The Weekly gm - Apr. 24

gm ETH SD community,

What a week for our community and the Ethereum ecosystem at large! Let’s dive in.

1. Welcome Verkle Labs!
A new venture from the ETH SD ecosystem, Verkle Labs is pioneering the intersection of AI and Web 3 technology to shape the world of tomorrow. Founded by @ultrasoundchad and @Clouds9x, the team has over 10 years of startup and enterprise software development experience.

Your next software project, product, or service is too important to have just anyone build. DM @verkelelabs on Twitter or head to verklelabs.io to see how they can assist you and your team.

2. Monday Meetup: AI San Diego
Worlds are (gracefully) colliding! Today from 6:30pm to 8pm, join gmchad.eth and Bryan Landers for a networking session and presentation all about AI at the Edge Wallet HQ. To give some alpha on the night’s topics, ChatGPT, prompting, and LLM APIs will be featured during the event.

Subscribed to the AI San Diego calendar on Luma to be the first in the know for more AI events in SD, and register for tonight’s event on Luma.

3. Around the Corner: Consensus 2023
Grab your cowboy boots, we’re saddling up for Consensus 2023. For those in our community that are attending, shoot us a DM on Twitter to connect while in Austin. For those not attending, what talks or projects should we not miss? Let us know.

In addition to the main conference itinerary, here’s a handy list of non-Coindesk-affiliated side events. Maybe just pick a few of your favorites, as the list is decently dense.

4. ETH SD Community Spotlight: The Social Coyote by Jonah Peake
A long-time member of the ETH SD community, Jonah Peake co-hosts the Fresh Brewed Tech Podcast with Neal Bloom, and has been a part of storied startups such as Postmates and Lime. Recently he’s launched The Social Coyote newsletter to bring awareness to high-signal events in the SD tech and entrepreneurship scene.

Subscribe here: https://thesocialcoyote.beehiiv.com/subscribe.

1. Snapchat AI
As the guest star in this week’s episode of, “Who’s Building in AI”, please give a big round of applause for Snapchat. Last week, the messaging giant released their AI chatbot to its 750 million monthly users for free.

Play stupid games (with AI), and win stupid prizes (with AI).

2. Hot Shitcoin Summer: $PEPE & $AIDOGE
At a macro level, the success of alt- (shit-) coins, generally indicates the success of foundational tokens like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Last week, two coins with high meme-ability gained significant attention throughout Crypto Twitter.

$PEPE regards itself as “the most memeable memcoin in existence.” Here’s it’s performance over the past week.

$AIDOGE is AI-created, claims that “100% of the tokens belong to the community,” and warns to “never consider #AIDOGE as a MEME.” Too late for that last one, apologies.

3. Model-1 from Personal AI
A San Diego-native company, Personal AI brings optimization to your personal messaging and memory with an AI model trained by you. Earlier this month, they released their Model-1. Check out the presentation and demo below, and head to personal.ai for more info.

1. Gary’s Big Gaffe
Some questions are harder to answer than others.

The one that US Securities and Exchange Commission Chairperson Gary Gensler was asked, while appearing simple to crypto natives, was a little more than difficult to answer.

“Is Ether a commodity or a security?”

Let’s not have this happen again.

2. Biden Communication Director Barred From Future Crypto Involvement, Due to Past Involvement
A previous service provider to Uniswap and Andreessen Horowitz in a communications capacity, White House Communications Director Ben LaBolt has been restricted from interacting with any previous clients of the crypto sector. This is not unusual, as many White House staffers in high-ranking positions are routinely prevented from operating in areas where potential conflict of interest could arise.

An ethics disclosure released on Friday revealed that LaBolt is still hodling a few cornerstone cryptocurrencies ($BTC & $ETH), in addition to stocks in Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft.

3. BASE Eyes Mainnet Launch for This Year
The Ethereum L2 from Coinbase, Base, has been slated to go live on mainnet sometime this year, according to recent updates.

As the most dominant CEX in the United States, with 76.2% of users on the platform according to a recent CoinGecko report, it will be interesting to see the retail attention on and attitude towards the Dapp building platform.

We’ll keep you posted every Monday on what’s happening in the space. Follow @ETHSanDiego on Twitter or visit ethsd.org for info on events, educational content, and more!

See you next week,
@ChaseOnChain.eth & @gmchad.eth

Disclaimer: None of this is financial advice and is for educational purposes. Always do your own research.