November 15, 2021       /       Unchained Daily       /       Laura Shin

Daily Bits ✍️✍️✍️

  • The SEC rejected VanEck’s spot bitcoin ETF on Friday.

  • Pew Research: 16% of Americans have personally invested in cryptocurrencies.

  • A DAO is attempting to buy the US Constitution.

  • Morgan Stanley says the metaverse is the next big investment theme.

  • Forte, a blockchain gaming startup, raised $725 million in a Series B.

  • Jimmy Fallon purchased a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT, coinciding with the trading volume for BAYC spiking900%.

  • Cryptocurrencies (and perhaps other digital payment methods) account for more than 14% of AMC’s online transactions.

  • The SEC is asking for a court order to compel Terra CEO Do Kwon to comply with the investigative subpoenas.

  • Cream Finance’s token, CREAM, plunged on news that the solution to compensating users who were impacted by a recent hack involves inflating the token supply.

  • OpenSea has burned more than 100,000 ETH.

  • Tezos’s NFT marketplace, named Hic et Nunc, appears to have shut downwithout warning.

What Do You Meme?

What’s Poppin’?

Taproot Has Arrived

Bitcoin experienced a software upgrade this weekend. The upgrade, called Taproot, was activated at block 709,632 at 5:15 UTC on Sunday morning, marking the first major upgrade to Bitcoin’s code since 2017.

Taproot introduces “Schnorr signatures” to Bitcoin, which will improve the privacy and security of the network by displaying complex, multi-signature transactions in a similar manner to basic transfers on-chain. In addition, the scalability of Bitcoin should improve due to swapping out the old cryptographic framework, ECDSA, for the new Schnorr signatures.

To put that in plain English, Taproot improves privacy and security for users by obscuring the details of complex transactions. Scalability is improved because Schnoor signatures are more efficient than the old signature protocol (ECDSA), making transactions cheaper and lightweight.

However, for average Bitcoin users, Taproot will most likely have little effect, according to Pieter Wuille, one of the developers behind the upgrade.

The upgrade was voted and scheduled earlier this year when over 90% of miners decided to “signal” their support for Taproot.

Recommended Reads

  • Arthur Hayes on inflation:

  • Theodora Chu, a former product manager at Stripe, on falling down the crypto rabbit hole:

  • Naavik research on the decline of Axie Infinity earnings:

On The Pod…

Alameda Research’s Sam Trabucco: What Solana Does Better Than Ethereum

Sam Trabucco, co-CEO of Alameda Research, discusses the different price drivers that led to BTC, ETH, SOL, and LUNA reaching new all-time highs in the past week. Show highlights:

  • why Sam believes no bad news from regulators is good news

  • what effect leverage has on the crypto markets

  • the significance of Bitcoin hitting a new all-time high and the crypto market cap reaching $3 trillion

  • how the approval of a bitcoin futures ETF affected the crypto market

  • what Sam thinks about the actions of US crypto regulators (hint: it’s probably not what you would think)

  • why Sam thinks ETH’s price hit a new all-time this week

  • what Sam thinks about the changes to ETH monetary policy and the upcoming merge to Ethereum 2.0

  • how Sam views the competition among layer 1 blockchains and why he is not a fan of maximalism

  • what factors he believes are driving the price of SOL

  • what sort of projects are being built on Solana, and why people are excited about the ecosystem

  • what Sam thinks about Terra passing a proposal to burn LUNA

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