics will dominate 2025.

💅 But jokes aside, it's still finest selective manual work by the w3 research team, combined with a content pinch from vickchick030.

Today’s Lineup and Why

🎡 Digital Assets Season: I spend 90% of my working time on this, so please appreciate it.

🎙️ Solana Podcast: Had an amazing convo with Nick Ducoff, Head of Institutional growth at Solana. Spoiler: He loves memecoins and working with institutions like VISA & PayPal. And yes, we recorded it.

🌚 What Keeps Me Awake at Night: AI agents (still!) and being rejected by BerghAI for 14 times in a row.

🫶🏽 Join the Team: I’m hiring a working student crazy enough to join the w3.trenches.

With the positive market vibes and years of innovation in the Web3 space, crypto and blockchain are resonating across various industries. Especially interested? The TradFi industry.

Many blockchain companies are eager to collaborate with TradFi folks. Thus, we see great potential in supporting these interactions with our expertise and curiosity.

We - w3.vision and Blockstories - along with Max and his team, are pooling our abilities to facilitate learning between these groups.

From January to March, we’re traveling with 8 partners through Zurich, London, and Frankfurt, releasing podcasts, deep dives, and tons of social media content on the potential being created by these companies.

We are kicking off the Deep Dive Section with Nick Ducoff, from Solana 💥

Solana stands out as one of the fastest and most innovative blockchains, focusing on high performance and low transaction costs.

The blockchain processes approximately 65,000 transactions per second (TPS) with fees as low as $0.001, making it ideal for various financial applications.

Key Products and Solutions

Solana offers institutions two groundbreaking solutions: Token Extensions and Permissioned Environments.

Token Extensions

Designed for regulated entities, Token Extensions allow banks and financial institutions to create compliant tokens on Solana’s public blockchain. Features like transfer restrictions, ownership validation, and regulatory reporting ensure institutions meet strict compliance standards.

Example: PayPal cited Token Extensions as a core reason for deploying their PYUSD stablecoin on Solana, leveraging these features to provide a scalable and compliant solution.

Permissioned Environments

For institutions unable to use public blockchains due to regulatory constraints, Solana offers Permissioned Environments. These private deployments allow institutions to customize validation rules, transaction governance, and compliance monitoring while retaining the speed and efficiency of Solana’s core technology.

Example: One specific example is the company Iron, which is building an on-chain bank. Iron uses Solana Permissioned Environments (SPEs) to benefit from Solana's architecture while:

  • Enabling tokenised deposits from commercial banks

  • Conducting confidential trading

  • Offering private tokenisation of real-world assets

Payment Solutions

From peer-to-peer transfers to large-scale institutional settlements, Solana’s payment capabilities are reshaping global finance.

Sling Money, a Solana-powered payment app, has become a leader in Africa, topping app charts in several countries. By offering fast, low-cost transactions in emerging markets, Sling Money exemplifies Solana’s potential to bring financial inclusion to underserved regions.

Institutional Treasury Management: Corporations such as the $1.4 trillion asset manager Franklin Templeton use Solana for treasury management and moving funds across borders with unmatched efficiency. Traditional bank transfers, which require multiple intermediaries, are now replaced by Solana's seamless infrastructure.

The Result?

With Solana, institutions can reduce transaction layers, save on fees, and manage liquidity more effectively than ever before.

Institutional Integration

Major companies like PayPal, Visa, Stripe, and Franklin Templeton have chosen Solana for their blockchain initiatives. These partnerships demonstrate Solana's capability to handle enterprise-scale operations while maintaining its core benefits of speed and low cost.

Cross-border payments have emerged as a primary focus, eliminating the complex chain of correspondent banks and reducing multiple layers of fees.

👉🏽 The Solana network enables companies to move funds across borders efficiently and manage their global liquidity.

Franklin Templeton is pioneering the use of tokenized money market funds on Solana, planning to bring traditional financial products into the DeFi ecosystem. This allows for greater composability, meaning other protocols can build additional services on top of these tokenized funds.

