September 16, 2021       /       Unchained Daily       /       Laura Shin

Daily Bits ✍️✍️✍️

  • Google announced a partnership with Dapper Labs, the NFT company behind NBA Top Shot, to support and scale Dapper’s Flow blockchain.

  • BitMEX executive Gregory Dwyer agreed to be extradited to the US for conspiracy to evade money laundering regulations.

  • Abra, a crypto wealth management platform, raised $55 million in a Series C.

  • Canaan, a Bitcoin mining manufacturer, brought in a record$167 million in revenue during Q2.

  • Solana’s mainnet came back online Wednesday morning after the network was down for nearly 20 hours.

  • Asset manager Franklin Templeton plans to raise $20M for a blockchain venture fund.

  • Coinbase filed with the National Futures Association, its first step to allowing crypto futures trading on the exchange.

  • $1 billion worth of ether has been burned since August’s London hard fork.

  • A new amendment to the $3.5 trillion “Build Back Better” package would apply wash sales rules to digital assets if passed.

  • Bitwise filed for a bitcoin futures ETF.

  • Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin was named to Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people of 2021 list.

What Do You Meme?

What’s Poppin’?

An employee at OpenSea, the largest NFT marketplace in crypto, bought NFTs based on insider information, according to a statement issued by the company.

“Yesterday, we learned that one of our employees purchased items that they knew were set to display on our front page before they appeared there publicly,” said OpenSea.

OpenSea’s statement comes shortly after @ZuwuTV accused Nate Chastain, head of product at OpenSea, of purchasing certain NFT projects just before the platform gave it space on the front-page. Essentially, the tweets allege that Chastain used his knowledge of OpenSea’s promotion schedule to scoop up hot projects before prices spiked from its position on the front page of the marketplace.

While not necessarily insider trading, as insider trading does not exist in crypto per se, OpenSea is treating Chastain’s actions as something akin to frontrunning. The NFT marketplace posted two new guidelines for employees, explicitly forbidding any such actions in the future.

OpenSea wrote:

  • ​​OpenSea team members may not buy or sell from collections or creators while we are featuring or promoting them (e.g. on our home page); and 
  • OpenSea team members are prohibited from using confidential information to purchase or sell any NFTs, whether available on the OpenSea platform or not.

OpenSea is having a third party conduct a review. It remains to be seen whether OpenSea will keep Chastain or not.

Recommended Reads

  • Resident Advisor on DAOs:

  • Bankless on why the world needs crypto:

  • ConsenSys’s Matt Corva on crypto and regulations:

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