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According to Vice Economy Minister Maurizio Leo, Italy plans to increase the capital gains tax on bitcoin and other crypto from 26% to 42% in its 2025 budget to generate funds for social support programs. This move comes despite Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni's earlier statement that there would be no new taxes for citizens. Taxes for other assets will stay at 26%.
In its annual report, a16z Crypto found that crypto activity and usage are at all-time highs, with over 220 million monthly active addresses. Stablecoins are the clearest example of product-market fit with $8.2 trillion in transaction volume in Q2, doubling Visa's volume. Scaling costs have dropped by over 99%, and the crypto x AI narrative has legitimate use cases. NFTs are less speculative and have become social experiences.
Fuel Labs has launched Fuel Ignition, a high-performance Ethereum L2 solution powered by the FuelVM. It is designed to combat blockchain centralization by creating scalable architecture on consumer hardware. Ignition offers fast, low-cost transactions with parallel execution, supports all Ethereum and Solana wallets, and aims to retain Ethereum's core values of decentralization, security, and community-driven development.
Conduit G2 is a new, production-ready sequencer that's 10x more powerful than default sequencers for Arbitrum Nitro and Optimism Superchains. It delivers 50-100 Megagas/s, equivalent to nearly 5,000 ETH transfers per second, and has a long-term goal of achieving Gigagas speeds. G2 is already live on Gravity Chain and Proof of Play.
Time is a platform that tokenizes creators' time into redeemable currency, allowing users to purchase “minutes” priced on a bonding curve and redeem them for events like calls, messages, and group chats, with ~95% of redeemed value going to the creator. Addressing weaknesses of previous SocialFi apps like Friendtech, Time offers features like redemption options, sustainable third-party extensibility, and creator-controlled pricing, making it a promising evolution in the creator monetization space.
Four EIPs related to blob management and calldata costs aiming to optimize Ethereum's DA and fee mechanisms have been advanced to consideration status. Despite concerns for solo stakers about increased bandwidth requirements, they would lower the max block size. Reducing the minimum stake for running a node would be a bad idea due to the need for accountability and sybil resistance. Out-of-protocol options already allow solo-stakers to stake with for lower collateral.
Ethereum has not won the L1 wars - Solana, Avalanche, and Near have innovated to remain competitive. New L2s now resemble past L1s, relying on low fees and airdrop farming for user retention and acquisition instead of proper product-market fit. The unclear value accrual from L2s to ETH and the resurgence of alt-L1s could explain ETH's price stagnation.
Despite strong fundamentals, liquid tokens of real crypto businesses are undervalued and represent a compelling investment case. This author contrasts this value with memecoins, suggesting each has merit for different reasons. The market is shifting toward fundamentally driven valuations, and there may be a time when altcoins with strong fundamentals outperform. One investment approach is to be in both memecoins and high-quality value-driven altcoins.
According to a Tren Finance research report, the RWA tokenization sector, currently valued at $185B, could grow over 50x to reach around $10T by 2030.
PYUSD has experienced a 40% drop in market cap, from over $1B in August to $618M.
Coinbase has begun enabling gas fees to be paid in any token when an app uses an ERC-20 paymaster.
“Religious energy” – a combination of compelling narratives and ideological drive – is a leading indicator of success for emerging blockchain ecosystems.