April 27, 2022       /       Unchained Daily       /       Laura Shin

Daily Bits ✍️✍️✍️

• Fireblocks saw $500 million pour into Terra in the week after launching support for the L1.

• Yuga Labs’ Otherside metaverse will require users to pass Know Your Customer (KYC) verification to participate in this week’s land auction.

• Bluesky, the decentralized project spun out of Twitter, says it will be unaffected by the Elon Musk acquisition.

• Bybit is set to offer crypto options trading soon.

• Robinhood announced that it has laid off ~9% of its workforce.

• The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau invoked an old rule to expand its reach into fintech and crypto.

Today in Crypto Adoption…

• Fidelity will soon begin offering bitcoin investment in its 401(k) accounts; MicroStrategy announced that it plans to take advantage of this offering.

• Standard Chartered purchased land in The Sandbox.

• Fort Worth, Texas, is set to become the first city in the US to mine bitcoin.

• Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina, will allow crypto to be used for tax payments.

The $$$ Corner…

• 0x Labs, a DEX and NFT infrastructure protocol, raised$70 million in a Series B.

• Vertex, a decentralized forex platform, raised $8.5 million in seed funding.

• Former Passport Capital and Microsoft employee Joe McCann is looking to raise $1 billion for a crypto fund.

• CXIP Labs raised $6.5 million in seed funding to help fix common problems in NFT minting.

What Do You Meme?

What’s Poppin’?

Finally, An L2 Announces an Airdrop

Optimism, the third-largest Ethereum L2 by total-value locked, announced an airdrop of a governance token that will trade under the ticker OP.

The news comes as part of a grander strategy dubbed “Optimism Collective,” which the Optimism team described as “a large-scale experiment in digital democratic governance” in a blog post yesterday. As part of the plan, Optimism Foundation is being created as a “steward” for the Collective’s early days of governance, with plans to “dissolve” once the network is substantially bootstrapped.

Interestingly, Optimism is splitting control of Optimism Collective into two groups: the “Token House” and “Citizens’ House.” Token House is set to govern the Optimism protocol with OP tokens via on-chain voting – which is more or less industry standard. With Citizens’ House, which will launch later in 2022, Optimism is paving a new path. The L2 plans to use soulbound NFTs, or NFTs that are non-transferable, to allow non-token OP holders to decide how future revenue collected by Optimism is used.

“Together, the two houses of the collective will drive a powerful flywheel, funding public goods that make Optimism blockspace more valuable, leading to more revenue for public goods, and so on,” wrote the Optimism team yesterday.

Notably, the “Token House” will be kickstarted through various OP airdrops rounds, which Optimism calls “seasons.” Over 250,000 addresses are eligible for Airdrop #1, where 5% of the supply will be gifted to crypto participants who have used crypto bridges, made a transaction on Optimism, donated to Gitcoin, voted in a DAO, and/or signed on a multisig that executed more than ten transactions. The airdrop will commence in Q2, with future airdrops up to 9% of the token’s total supply in the works.

Perhaps not coincidentally, Optimism’s total-value locked has risen 15% over the past seven days to 10.46% of all Ethereum L2s. Arbitrum and dYdX, the two largest L2s, have seen TVL growth of -1.17% and 0.55% over that same time period – hinting that Optimism could see a surge in activity in a post-token environment, especially given that future airdrops are being promised.

Recommended Reads

1. Erik Voorhees on ShapeShift’s transition to a DAO:

2. James McGinniss on how Bitcoin fits into the current energy and currency climate:

3. Chris Lehane on web3 and midterms:

On The Pod…

Amy Wu on Why FTX Is So Excited About Web3 Gaming

Amy Wu, head of FTX ventures and gaming initiatives, discusses her role at FTX, what problems need to be addressed in the web3 gaming world, and her thoughts on APE and Yuga Labs as a board member of Apecoin DAO and investor in Yuga Labs. Show highlights:

• what Amy does at FTX

• how her background investing in gaming prepared her for her role at FTX

• Amy’s vision for FTX’s gaming studio

• how FTX is helping gaming studios get into web3 and NFTs

• why Amy thinks blockchain games are the evolution of the ‘free to play’ gaming archetype

• what best practices Amy believes web2 companies should implement when transitioning into web3 gaming

• why there is so much backlash against traditional companies incorporating NFTs (hint: it’s not just about environmental concerns)

• how FTX Ventures is looking to deploy capital and why it is so interested in Korea and India, specifically

• why Amy thinks the L1 wars will end with just a few winning chains

• why “consumer products” are going to be more important than high throughput blockchains in onboarding the next billion users

• what Amy’s role as a board member of Apecoin DAO is like

• what Amy thinks about APE and Yuga Labs

• trends for the rest of 2022: social media, dating apps, and more…

Book Update

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