December 2, 2021       /       Unchained Daily       /       Laura Shin

Daily Bits ✍️✍️✍️

  • Fidelity launched a spot bitcoin ETF in Canada.

  • Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen clarified that some non-custodial entities will not be subject to FATF standards in a letter to Senator Toomey.

  • The jury in Kleiman v. Wright has not come to a conclusion on the trial.

  • A December 8th Congressional hearing will feature major players from the crypto industry, including Circle’s Jeremy Allaire, FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried, Bitfury’s Brian Brooks, Paxos’ Chad Cascarilla, Stellar’s Denelle Dixon and Coinbase’s Alesia Haas.

  • DEX aggregator 1inch announced the closure of a $175 million Series B funding round.

  • A change to ad requirements on Meta, formerly known as Facebook, will make it easier for crypto-related ads to run on the platform.

  • Metaverse land sales in Solana and Ethereum topped$100 million in the last week alone.

  • Crypto.com (disclosure: a sponsor) spent $216 million in an acquisition of two US-based derivative exchange platforms yesterday.

  • FTX.US added support for Ethereum NFTs.

  • Hashed, a South Korean VC, launched a $200 million fund to invest in web3.

What Do You Meme?

What’s Poppin’?

Square Goes 3D

 

Yesterday, Square Inc. announced that it is changing its name to Block in a rebrand that will take full effect on December 10th.

 

According to a company press release, the rebrand to Block is an acknowledgment of company growth. Since 2009, Square has expanded its reach outside of small business solutions by adding the likes of Cash App, TIDAL, and TBD54566975.

 

“We built the Square brand for our Seller business, which is where it belongs,” said Jack Dorsey, co-founder and CEO of Block, in the press release. “’Block’ is a new name, but our purpose of economic empowerment remains the same. No matter how we grow or change, we will continue to build tools to help increase access to the economy.”

 

Square, the fintech Seller business, will continue to function under its original name. However, Square Crypto is being renamed Spiral. The company explained the name as reflecting the “focus on #bitcoin as it continues to grow like a spiral from a single point, encompassing more and more space until it touches everything.”

 

The Square news comes during a week chock full of mainstream companies adopting the crypto industry:

Recommended Reads

  • Lyn Alden on proof-of-stake:

  • CoinDesk on the future of money:

  • Ikigai’s Travis Kling on what happened in crypto during the month of November:

On The Pod…

Will Solana Be the Execution Layer and Ethereum the Settlement Layer?

 

On Unchained, two co-founders of Solana Labs, Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal, dive deeply into the Solana ecosystem, discussing everything from the price of SOL to the Solana network outage to the competition between Ethereum and Solana. Show highlights:

    • why Raj thinks SOL’s market cap grew from $86 million to $68 billion in less than a year
    • Anatoly’s and Raj’s background and how they found themselves working together to build Solana
    • why Anatoly thinks Solana will be a general-purpose blockchain rather than specializing in gaming or high frequency trading
    • Anatoly’s goal to make Solana the first billion-user blockchain
    • why Raj thinks NFTs on Solana have been so popular
    • why, in the opinion of Raj and Anatoly, Solana’s purpose has shifted away from high-frequency trading
    • how NFTs could replace ads
    • why “everything is DeFi”
    • how Solana Labs plans to allocate the recent $314 million funding round it raised
    • what lessons Anatoly learned from the 18-hour September network outage
    • technically speaking, what happened to cause Solana’s network outage
    • why Anatoly believes that outages, at this stage, aren’t necessarily a bad thing
    • whether “trading mercenaries” dominated at Solana Breakpoint
    • why developers are interested in building on Solana
    • how Solana and Ethereum compare as execution and settlement layers
    • why Raj doesn’t like framing competition between Solana and Ethereum as a fight
    • how Anatoly views the competition between Ethereum and Solana
    • whether the arrival of Neon Labs, which is bringing EVM to Solana, could lead to developers leaving Ethereum
    • how NFTs and Phantom wallets are bringing in new users for Solana
    • whether Raj and Anatoly would roll back Solana if something like Ethereum’s DAO hack were to occur
    • why Solana has the competitive advantage in throughput, according to Anatoly
    • what would happen if FTX cofounder and CEO Sam Bankman-Fried gave up on Solana
    • their predictions for Solana five years from now

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 Feb. 22. Pre-order it today!

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