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This Week in Web3
1. Coca-Cola has launched an NFT collection on the Polygon network on the eve of International Friendship Day. The bubble-themed NFTs were airdropped to the digital wallets of existing Coca-Cola NFT owners. These NFTs came with the functionality called ‘share-to-reveal’ where each NFT will be revealed after being shared with a friend. I like the way they are approaching NFTs.
2. Quote: “So today with rollups, transaction fees are generally somewhere between $0.25, sometimes $0.10, and in the future with rollups with all of the improvements to efficiency that I talked about. The transaction costs could go down to $0.05, or even maybe as low as $0.02. So much cheaper, much more affordable, and a complete game changer.” – Vitalik Buterin. [Cointelegraph]
3. Report: Ethereum saw inflows totaling US$16m and is enjoying a near 7 consecutive week run of inflows totaling US$159m. We believe this turnaround in investor sentiment is due to greater clarity on the timing of The Merge. [Coinshares]
4. Mega Mutant, an NFT from MAYC (part of the Bored Apes NFT family) sold for 3.9M$. I have an ape too. The only difference is it’s worth 0.02 ETH. [Tweet]
5. BlackRock launches private trust offering direct bitcoin exposure. Anthony Scaramucci believes this will create a “demand shock” in Bitcoin. [The Block]
6. The US Treasury added Tornado Cash contracts to the SDN list (the list of Specially Designated Nationals with whom Americans and American businesses are not allowed to transact). Around $75000 worth of USDC (Yes, it is a centralized currency) are blacklisted. At least now we all can probably agree on why Decentralization is so important. [Tweet]
7. Users are getting blocked by Aave as someone randomly sends ETH to them from Tornado. [Justin Sun, Sassal, Aave]
8. Tornado Cash Developer Arrested. This probably is the craziest thing I’ve heard in a while. A developer who wrote code to help users protect their privacy got arrested. This is a direct attack on Privacy by the government. [The Hacker News]
9. Stat: Metaverse land sales plunge 85% in 2022. Decentraland’s NFT land prices peaked at $37,238 in February 2022. Do you know what the current price is? Around $5000. Same story for Sandbox lands. $35,500 in January to around $2,800 right now. [Cointelegraph]
10. After Elon Musk, Mark Cuban shares his love for dogecoin. “I still think DOGE has got more applications potentially available to it than Cardano. He also shared his views on the Metaverse: The worst part is that people are buying real estate in these places. That’s just the dumbest shit ever.” [Analytics Insight, CNBC]
11. It’s Mark again!! A lawsuit was filed accusing Mark Cuban of misleading investors through his promotion of cryptocurrency trading platform and brokerage Voyager Digital, which filed for bankruptcy in July. [Chron]
12. Polygon is partnering with Neowiz to build a gaming platform!! [Tronweekly]
13. Immutable sales volume plunges!! The sales volume in January was around $54 million. And what’s the sales volume in July?? It’s $5.2 million. [Beincrypto]
14. Curve Finance warns users not to use their frontend after $573,000 was stolen. Binance helps Curve by recovering most of the stolen funds. [Tweet, Coindesk]
15. The Ethereum Goerli Testnet Merge is now live!!! Proof Of Stake is activated and we are now way too close to ‘The Merge 👀’. And yes, we have a date. It’s around September 15th. But they didn’t confirm the year yet. [Tweet]
16. Coinbase posts a loss of revenue in Q2. [ A Short Thread, Business Standard]
17. Namibia got its first Bitcoin ATM!!!! [Namibian]
18. ENS names still prove to be one of the best NFTs. 555.eth sold for $1,60,000. I bought mine for 0.1% price of that.
19. Around 140K BTC are due to be released from MT Gox at the end of this month, most probably.
20. Indian authorities have frozen crypto exchange Vauld. Nearly $46M worth of assets. [Coindesk]
21. Ethereum is leaving crypto exchanges at a rapid rate this week, while Bitcoin is moving in the opposition direction, according to Lucas Outumuro, the head of research at analytics firm IntoTheBlock. [DailyHodl]
22. Blackjack.eth got registered for a 48.7 ETH (100k$) premium. [Tweet]
23. Hoddlenaut freezes withdrawals and deposits. Not your keys, not your coins. [Business Standard]
24. Sam Bankman-Fried or Justin Sun. Who is gonna get Leon Li’s (the founder of crypto exchange Huobi) majority stake? I tried to buy it, but they said I need to have funds. So I backed out! [Blockworks]
25. Gabagool, someone who works at Velodrome attacked the protocol and managed to drain 350k$ from the wallet. [Velodrome Statement]
26. Crypto influencers are making 1000s of dollars but…[CNBC Video]
27. We all know that SBF (Sam Bankman-Fried) has bailed out ailed crypto companies. He revealed that he is very disappointed he is the only one doing all the bailouts. “I would be super happy for others to take that on instead of me. The reason that I have been doing it, frankly, is because it doesn’t seem clear to me that there are others who are stepping up and doing that.” [Decrypt]
28. “I made confident bets and made confident statements on behalf of UST because I believed in its resilience and its value proposition. I’ve since lost these bets, but my actions 100% match my words. There is a difference between failing and running a fraud.” – Do Kwon said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. [Coingape]
Interesting Reads Of The Week
- Ethereum: The World Computer
- Bitcoin’s Privacy Problem—And What Cypherpunks Are Doing to Solve It
- Twitter thread on Cosmos
- Using Bitcoin without the internet??
- 3 common misconceptions about Tornado Cash
- If you were given the opportunity to go back in time and change your crypto decisions….
- Unlocking NFT liquidity
- Hal Finney – NFTs – 1993
- The SEC’s stance on Crypto
- Running a full node to avoid censorship? Or what other options?
Meme Of The Week
