August 1, 2022 / Unchained Daily / Laura Shin
Daily Bits✍️✍️✍️
- The Federal Reserve and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. issued a cease-and-desist letter to Voyager to stop misleading customers about having FDIC insurance.
- Aave DAO voted in favor of creating GHO, an Aave-based stablecoin.
- Yuga Labs adjusted Meebits royalties to receive a 5% royalty on all secondary sales.
- Cardano’s Vasil upgrade has been delayed by few weeks for more testing.
- KuCoin is now offering users exposure to blue-chip NFT projects via NFT ETFs.
- Crypto exchange CoinFLEX announced layoffs amid market downturn.
- FTX US plans to launch an options trading platform.
Today in Crypto Adoption…
- Tiffany & Co. is releasing “NFTiffs,” a collection of 250 digital passes for CryptoPunk holders that can be redeemed for a custom-designed pendant in the likeness of a CryptoPunk.
- Schwab Asset Management will list its first crypto-related ETF on August 4.
- The FDIC clarified that its insurance coverage does not protect crypto company failures.
The $$$ Corner…
- Babel Finance lost over $280 million in customer funds through trading.
What Do You Meme?
What’s Poppin’?
Three Stats to Remember July By
The month of July is over. Here are three notable trends to remember the month by (outside of the never-ending Celsius/Voyager/3AC drama, which was covered on Unchained here, here, here, and here).
- NFT marketplace volume fell to ~$630 million in July, the lowest number since… last July.
- USDT hit its all-time low in stablecoin market capitalization dominance during July at 45.61%, according to data from The Block. The decrease in USDT supremacy has coincided with an increase in USDC, which now holds a 32.14% share of the stablecoin market via a supply of 45.2 billion USDC in circulation.
- July’s two biggest winners in the top 100 tokens by market capitalization were LDO and ETC. Both tokens appear to have caught investor attention in the lead-up to The Merge, where Ethereum will move from a proof-of-work consensus algorithm to a proof-of-stake. Lido DAO (LDO), which governs Lido Finance, the largest liquid staker in the market, shot up 430% over the past 30 days as The Merge date became more solidified. Ethereum Classic was also hot, running up 166% in July as investors like AntPool invested in the ecosystem with the idea that mining power could move over to the network after Ethereum transitions to PoS.
Recommended Reads
- Forta’s Andrew Beal on the spectrum of decentralization
- @shivsakhuja on NFT use-cases
- Mark Murdock (the former Unchained editorial asst.) on native assets
On The Pod…
Welcome to The Chopping Block! Crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, and Tarun Chitra chop it up about the latest news in the digital asset industry. In this episode, Balaji Srinivasan discusses his latest book, “The Network State,” how different digital tools like crypto will help empower network states, and analyzes how crypto fits into the current political environment. Show topics:
- why Balaji wrote a book and why he is so enthralled with a digitized future
- what a “network state” is, and what components of crypto are embedded into the idea
- why Balaji is interested in “re-centralization”
- why Balaji believes that networks states need to be recognized by real nations
- what makes a network state better than a physical nation or digital community
- why Balaji thinks a community of people who eat a keto diet could be the first network state
- why Balaji thinks the network states will be a good thing
- where Bitcoin maximalism fits into the left vs. right political divide, woke culture, and Christianity
- what the overlap between politics and crypto will be going forward
- what is the best way to learn, read, and debate “The Network State”
- where crypto tools and communities have gone wrong so far and how the industry can improve going forward
- what lessons Balaji learned from the tech bubble in the early 2000s
- what Balaji’s over-under is for when the first network state will arrive
- Balaji’s pitch for a 50:50 BTC/ETH portfolio (note: not investment advice)
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
