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The LI.FI bridge has been hacked for at least $8M. This has resulted in unauthorized withdrawals of up to $5.8M in ether and various stablecoins. LI.FI has advised users against interacting with its dapps while the issue is investigated. Users who did not set infinite approval should not be at risk.
Around 100 people donated crypto to Donald Trump's presidential campaign last quarter. Notable names included the Winklevoss twins and Kraken co-founder Jesse Powell. Crypto made up 1% of donation volume. Trump's acceptance of crypto has had a positive media impact on the crypto industry.
Chain GDP is a new on-chain metric designed to accurately gauge economic activity on a blockchain that focuses on the sum of all application fees generated within a chain. It is difficult to manipulate this metric (e.g., wash trading) because it only accounts for fees paid across various applications. Chain GDP aims to provide a clearer and more tamper-resistant picture of a blockchain's economic activity compared to traditional metrics like TVL or transaction count.
Uniswap has officially released its wallet browser extension. The extension is positioned directly in the browser sidebar, eliminating pop-ups and providing seamless access to crypto transactions. Uniswap's extension also offers automatic network switching and supports multiple blockchains, integrating smoothly with other Uniswap products.
The number of crypto owners worldwide is 400-500 million, over half of which come from Asia. The top 20 L1 chains boast 75 million monthly active users, and L2s have 20 million MAUs. 44% of non-owners cite instability and lack of government protection as reasons they will never buy crypto. The most popular cryptos in the US are Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dogecoin, and Cardano.
This post describes an experiment that evaluated the crypto onramp experience for new users using Phantom Wallet. The experiment demonstrated significant challenges in the fiat-to-crypto conversion process. None of the available payment providers supported credit card transactions, potentially because of concerns around fraud and chargebacks, posing a large obstacle for retail onboarding. There is a need for more streamlined and integrated onramping processes to increase crypto user adoption.
This bull cycle, Ethereum may be the only tokenization platform with a spot ETF classified as a commodity, giving it a massive advantage in onboarding institutions like BlackRock's BUIDL fund. It is also the chain of choice for Coinbase, as evidenced by the Base L2. Institutions will pay premium transaction fees for its stability and liveness, and they will value its high cash flow and real yield.
Consumer apps do not get the same attention as high-valuation infra projects.
The protocol wars were a multi-decade debate on what standard the Internet should use, concluding with the adoption of TCP/IP.
Vitalik Buterin shares thoughts on how too much investment is going into specific types of infrastructure that benefit from high-risk ventures, while other essential infrastructures are underfunded.
Stripe will permit Europeans to use both their credit and debit cards to purchase Bitcoin