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

Photographer Justin Aversano wraps two-year global portrait project with 366 NFTs

Photographer Justin Aversano finished a 366-day portrait series this week, in which he auctioned each 10-second analog film portrait as an NFT to 135 buyers.

Throughout the project, which began in April 2025, Aversano traveled to all seven continents, filming strangers including Antarctic explorers and Zambian families, then minting each portrait daily on the Ethereum blockchain.

Each day, he also ran a live audio conversation on X to introduce other artists, community members, and thought leaders to his audience.

Morgan Stanley to list first Wall Street bank-issued Bitcoin ETF

Morgan Stanley launched a Bitcoin ETF, a type of investment fund that trades on a stock exchange and tracks Bitcoin's price. The rollout made it the first major Wall Street bank to offer such a product, which lets people invest through a normal brokerage account without buying or storing Bitcoin themselves.

Called the Morgan Stanley Bitcoin Trust, the fund will trade under the ticker MSBT on NYSE Arca.

Ethereum Foundation backs new framework to connect its ecosystem

Blockchain companies Gnosis and Zisk are building an "Ethereum Economic Zone,” which will serve as a shared technical infrastructure that lets layer-2 networks (L2s) process transactions together.

The Ethereum Foundation is supporting the project because L2s, which are built to process more transactions at a lower cost, have historically operated as disconnected systems that pull fees and activity away from Ethereum's main network. 

The proposed framework would require participating networks to accept ETH as the default transaction currency and share the same underlying infrastructure, theoretically cutting duplicate technical work. 

Gnosis and Zisk reportedly plan to publish technical specifications in the coming weeks.

Nearly 70,000 ETH has been staked since February, putting the Ethereum Foundation close to its goal

The Ethereum Foundation staked about 45,000 ETH on Friday, bringing its total staked amount to 69,500 ETH, just short of its self-imposed 70,000 ETH goal. 

Staking, or locking up cryptocurrency to help validate transactions on the network, earns the staker a percentage yield over time. The foundation says it plans to use that yield to pay for protocol research, development, and ecosystem grants rather than selling ETH holdings outright, a shift driven by community pressure to stop liquidating tokens to cover expenses.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has flagged one tradeoff: a foundation that holds staked tokens could end up with outsized sway over the network's direction if a major community dispute ever forces a vote.

SoFi launches business banking platform for both fiat and crypto

Financial services platform SoFi launched a business banking platform that lets companies hold, move and settle funds in either traditional currency or crypto within a single regulated system, according to a company press release. 

The platform, called Big Business Banking, also supports SoFiUSD, SoFi's stablecoin. The platform is also expected to connect with Solana and other blockchain networks.

According to the press release, initial participants include Cumberland, Bullish, BitGo, B2C2, Fireblocks, Wintermute, Galaxy, Jupiter, Mesh Payments and Mastercard.

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