This Week on web3 5min recap

Market information and major news from 12/28~1/3.

Good morning.
Mitsui from web3 researcher.

This is a summary article about the web3 market for the last week.We have gathered information from more than 20 national and international media and newsletters and have picked up news from them.Please use it to catch up on information and trends!

💥News Pickup
📊Market &News (L1, L2, DeFi, NFT, GameFi, AI, Other)

💥News Pickup

1,Over 400 Projects Gather for Inaugural Solana AI Hackathon

• First Solana AI Hackathon Concludes Monday

• Several entrants already have tokens trading at a market cap worth millions of dollars, with cryptocurrency trading agent co-pilot and AI agent "swarm" being the hottest categories

• The winner of the hackathon organized by SendAI will be announced around January 10, said Yash Agarwal, co-founder and CEO of SendAI

2,a16z Crypto Supports IRS Opposition to DeFi Regulations

• a16z Crypto's Regulatory Director, Michelle Kober, announced her support for a coalition of virtual currency advocacy groups that are suing the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the U.S. Treasury Department over new DeFi regulations that critics claim threaten the future of the industry.

• Kober made the announcement in a December 29 post to X, emphasizing that a16z believes DeFi has the potential to make financial services and the digital economy "accessible, efficient, interoperable, reliable, and consumer-centric"

• The lawsuit, filed on December 27 by the Blockchain Association, the DeFi Education Foundation, and the Texas Blockchain Council, challenges IRS and U.S. Treasury Department regulations that classify DeFi platforms as "brokers"

• The regulations would force DeFi platforms to comply with strict reporting and customer verification (KYC) requirements

3,Europe's MiCA regulations take effect, reducing Tether's market cap by $3 billion.

• Tether's (USDT) market capitalization fell approximately 1.4% over the past week, coinciding with the full implementation of the European Union's crypto asset market (MiCA) regulation on December 30

• The drop comes amid European exchanges' efforts to delist USDT in response to the new MiCA regulation, which aims to provide unified oversight for the virtual currency industry

• MiCA was introduced in June 2023 with the aim of creating a unified legal framework for the 27 EU member states, requiring crypto service providers to obtain authorization from national regulators and adhere to strict transparency standards

• The regulation also requires issuers of stablecoins to maintain sufficient reserves and meet stability and reliability requirements

• Failure to comply could result in the removal of stablecoins and other crypto tokens from European exchanges; in mid-December, Coinbase preventively delisted USDT due to compliance concerns