Welcome back, this week Lucas and Anita break down the chaotic rollout of Ethereum’s biggest drop yet — a virtual land sale for the Bored Apes metaverse. The startup behind it banked more than $400 million in the sale, but the auction of land tiles called Otherdeeds brought the Ethereum blockchain to a crashing halt, leaving users paying exorbitant transaction fees worth thousands and tens of thousands of dollars just to buy themselves some monkey land.

Beyond that, they discuss Wikipedia’s abandonment of crypto donations after a vote from the Wikimedia Foundation’s editors and how the SEC is bulking up its crypto crime division with a few new hires that are tasked with the daunting challenge of policing web3.

In their interview this week, Lucas and Anita chat with Jill Gunter. Jill is a crypto VC at Slow Ventures and the co-founder of Espresso Systems — a startup building a privacy-centric blockchain. Listen along as they get her take on why there are so many blockchains out there and whether we’re headed towards a future where one blockchain rules them all.

Subscribe to the Chain Reaction newsletter to dive deeper: https://techcrunch.com/newsletters

Chain Reaction comes out every Thursday at 12:00 p.m. ET, so be sure to subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite pod platform to keep up with the action.