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Bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX is looking to stake, sell, and hedge its ~$3 billion in digital assets. FTX wants to hire Mike Novogratz’s Galaxy as an advisor to optimize its sales. The company's goal is to protect the value of the holdings through calculated trading, potentially via weekly sales limits, and ultimately return funds to users in fiat instead of crypto.
Mastercard and crypto exchange Binance will terminate their cryptocurrency card programs in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Bahrain from September 22. The cards enabled payments in traditional currencies using cryptocurrency holdings. The termination will not affect Mastercard's other crypto card initiatives. This move comes amidst Binance facing ongoing regulatory challenges, including a US lawsuit for alleged deceptive practices.
Beam has launched a product called Instant Payouts. Instant Payouts allows users to send crypto from their cold or hot wallets directly to their debit card and receive funds on the same day. Beam charges a 1% fee, similar to Venmo and CashApp. Instant Payouts is live on Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche, and Polygon.
Maple Finance is returning to Solana to launch its Cash Management Solution, which could provide DAOs, corporate treasuries, and high-net-worth individuals access to yield backed by US Treasury Bills. The pool will accept deposits of USDC-spl, targeting the current 1-month US Treasury bill rate minus fees, and will not impose additional costs on lenders. Maple Finance's return is just one of many big news items on Solana this week.
Cryogen is a tool designed to effectively consolidate extracted datasets from Ethereum while boosting query performance and reducing disk space. It does this by consolidating datasets in place and merging parquets into larger files to keep the dataset updated regularly. Caution is advised when using Cryogen with Cryo as it may output duplicate data in the dataset.
The news cycle on Solana really picked up speed this past week. Highlights include a direct integration with Shopify, a new ChatGPT plugin, the return of treasury management solution Maple, private token swaps with Elusiv, $3 million seed fundraising for collectible content company DRiP, and video call token-gating via Brave. Other notable mentions were the rollout of Solana Sign-In and the launch of the first euro stablecoin on Solana.
Roman Storm and Roman Semenov have been charged with allegedly operating an unregistered money transmitting service. The allegations seem unclear as they appear to have functioned as anonymous software providers within FinCEN's guidelines rather than as money transmitters. The case revolves around whether they had "independent control" over funds transmitted. The specifics of whether they controlled the smart contracts remain ambiguous.
Coinbase announced plans to decentralize the Base network, aiming to create a system where no single entity has control. Working alongside the Optimism Collective and OP Labs, Coinbase will implement fault proofs and diverse client software to avoid censorship. Additionally, they will contribute to the OP Stack infrastructure and help form a "security council" for the Superchain to further enhance security and decentralization.
Chainlink’s new CCIP product enables cross-chain trading, lending, and more and has some crossover with LayerZero functionality. This tweet provides a comparison of the two focused on their security models.
Coinbase’s L2 Base has been accused of violating federal laws. This thread breaks down why that’s not the case.
This blog explains why current crypto incentive systems, like token rewards and airdrops, are insufficient for mainstream adoption. It instead suggests that web3 products should draw from Web 2.0 loyalty programs, where incentives are based on higher psychological motivators like status and curiosity.
This thread explains why the framing and discussions around the concentration of staking between different protocols is misguided and could be harmful to the space.