June 9, 2022       /       Unchained Daily       /       Laura Shin

Daily Bits✍️✍️✍️

  • Liquid staking providers are bucking the bear market trend with “heavy inflows” of capital.

  • Yuga Labs revoked a line of code that would have allowed them to mint an infinite amount of Bored Ape NFTs.

  • An attacker was able to get away with $20 million in OP tokens after a transfer between the Optimism PBC team and Wintermute went awry.

  • The New York Department of Financial Services published new guidance for dollar-backed stablecoins.

Today in Crypto Adoption…

  • PayPal now allows users to withdraw crypto to non-custodial wallets.

  • Litecoin’s new privacy features lead to Korean exchanges delisting it.

  • NFT and crypto technologies are highlighted at Cannes Film Festival.

The $$$ Corner…

  • Frax has proposed a $20 million buyback of FXS tokens.

  • Valkyrie Investments raised $11.15 million in strategic venture funding.

  • Ledger and VC Cathay Innovation launched a $110 million venture fund.

  • Ecuadorian payments company Kushki raised $100 million at over a $1 billion valuation.

What Do You Meme?

What’s Poppin’?

Ethereum’s Ropsten Testnet Merges Successfully

Yesterday morning, Ethereum’s Ropsten testnet, the largest of its three testnets, completed the protocol’s first successful public merge of an active test network. “Merge” is the term used to describe bringing economic activity onto an empty proof of stake chain.  Ropsten is Ethereum’s largest test network; Ethereum’s other two testnets, Goerli and Seoplia, are expected to merge as well in the coming months.

In the proposed merge of the Ethereum mainnet (to be enacted “Q3/Q4 2022”), the existing Proof of Work chain will be merged into the Proof of Stake chain currently being run on the Beacon Chain with a set of independent validators each staking 32 ETH.

While Ropsten’s successful merge bodes well for the technical aspects of the eventual mainnet merge, concerns are building about the centralization of staking services from both a client (software) and provider (staking-as-a-service) perspective. Currently, the Prysm client has approximately a two-thirds market share in the validator set for Ethereum’s Beacon Chain, which concerns some in the community. Furthermore, outdated client software was identified as a potentialcause of a seven-block “reorganization” (when the chain forks and several blocks pass before a winner is finalized) two weeks ago. In a similar vein, more than a third of all validators are controlled by staking services (of which Lido is far and away a leader), and a significant portion of the rest are operated by centralized exchanges.

Recommended Reads

  1. Haseeb Qureshi on blockchain bridges:

  1. @puntium on the steady growth of ‘good things’ in crypto:

  1. Hivemapper picks Solana for global mapping software:

On The Pod…

How Soulbound Tokens Could Reduce Speculation and Improve DAO Voting

Glen Weyl, RadicalxChange Foundation founder and political economist & social technologist at Microsoft Special Projects, and Puja Ohlhaver, strategist at Flashbots, discuss “soulbound tokens” and their implications for collaboration and social organization in a variety of spaces.

Topics covered include:

  • how Glen got involved in crypto, wrote a book, and came to co-write a paper with Vitalik Buterin

  • how Puja studied economics and got in touch with Glen in pursuit of a middle ground between left and right politics

  • what soulbound NFTs are and how they work

  • how Vitalik’s paper articulated how the concept of the soulbound token could advance decentralized collaboration in web3

  • how decentralized reputation can enable larger networks of coordination

  • how identity can be understood through the lens of community participation

  • how the name ‘soulbound token’ came about

  • how these tokens could provide a technology for those who value scarcity but disdain speculation

  • how identity-dedicated tokens could work on a technical level (including recovery)

  • what is DeSoc and why is it important?

  • how non-transferable tokens can improve DAO organization, including resolving issues with quadratic funding

  • how identity-locked tokens can be protected from bots and AI abuse

  • how these tokens could support community privacy and responsible information disclosure

Book Update

My book, The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze, which is all about Ethereum and the 2017 ICO mania, is now available!

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