What a week in Web3 it's been!

From Salesforce announcing their NFT cloud platform to Jack Dorsey introducing the world to Web 5 and Consensus taking over Austin this week, it's been quite a busy week. Let's get started.

“Ready Layer One”

Peter Vessenes and Snow Crash author Neal Stephenson, announced a new company this week, LAMINA1 with the goal of “building the open metaverse together.” The Bitcoin pioneer and the man who coined the term “metaverse” are joined by an incredible list of A-list C-suite members, advisors, and investors.

Magic Leap founder Rony Abovitz is an investor as well as being on the board of directors. Former Unity head of AR/VR Tony Parisi is their Chief Strategy Officer – his Medium post on LAMINA1 is how many people first heard about the company. Its website calls it a “base layer for the metaverse” but other than that, we still don’t know much about it.

Also, love seeing Margo Spiritus and Karen Laur in leadership roles. During my tenure at Magic Leap, Neal was the company’s Chief Futurist.?

Congratulations to Neal and the Lamina1 team! Keep your eyes on what they are doing.?

LACMA Finds a New Patron

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has a new acquisition fund led by Paris Hilton . The fund is earmarked for digital arts by women. LACMA has a pretty sound platform – in addition to maintaining digital arts collections for the last sixty years, the museum has also been partnering with Snapchat to enhance local landmarks with artistic AR.

“A Metaverse More Like Us”

Clinique partnered with Daz 3D on its recent campaign for “A Metaverse More Like Us .” The campaign features virtual makeup for Daz 3D’s collection of almost 9,000 unique female and non-binary avatars, as well as physical products inspired by the virtual characters. The physical and virtual product lines were made by Clinique makeup artists. I was honored to work again with Clinique on the strategy for this campaign!?

A Digital Fashion Event from immerse

The schedule is live for an upcoming online event focusing on “Digital Fashion, Content, Storytelling, and Immersive Entertainment ” as a part of the immerse Global Summit Series. The online event happening this month includes sessions led by VNTANA CEO Ashley Crowder and Metaverse Fashion Council board member Kazbek Bektursunov.

Jadu Teases Designs

Jadu took to Twitter this week to reveal some of their design process for avatars playable within the game and in-game menus. Jadu has been selling NFT accessories for the game for a while now, but this is the most we’ve seen of what the game will actually look like. The thread also said that avatars for the AR game should drop next month.

This Is Your Forbes on Crypto

This week, Forbes released their Fintech 50 list. The list includes a number of companies either directly or indirectly involved in blockchain, cryptocurrencies, and NFTs, including OpenSea , FTX , Chipper Cash , TRM Labs , and Ava Labs .

Also this week, Forbes released results from a survey of 65 of the world's wealthiest people. Among the findings: the crypto adoption rate among billionaires is double that of “average” people. That includes a small fraction of billionaires that reported having over half of their wealth in cryptocurrency.

In other Institutional News...

Mastercard announced that its users can now use the card in Coinbase’s new NFT marketplace. The major credit company also listed a series of “Web3” partners including ImmutableX , Candy Digital , The Sandbox , and Nifty Gateway .

Also this week, PayPal announced that users can send and transfer cryptocurrencies from their PayPal wallets to other PayPal users or to outside wallets and exchanges. Users have been able to “buy and sell” crypto on PayPal for a while now, but that was it – they couldn’t use the crypto to pay for goods and services.

Predicting Crypto With AI

CryptoSwarm AI is a coming service that will use a combination of artificial intelligence and human traders to develop insights on cryptocurrency market changes before they happen. The company is currently in the phase of growing its community of crypto traders, but has plans to scale and incorporate more diversified Web3 assets.

ARKit and Mixed Reality Toolkit Updates

Don’t let the critics fool you about Apple and AR. While some expected (or hoped) that the company would release an XR headset at WWDC, the computer giant did no such thing. It did announce ARKit 6, which focuses on improved motion and image capture, and released Location Anchors for a number of cities worldwide.

Later that week, Microsoft announced the third version of their Mixed Reality Toolkit . MRTK3 streamlines prototyping and input systems for developers. Perhaps the most exciting thing for non-developers is the focus on expanding experimental platform support from Hololens to Meta headsets, Steam VR, and even select 2D displays.