August 16, 2021       /       Unchained Daily       /       Laura Shin

Daily Bits ✍️✍️✍️

  • Polygon acquired Hermez Network for $250M, marking the first merger of blockchain networks. 
  • Yesterday was the 50th anniversary of Bretton Woods. 
  • Fortune raised $1.3M in an NFT sale. 
  • FTX.US plans to offer crypto derivatives trading in less than a year. 
  • Cardano plans to launch smart contracts functionality in September.
  • Bitcoin mining difficulty increased for the second adjustment in a row. 
  • The IRS will not be going after miners, regardless of the “broker” definition found in the infrastructure bill. 
  • “The community for doge is the strongest when it comes to using it as a medium of exchange.” – Mark Cuban
  • Walmart is looking to hire a digital currency and crypto product lead.

What Do You Meme?

What’s Poppin’?

Volume on OpenSea since the beginning of August is poppin’. 

The NFT marketplace recorded nearly $950M in volume in the past 15 days, according to data from Dune Analytics.

In lockstep with the rising tide of volume, user growth and NFT sales also observed marked increases on the marketplace.

  • OpenSea users, someone with a registered account and one purchase, jumped from ~62,000 in July to 100,000+ in August.
  • NFT monthly sales rose ~47% since last July — to over 650,000. (For context, in August 2020, OpenSea saw 3,590 NFTs sold on its platform.)

OpenSea’s surge in popularity is leading to massive amounts of ETH being burned. After EIP 1559 went live eleven days ago, data from ultrasound.money shows OpenSea as the leading ETH burner — by a pretty wide margin.

At its current pace, OpenSea is burning nearly half an ETH per second. At publishing time yesterday, the NFT marketplace accounted for about 12% of all ETH burns since the London hard fork. 

Recommended Reads

  • CoinDesk on stablecoin backing:

  • An open letter to Senator Elizabeth Warren about Bitcoin: 

  • Sam Bankman-Fried on Coinbase’s Q2 results:

On The Pod…

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