May 23, 2022 / Unchained Daily / Laura Shin
Daily Bits✍️✍️✍️
- Do Kwon said TFL does not owe taxes in South Korea.
- Opensea launched “Seaport,” a marketplace that allows NFT bartering.
- Arthur Hayes, former BitMEX CEO, was sentenced to 2 years’ probation.
- Thousands of Blockfusion mining rigs go offline after an explosion.
Today in Crypto Adoption…
- ECB President Christine Lagarde said she will guarantee a digital euro.
- Representative Byron Donalds introduced a bill to protect investors’ ability to add Bitcoin in their 401(k)s.
- Sony announced it will enter the Metaverse.
The $$$ Corner…
- Wormhole paid $10 million to a hacker who reported a bug.
- Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam bought $75 million of company stock via his VC firm Paradigm.
What Do You Meme?
What’s Poppin’?
The Merge Is Coming
Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin confirmed that the Merge, which shifts all economic activity in Ethereum to its proof of stake chain, is happening sometime this summer. “If there are no problems, then the merge will happen in August,” Buterin said at the ETH Shanghai Web 3.0 Developer Summit.
The comments came just after the announcement of the Ropsten testnet going through the Merge in June, which will be a huge testing milestone toward Ethereum’s mainnet merge, according to ETH core developer Preston Van Loon. After being questioned about a possible date at Permissionless, a conference on DeFi and Web3, Van Loon said: “as far as we know, if everything goes to plan, August – it [The Merge] just makes sense. If we don’t have to move (the difficulty bomb), let’s do it as soon as we can.”
The Merge is the most anticipated upcoming event in the Ethereum ecosystem. While the proof-of-stake chain has been functioning since December 2020, the diverse activity of Ethereum, which includes ERC-20 tokens, DeFi apps, NFT marketplaces, gaming and more, is still on the proof-of-work chain. Switching all that to what is now called the beacon chain, which has been processing empty blocks via a proof-of-stake consensus algorithm for some time, has been compared to swapping out the engine on a plane mid-flight. People who are convinced that the Merge is not priced in, such as Anthony Sassano, founder of the Daily Gwei, say the reason the price action for ETH has been languishing is that people don’t understand the implications of the Merge, and what it means for the cryptoasset.
Recommended Reads
- Jason Levin on the future of Ethereum.
- Thor Hartvigsen on finding sustainable DeFi yield farms.
- Atare on Seaport, the new protocol for NFT marketplaces.
On The Pod…
The 5 Biggest Lessons From Terra/Luna’s Collapse, According to Tascha Che
Tascha Che, founder of Tascha Labs, unpacks the Terra/Luna debacle and reveals what she believes are the five main takeaways from its collapse. Here are some highlights from the show:
- how stablecoin issuers make money
- what caused Terra’s downfall
- why Tascha is bullish on algo stablecoins
- whether she believes undercollateralized stablecoins can work
- how fast market cap expansion without actual network effect equals death for stablecoins
- why she doesn’t believe a stablecoin’s network effects mean much for its success
- why small(er) stablecoins are better
- how blockchains mirror national economies
- which stablecoins is Tascha excited about
- how FRAX is a stablecoin that resembles fiat currencies
- whether the UST collapse will affect the stablecoin development and further regulation
- how cross-chain agreements would be helpful for the stability of the crypto ecosystem
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