Future Developments: Firedancer

Solana’s Firedancer update, developed in partnership with Jump Crypto, represents a breakthrough in blockchain scalability. Scheduled for deployment in 2025, Firedancer will increase TPS from 65,000 to over 1 million, reinforcing Solana’s position as the fastest blockchain in the world.

Why it Matters:

  • Greater Scalability: Institutions can handle larger transaction volumes without sacrificing performance.

  • Enhanced Stability: Firedancer provides redundancy by running an independent validator client, increasing network resilience.

This milestone, dubbed “Solana’s Merge Moment,” is poised to attract even more institutional adoption.

In our latest podcast episode of the Digital Assets Season, we interviewed Nick Ducoff, Head of Institutional Growth at Solana.

Why you should listen to the full episode?

The podcast offers unique insights into:

  • Solana’s approach to institutional adoption and compliance

  • Future developments, including the upcoming Firedancer update

  • Real-world applications of blockchain technology in traditional finance

  • The intersection of DeFi and traditional finance

Babe, wake up - w3.wave dropped some “not-your-type-of-predictions”

My fav part is the comment section.

Want to work with us but still at university?

No worries, because we are

Want to work with us but still at university? No worries, because we're all about making it work for you! It’s straightforward and trust me - you are going to see a lot of stuff.

You’ll be:

  • working from w3.hub - the go-to Web3 co-working and community space in Berlin.

  • conducting in-depth research on Web3 trends and market insights

  • supporting our founders with their content activity (like this newsletter or my X acount. You followed me yet?)

🐼 I just read that Bitpanda has partnered with Paris Saint-Germain. Following their partnerships with FC Bayern and the NFL, this new collaboration with a major sports team brings even more attention to crypto. It's redefining how people invest and connect with crypto assets. (Press Statement)

🥷🏽 It's so randomly good - the Berghain bouncer story. My Superteam Germany folks shared it with me, but the bouncer still hasn't let me in. Let me know if and how you managed it (Link).

🤖 The AI agent topic has been around for what feels like an eternity (in crypto years). No matter how much you've heard, there's always more to learn.

Did everyone catch the Virtuals Protocol hype? In a nutshell: I listened to a Bankless podcast episode with Jansen Teng, co-founder of Virtuals, recently (Link). The only question I had was:

💅🏽 If AI agent Luna's sole mission is to grow her X account to 100k... can an agent do that... for me too?

TL;DR and My Sauce:

AI agents are shaking things up in the crypto world. They're not your everyday chatbots. These digital beings can trade, create content, and even hire other AI agents using crypto. Think of them as digital entrepreneurs with their own crypto wallets.

Nvidia's boss, Jensen Huang, thinks they'll be a multi-trillion-dollar industry someday. They're like Siri or Alexa but way cooler because they're in Web3 and have access to money.

The AI agent scene has exploded from nothing to over $15 billion in just months. It's expected to hit $250 billion by the end of the year. Virtuals alone has launched over 11,000 agents, with 140,000 people holding various agent tokens.

Take Luna, for example. She's an AI agent on the Virtuals platform. Her deal: Growing her following to 100,000, commissioning graffiti artists, and hiring other AI agents.

The best part? She makes these decisions on her own. Imagine having an AI that works for you like that → So, can there be an AI agent supporting me with my influencer career on X?

I'm definitely going to find out and keep you updated.

And while we're at it:

I'm on LinkedIn

I'm on X

Just started with YouTube and thinking about how to continue it

Always here at w3.hub

Active in the w3.group. Follow on LinkedIn to keep up with our projects

This season, presented by w3.vision x Blockstories, takes a deep dive into the key verticals and trends shaping the digital assets industry - from tokenization and asset management to stablecoins.

Don't miss out on any news, updates, & vibes anymore. Discord is so yesterday. Let's meet on Telegram.