RIP Uber

Gm, everyone. Crypto had its best week since August last week, giving traders the kind of respite the stock market seemingly can’t. We’re not out of the bear market woods yet, but the breather is welcome.

Today: A Web3 startup is trying to decentralize ride sharing, Hong Kong is deregulating crypto, and Google is launching a hosted node service. What a start to the week, huh? Let’s dive in.

—Angelina & Vincent

Could Web3 Dethrone Uber?

Once upon a time on Wall Street, ridesharing companies were hotter than Sweetgreen and scooter startups combined. The likes of Uber and Lyft revolutionized the way we travel, disrupting the transportation industry and setting new mobility standards—and (at least for a little while) taking up the mantle as the investment.

But there’s a reason Uber and Lyft lost favor with Wall Street’s suits, and it’s the very same reason these web2 interpretations of ridesharing are sitting ducks for web3: Web2 ridesharing was built on the backs of drivers who are overworked and underpaid…

Enter: Web3 ridesharing.

The Decentralized Engineering Corporation (DEC) just raised $9 million to launch the first web3 ridesharing app, Teleport. The app is powered by DEC’s Solana-based TRIP protocol and will go live this December in select U.S. cities.

What you need to know:

• TRIP allows drivers to bid for customers in an open marketplace. It’s open source, competitive, and fair—unlike the closed platforms run by corporate ridesharing monopolies.

• The protocol rewards the most active drivers and riders with a stake in its governance, giving control back to its users.

• Riders can pay drivers using USDC or fiat through Apple Pay.

Our take: The current ridesharing industry sucks, especially for drivers. In many countries, Uber drivers work in brutal conditions for peanuts. TRIP eliminates the middlemen corporations (Uber, Lyft, Bolt), relieving pressure on drivers and giving ownership to those who help grow it. Win/win.

Brownie points? TRIP runs on a decentralized blockchain, meaning no one company owns and controls all user data.

Bottom line: We hear a lot about web3 disrupting existing web2 industries, but rarely do we see an example as obvious and understandable as Teleport and TRIP. If TRIP succeeds, it holds the potential to take a good chunk of market share from established ridesharing apps—dialing up the pressure on incumbents like Uber to improve their working conditions and explore web3 integration.

—Angelina

Hong Kong Opens up for Crypto Business

Hong Kong plans to let crypto platforms offer retail trading more broadly, according to Bloomberg. This is a massive shift from when the city would only allow crypto firms to serve customers with portfolios that had at least $1 million.

Some context: The move stands in sharp contrast to the crypto ban that exists on mainland China and serves as an example of how financial regulation in both markets may deviate in the future.

Hong Kong is trying to win back over talented workers who are leaving the city because of its austere Covid policies and Beijing’s tightening grip over Hong Kong’s government.

FYI: At the same time as Hong Kong is loosening rules, its financial competitor Singapore is tightening them. Earlier this week, Singapore proposed a ban on leveraged retail token purchases.

And earlier this year, Japan made similar moves to Hong Kong to boost growth in its own economy. As other Asian countries implement tougher crypto regulation, places like Hong Kong and Japan could make up the difference as regions with slower economies increasingly view crypto as a way to kickstart growth.

—Vincent

Nodes Made Easy

Running your own node is a lot like hosting your own website—time consuming and costly. A technical headache, quite frankly. But that’s why web hosting services exist.

And now nodes are getting the same treatment. Google’s newly announced Blockchain Node Engine (BNE) aims to cover all the maintenance hassle involved in running your own. While BNE will initially only support Ethereum nodes, Google plans on extending the service to more networks.

The pros: BNE not only provides devs with an easier infrastructure to build projects, it also highlights that tech giants are paying more attention to the crypto space.

The con: If Google’s node service is amazing, the Ethereum network could end up living on Google (*cough* centralization).

—Angelina

In other news:

• The Bitcoin white paper celebrated its 14th birthday yesterday.

• Core Scientific, the largest bitcoin miner by computing power, warned investors last week that it may go bankrupt.

• Bitcoin miner Argo failed to secure $27 million in fundraising and could be “cash flow negative in the near term.”

• Check out Web3 Daily. A free newsletter sent Monday through Friday covering important crypto and Web3 news (translated into plain English).

• Dogecoin reached a market cap of $10 billion over the weekend following Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover.

• Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin warned that crypto should slow down its integration with traditional finance.

And that’s what you need on your crypto radar today. What services would you like to see be decentralized in the future? Reply to this email and let us know. See ya on Friday!