September 14, 2021       /       Unchained Daily       /       Laura Shin

Daily Bits ✍️✍️✍️

  • SEC Chair Gary Gensler believes many crypto exchanges need to register with the SEC.

  • Recur, an NFT platform, raised $50M in a Series A, valuing the company at $333M.

  • Democrats are eying expanded crypto regulations, specifically the wash rule, as part of a trillion-dollar tax and spending plan.

  • El Salvador will exempt foreign investors from tax on BTC profits.

  • Coinbase plans to sell $1.5B in debt to fund product development and M&A.

  • Walmart is not partnering with Litecoin, despite reports.

  • MicroStrategy announced the purchase of another 5,050 BTC for its balance sheet.

  • The Bank of Russia has designs to launch a digital ruble by 2030.

  • BlockFi CEO wants federal regulators to weigh in on crypto lending.

  • A majority of institutional investors are open to investing in crypto.

What Do You Meme?

What’s Poppin’?

Three trends to keep an eye on:

 

1. Solana > Bitcoin and Ethereum, according to digital asset fund investors. 

For the week ending September 10th, Solana (SOL) digital asset funds led the crypto space in inflows, hinting that institutional investors remain bullish on the smart contract blockchain. According to data from CoinShares, Solana-based funds saw an influx of nearly $50M last week. For context, Bitcoin funds only grew by $200,000, while Ethereum witnessed a $6.3M outflow.

2. An NFT bear market? 

After a prolific August, it appears the NFT market could be heading for a bit of a downturn. Data from The Block shows that NFT trading volume dipped to $311M last week — the lowest figure since mid-July and less than 1/3rd the volume the NFT industry experienced during its busiest week in August.

 

3. Arbitrum TVL is mooning. 

Total value locked (TVL) on Arbitrum has ballooned from under $25M to start the month to over $2.2B as of publishing time.

Arbitrum is a layer 2 solution aiming to provide cheaper fees and higher throughput for Ethereum transactions. While Aave and Uniswap, two of the largest DeFi protocols, are live on Arbitrum, they do not seem to be the main attraction. So far, users appear to be flocking to Arbitrum to take advantage of a liquidity mining program based on a meme coin, ArbiNYAN (NYAN). Of the $2.2B locked into Arbitrum, NYAN accounts for approximately $1.44B of that TVL, according to DeFi Llama.

As with most liquidity mining programs, which offer extremely high yields in exchange for users staking tokens, NYAN tokens have precipitously dropped in value, falling under $1 after hitting its high of $7 over the weekend.

However, Arbitrum’s growth would still be considered substantial without the help of ArbiNYAN. At nearly $800M in non-NYAN TVL, Arbitrum is the largest L2 solution on Ethereum.*

(*editors note: Polygon has $8.4B in TVL,  which would make it substantially larger than Arbitrum. Polygon, however, is better classified as a sidechain than strictly a layer 2 solution.)

Recommended Reads

  • SEC Chair Gary Gensler on regulating crypto (and more):

  • Not Boring on Web 3.0 interfaces and user experience:

  • Compass Mining’s Zack Voell on Bitcoin transaction fees:

On The Pod…

Can Bitcoin Be Secured Only by Transaction Fees? Two Researchers Sound Off

 

Once the block reward diminishes greatly, can Bitcoin be secured only by transaction fees? On Unchained, Bitcoin writer Vijay Boyapati and Ethereum Foundation’s Justin Drake debate the merits of Bitcoin’s security model, which Drake says will largely rely on transaction fees as soon as within 20-30 years, not in 100+ years. Highlights:

  • Justin’s and Vijay’s professional backgrounds
  • why Justin thinks Bitcoin cannot survive solely on fees
  • how Bitcoin is currently secured
  • what makes Bitcoin’s security subjective rather than binary
  • how much it would cost in dollars to 51% attack Bitcoin
  • what the Bitcoin network could do in response to a 51% attack
  • how to calculate Bitcoin’s security budget
  • why Bitcoin’s price can’t go exponential forever
  • whether a “nuclear option” for Bitcoin miners could protect against a 51% attack
  • why nation-states could be either pro or anti-Bitcoin
  • why a Bitcoin Standard could be similar to the Gold Standard
  • how Bitcoin will change going forward, and why Vijay thinks transaction fees will increase
  • why Justin does not think transaction fees will increase enough to secure Bitcoin’s base layer
  • how Justin would fix Bitcoin’s security model — and why he thinks the 21 million hard cap is a meme
  • why Vijay does not think Bitcoin’s security model will ever change — especially the 21 million hard cap
  • what Justin thinks Ethereum is doing better than Bitcoin
  • why Vijay thinks Ethereum will fail

Book Update

My book, The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze, is now available for pre-order now.

The book, which is all about Ethereum and the 2017 ICO mania, comes out Jan. 18. Pre-order it today!

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