August 12 2022 / Unchained Daily / Laura Shin

Daily Bits✍️✍️✍️

Rune Christensen, MakerDAO cofounder, proposed that the protocol sell its USDC reserves.
After the sanctions, Tornado Cash experienced massive amounts of withdrawals.
BlackRock announced the launch of a spot Bitcoin trust for its institutional clients.
DeFi protocol dYdX blocked wallets that have recently interacted with Tornado Cash.
After suffering a DNS hijack, Curve proposed to migrate to Ethereum Name Service.
LDO, the native token of Ethereum staking platform Lido Finance, jumped 18% after the success of the Goerli Merge.
Fixed Float, a cross-chain exchange, froze $200,000 worth of ETH that was stolen in the Curve hack.

Today in Crypto Adoption…

Investment giant T. Rowe Price appointed Blue Macellari, a crypto expert, as head of the company’s digital asset strategy.
Taiwan’s government adopted Ethereum IPFS technology to prevent cyberattacks.
Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina, plans to deploy Ethereum validator nodes next year.

The $$$ Corner…

Jito Labs, an MEV infrastructure developer on Solana, raised $10 million.
Framework Ventures and Multicoin Capital led a $10.5 million round for Satellite IM, a decentralized communications platform.

What Do You Meme?

What’s Poppin’?

The Merge Has a Tentative Date

by Juan Aranovich

Ethereum core developers agreed on a potential date for the Merge, which will likely happen on September 15 or 16, said Anthony Sassano, founder of The Daily Gwei.

The Merge, which marks the moment in which the Ethereum blockchain switches from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake (PoS), is one of the most awaited events in the year in the crypto industry.

The discussion was held in a Consensus Layer call for developers yesterday, after the successful integration of the Goerli testnet into the Beacon chain.

The confirmation of the Merge date, in addition to the success of the Goerli testnet, was seen as very positive news for investors. ETH is up more than 15% in the last week. Furthermore, the ETH/BTC ratio, which tracks how Ethereum performs against Bitcoin, has increased almost 40% in the last 30 days, showing great investor confidence in the smart contract platform.

Some say that “The Flippening” (the moment when ETH potentially surpasses BTC in market cap) is coming soon. “I don’t think ETH will flip BTC before the Merge. But I do think once the Merge occurs successfully it’s only a matter of time. Structural demand vs structural supply. Can’t fight the flows,” said Hal Press, founder of North Rock Digital.

On The Pod…

Tornado Cash Sanctioned. Did the Government Overstep Its Bounds?

Jerry Brito, executive director of Coin Center, talks about Tornado Cash, why it was sanctioned, and what this means for privacy in crypto. Show highlights:

what Blender.io is and how it relates to Tornado Cash
how hackers have used Tornado Cash to launder money
whether the Office of Foreign Assets Control made a mistake, according to Jerry
how Americans were affected by the sanctions
why Jerry believes OFAC should have done an analysis to estimate how many people would be impacted by its decision
whether the sanctions should have been aimed at North Koren wallets and not the protocol
whether the sanctions are unconstitutional and whether Coin Center will litigate this
how Jerry believes Circle freezing USDC complicated everything
what the famous people who received 0.1 ETH from random accounts via Tornado Cash should do
what would happen if someone forked the Tornado Cash code and deployed a copycat smart contract to a new address
whether the sanctions signal the beginning of a privacy war on crypto
how regulators are applying the same traditional rules with crypto as they use with centralized entities

Book Update

My book, The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze, which is all about Ethereum and the 2017 ICO mania, is now available!

You can purchase it here: http://bit.ly/cryptopians

🎯 The Final Countdown?