Welcome to the OpenSea digest. Let’s look back through the biggest NFT and web3 news of the week.

MeebCo launches experimental research division

MeebCo, the company behind the Meebits NFT collection, announced a new research and development division called MeebCo Labs. 

The team said the division will focus on games and onchain experiments, meaning digital projects and transactions recorded directly on blockchain rather than through a centralized company database. 

From the announcement, it appears MeebCo Labs plans on giving the company room to test concepts that fall outside its usual product lineup, calling it the “division where we can get a little weird” and create “experiments and ideas that don’t fit neatly in a box.”

Sui developer unveils prototype for private business payments

Mysten Labs, the company behind the Sui blockchain, just introduced a new prototype called Tessera, describing it as a settlement network built for vetted businesses that need to pay invoices without exposing dollar amounts to competitors.

According to the announcement thread on X, Tessera is designed to solve the problem of institutional adoption on transparent blockchains. As SuiNetwork put it, "institutions won't settle on rails where competitors can see pricing and volume."

In contrast, businesses in the Tessera network pay each other with a confidential stablecoin, and the ledger hides the dollar amount from outside eyes. Regulators and auditors can still see specific transactions when granted time-limited permission, but they can't move money themselves. Operators can add members, freeze accounts or pause the network, and disputes go to an arbiter. 

Mysten Labs, the company behind Tessera and the Sui blockchain, posted the code on GitHub for anyone to check.

NODE hosts artist Ana María Caballero for a live reading that becomes generative art

Poet and multidisciplinary artist Ana María Caballero read her poem "Scylla" live at NODE on Aug. 8, and as she read, the words turned into generative art in real time.

NODE is a nonprofit foundation in Palo Alto, California, that gives digital artists a physical and digital space to exhibit and experiment.

Caballero works across performance, sculpture, moving image and code, folding written and visual mediums into a single piece. The Aug. 8 reading marked another chapter in her ongoing body of work that turns language into visual, computational forms.

Tether says its books just passed a major audit

Tether announced Thursday that KPMG U.S., a top accounting firm, completed a full audit of the company's finances and gave it a clean result, the best outcome an audit can produce.

Tether issues USDT, a stablecoin, a digital token designed to hold steady at one dollar, with more than $180 billion of it now in circulation. 

According to reports, auditors checked Tether's money, debts, income and records, and even counted its gold bars by hand to confirm they exist. 

Wall Street pushes deeper into crypto with new ETF moves

Two of Wall Street's biggest names made moves this week that show crypto becoming a bigger part of how they do business. 

Fidelity, a Boston-based asset manager, asked federal regulators on Aug. 11 to let its Ethereum fund begin staking, a process where crypto holdings help secure a blockchain network in exchange for rewards.

A day later, Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street bank, agreed to pay up to $2.25 billion to acquire NEOS Investments, an options-based income ETF provider whose funds include a roughly $1.1 billion bitcoin income product, deepening Goldman's ETF business and adding a crypto-linked fund to its lineup.

Taken together, the two moves point to traditional finance treating crypto less like an outsider asset class and more like a regular part of the business.

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