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Coinbase's offshore derivatives exchange has seen a surge in daily trading volumes, reaching up to $287m. Launched in May, the platform has onboarded 50 institutions and generated $5.5B in volume in its first seven weeks. The aim of this product is to accelerate Coinbase's global expansion amidst challenging regulatory conditions domestically.
The government has officially won its case alleging Tornado Cash committed OFAC violations. The courts deemed the Tornado Cash entity as sanctionable, based on grounds that the founders, DAO, and developers profited from smart contracts used for mixing funds - some of which were tied to suspect activities. Critics argue key legal concerns were not properly addressed, including the lack of process for US citizens whose funds are now trapped in the Tornado Cash contract.
Courtyard.io has launched a new marketplace facilitating the trade of physical collectibles on-chain. The marketplace provides a tokenization service to simplify the ownership, management, and trading of physical items for any kind of collector. Building on its previous successes tokenizing real-world assets, Courtyard.io offers features such as instant wallet creation, zero gas fees, crypto or credit payment options, and passive income potential for users. This move aims to tap into the $400B collectibles market.
Ethereum core developers are working to launch a new testnet named 'Holesky' next month. This move is intended to improve the testing environment and solve ether supply issues currently affecting other testnets. While an exact number hasn’t been nailed down yet, developers have mentioned the testnet having 1 billion testnet ETH, which would make testnet ETH significantly easier to acquire and speed up development.
Friend Tech, the recently launched SocialFi platform backed by Paradigm, took Crypto Twitter by storm last week and even started attracting mainstream influencers over the weekend. While the app is still in beta and buggy at times, it’s being praised as having a great UX that other crypto apps should aspire to. It’s a different onboarding experience from most crypto apps, so if you want to try it out, this thread is a great guide to getting started.
Ethereum L2s have been seemingly launching left and right during the bear market. Arbitrum dropped its token, Base and Binance launched L2s on the OP stack, and a myriad of zk rollups have been launched. This thread lays out a strategy for understanding and navigating the L2 landscape. The strategy hinges on two main points: studying the technology of each chain and considering the financial opportunities, both with the chain’s underlying token and the protocols built on the chain.
The ‘Flippening’, the potential of Ethereum surpassing Bitcoin in market cap, has been a hotly debated topic over the past few years. Bitcoin has the upper hand as far as its lindy effect relative to Ethereum and has more mainstream awareness. However, with a fixed supply, Bitcoin is simply a store of value, while Ethereum is a smart contract platform that all sorts of financial activity can happen on top of. With its updated PoS security model, Ethereum is also deflationary at times. This article discusses the topic further and makes the case for the ‘Flippening’ to happen.
This Forbes article discusses Coinbase’s launch of Base and how the competitive landscape of L2s is shaping up. Base offers faster and less inexpensive transactions than the base layer while maintaining full EVM compatibility. Since its launch, Base has already achieved a TVL ranking of fifth among Ethereum L2s, attracting over $200 million in value. With an explosion of activity between memecoins and now innovative apps like Friend Tech, it has also generated the most revenue of any L2 since its launch.
This thread lays out the case for a 2024/2025 bull run by comparing the current part of the cycle to 2019.
Over the weekend, for about an hour, it seemed as if Arbitrum went down, causing a bit of a stir. In reality, it was a different issue that caused the batch poster to stop. In this thread, Offchain Labs’ - the team behind Arbitrum - CTO explains the issue.
In the wake of OpenSea’s decision to sunset creator royalty enforcement, Yuga Labs announced it would be discontinuing support for OpenSea’s Seaport contract in future collections or updates to existing contracts.
Creditors will vote on Celsius’ plans to sell its assets to the Fahrenheit consortium, with creditors possibly recovering 67%-85% of holdings, now that a judge has approved of the plan.