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Celsius has filed a lawsuit against Tether, seeking $3.5 billion in Bitcoin, damages, and legal fees, alleging that Tether improperly liquidated its BTC collateral during Celsius' bankruptcy without allowing it to provide additional collateral. Tether denies the allegations, calling the lawsuit baseless and asserting that Celsius requested the liquidation to close out its position.
Tether (USDT stablecoin issuer) plans to double its workforce to around 200 employees by mid-2025, focusing on expanding its development, investment, and compliance teams in response to significant growth and record profits. This strategic expansion comes as Tether continues to dominate the stablecoin market, despite ongoing competition and past controversies over its reserves.
$FLY introduces cross-restaurant loyalty rewards and allows restaurants to save money on card processing fees by accepting it for purchases. Blackbird's recently updated Flypaper introduces Flynet, an upcoming L3 powered by the F2 token that will be the hub of Blackbird activity. F2 will be distributed based on FLY usage. Blackbird hopes to commoditize the experience of being a restaurant “regular” by sharing data within its network and creating an interaction flywheel.
App tokens historically have had problems with value capture, proper governance, and regulatory compliance. a16z Crypto has designed a fee tracing mechanism where pools can distribute fees compliant with a token holder's regulatory jurisdiction. A curator entity could handle finding compliant frontends and users for a fee, thus removing any additional burden from protocol governance.
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This edition of Consumer Notes highlights key developments in consumer crypto, including the rise of innovative platforms like Makememe.now, marginfi's The Arena, and dumpy.fun, which are pushing the boundaries of meme coins. It also covers major updates such as the launch of the Pudgy Penguin Consumer Chain on Abstract's testnet, Telegram's new crypto-integrated browser and mini-app store, and Blackbird's Flynet, a blockchain-based payment system aimed at revolutionizing restaurant loyalty programs.
This market map from Electric Capital highlights over 250 crypto projects working in the zero-knowledge space. It is categorized based on a spectrum of core tech to user-facing, further subcategorized into specific use cases. Years of ZK research are coming to life by advancing scalability and trustlessness and introducing new use cases across all of crypto. 80% of projects are infrastructure-focused, though the application sector is expected to grow.
On August 9th, Bitgo announced it will transfer custody of WBTC to a joint venture with jurisdictions in Hong Kong and Singapore as part of a partnership with Justin Sun and the Tron ecosystem. In response, and due to previously-acquired Sun projects faltering, BA Labs has proposed removing WBTC as collateral on Maker and SparkLend. tBTC is being suggested as an alternative.
Adidas has partnered with NFT collection Doodles to create collectible packs redeemable for physical apparel. The packs, retailing for $5, could include digital wearables or a tracksuit and shoes with art of Deysi, the mascot from the Doodles song by Pharrell Williams and Coi Leray.
Two prominent US mobile network carriers are testing Helium's MOBILE network to offload data traffic.
@pumpdotfun shared a stark update from the trenches of the meme coin world: out of 16,357 tokens launched in the past 24 hours, only 175 reached Raydium, and a mere 19 remain above a 69k market cap—resulting in a slim 0.12% success rate from launch to profitability.
Ripple has started testing its stablecoin, Ripple USD (RLUSD), on both the XRP Ledger and Ethereum networks.
Jupiter Exchange is tackling issues with its spot product, where efforts to protect users, like dynamic slippage and gas settings, have caused frustration during volatility, and its free quote API is being abused.