November 22, 2021       /       Unchained Daily       /       Laura Shin

Daily Bits ✍️✍️✍️

  • Binance announced a direct integration with Arbitrum One, an Ethereum layer 2 solution.

  • Square unveiled a whitepaper for tbDEX, a decentralized protocol that lets users exchange BTC, fiat, or real-world goods.

  • El Salvador president Nayib Buklele announced plans to build the first “Bitcoin City,” which will be funded through the issuance of a billion-dollar Bitcoin bond.

  • Kenneth Griffin, the founder of Citadel, was unmasked as the buyer who outbid ConstitutionDAO for the US Constitution.

  • Maple Finance and Alameda Research launched the first on-chain syndicated loan vehicle in DeFi.

  • Binance US is set to close a pre-IPO funding round in the next one to two months.

  • Snapshot Labs raised $4 million in seed funding.

  • Former US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton believescryptocurrencies have the potential to undermine the dollar as the reserve currency.

  • Copper, a cryptocurrency trading infrastructure firm, is in talks with investors to raise funds at a valuation of $3 billion.

What Do You Meme?

What’s Poppin’?

Zcash Pumps On Proof-of-Stake News

On Friday, the Electronic Coin Company (ECC), the developer behind Zcash, unveiled a new roadmap for the next three years.

 

Its goal is fully to instantiate Zcash, currently mainly a privacy coin, as a Web 3 technology through a three-step strategy:

  1. An official ECC wallet

  2. Proof-of-stake consensus

  3. Interoperability

 

As currently constituted, ZEC is a Bitcoin fork that uses cryptographic techniques, called zero-knowledge proofs, to obscure certain information in transactions, such as addresses and transactions amounts.

 

“The next generation of the internet, colloquially Web 3, is upon us. In this new internet, each individual is self-sovereign. There are no centralized gatekeepers to decide who can participate. There are no king-makers who determine who wins and who loses,” wrote the ECC team. “In this internet, ZEC will be a critical means for economic good and used in solutions that protect privacy and liberties. But for that to happen, we need to work together to make it easy for ZEC to be used within and across this new fabric,” the team added.

 

Through a native wallet, ECC will have a more direct relationship with Zcash users, allowing the developer to “rapidly rollout new features” based on feedback. ECC plans to release the wallet by 2022 and will open-source the code.

 

By moving to proof-of-stake, ECC hopes to reduce ZEC’s energy footprint. In addition, ECC believes that a move to PoS could unlock a “possible path to on-chain governance mechanisms.” ECC stated that a “shift to proof of stake is achievable within three years” if everything goes according to plan.

 

Most interestingly, ECC revealed interest in the “Cosmos stack” when outlining its interest in cross-chain interoperability. By building on and leveraging an already existing technology base, interoperability for Zcash could become “more accessible, more quickly,” according to the ECC.

 

“We have mapped out a high-level roadmap for the next three years. It’s aggressive but achievable and will require separate but integrated workstreams with key decision points on the way, including feature prioritization, platform and tool selection, and go-to-market plans,” concluded the ECC team.

 

In response to the outline, Zcash (ZEC) almost immediately began rallying, jumping from a low of $146.17 on Thursday to a high of $183.47 on Friday night. By Sunday afternoon, ZEC had crossed $225, marking an increase of 54% since Thursday.

Recommended Reads

  • a16z’s Chris Dixon on demand for block space:

  • Scalar Capital’s Linda Xie on social tokens:

  • @punk6529 on securing your NFTs:

On The Pod…

ConstitutionDAO Did Not Win the Auction. But It Demonstrated the Power of DAOs

Will Papper, SyndicateDAO co-founder and ConstitutionDAO contributor, tells the story of how a group of internet friends came together as a DAO to crowdfund a $41 million bid at a Sotheby’s auction for a physical copy of the US Constitution. Show highlights:

  • how Will and other ConstitutionDAO members feel after losing the auction

  • the significance of ConstitutionDAO despite its loss

  • whether Will knows who the other bidder was

  • why museums began reaching out to ConstitutionDAO and seem to be excited about DAOs moving forward

  • why there was so much confusion over who was the bidder for the DAO and whether it had won

  • why ConstitutionDAO did not bid more than $41 million — even though the crowdfund was at nearly $50 million

  • why ConstitutionDAO did not have a crypto-whale help keep the bidding war going

  • how ConstitutionDAO plans to refund participants

  • what Will thinks about using a layer 2 solution to refund ETH for ConstitutionDAO donations

  • how the idea for ConstitutionDAO came about

  • what role Will had in the formation of ConstitutionDAO

  • what lessons can be learned from ConstitutionDAO

  • what’s next for DAOs in general

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