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The SEC is reportedly seeking public input on a Nasdaq initiative enabling options trading on BlackRock's spot bitcoin ETF. Public feedback on the matter is expected within 21 days. The move follows the approval and subsequent launch of several spot Bitcoin ETFs from BlackRock and others.
Grayscale's Bitcoin ETF has been seeing massive outflows, reaching over $2.2 billion last week, causing downward pressure on the crypto market. Analysts suggest that some Grayscale holders are just shifting to the other lower-cost providers, while others are cashing out. Other Bitcoin ETFs are instead seeing inflows, with BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust recording $1.2 billion in total inflows.
Saga, an upcoming gaming-focused blockchain, has announced plans to offer play-to-airdrop rewards associated with games on other major blockchains like Solana, Avalanche, and Polygon. The 'Three Kingdoms' campaign will give players on these networks a chance at a share of SAGA tokens set for launch this spring. Games participating in the campaign include Forest Knight, MixMob, and StarHeroes, with other high-profile games set to join in the following weeks.
The Arbitrum Foundation, in collaboration with Offchain Labs, is rolling out the Arbitrum Expansion Program, aimed at facilitating the launch of custom Arbitrum Orbit Chains. This initiative, which encourages projects to build their own L2s and L3s with Orbit, allows Arbitrum to accrue value through fee-sharing with its custom chains. Along with this program, the foundation is also launching the Arbitrum Developer Guild to fund Arbitrum development and attract talented dev teams to the platform.
The Bitcoin scaling debate that began nine years ago has picked up steam again over the past year. While Bitcoin's lack of complex computation support once limited its uses, the success of Ethereum and Solana have pushed some in the Bitcoin ecosystem to look for solutions that enable use cases like DeFi and NFTs on Bitcoin. However, Bitcoin's scaling attempts, such as Layer 2s, have struggled with adoption challenges. There has been a renewed interest in figuring out how to scale Bitcoin following the Taproot upgrade and the success of Ordinals.
This post dives into reordering slippage on Ethereum, a term for price differences caused by transaction ordering in a block. A study found that this slippage has potentially cost users $9m on Uniswap alone, impacting 72% of all swaps and 92% of larger transactions over $250k. The study also noted that Telegram trading bots had suffered $2m in reordering slippage, indicating a potential risk vector for crypto traders that may not be obvious to most.
The intersection of AI and crypto has come into focus as of late, with centralized AI products like ChatGPT taking the world by storm. This post explains how despite AI's propensity to centralize with more computational strength, decentralization challenges this trend. An increasingly decentralized AI ecosystem could foster collaborative data sharing and mutually beneficial creation of AI models. However, the method and degree of decentralization is a tough problem to solve, with potential downsides being disruption to performance computing and the lack of a truly production-ready decentralized AI model.
This thread introduces an innovative approach to network incentives coined Direct-to-Contract Incentives. This methodology aims to address traditional program shortcomings by directly incentivizing on-chain contracts, bypassing bureaucratic inflation, and establishing a permissionless incentives marketplace. Moreover, it offers benefits including easy comparison, streamlined analysis, and accessible public data due to structurally consistent infrastructure.
Manta's token launch faced a DDoS attack, causing slow transactions and high gas fees. However, it still reached a $550 million market cap after the launch.
This post explains how batch transactions for EOAs in Ethereum can enhance security, reduce state growth, and remove intermediaries, improving user experience and efficiency.
This blog discusses how Dark DAOs, private smart contracts enabling vote-buying in DAOs, pose a significant threat to their decentralization and integrity and suggests urgent countermeasures.
Ethereum's Gitcoin-backed Public Goods Network is shutting down by mid-2024 due to challenges in user migration and operational costs exceeding its budget.