James' Crypto Weekly - August 28, 2021
Entering the era of stablecoin wars, network fragmentations, and Play-to-Earn economy
đ°Â News
EU will make Bitcoin traceable and ban anonymous crypto wallets in anti-money laundering drive. The EU's executive branch announces a new proposal requiring cryptocurrency exchanges to collect customers' identifying information, bringing them in line with the "Know Your Customer" (KYS) rules already imposed on other financial institutions. Link
Binance now requires new customers to supply a government ID and pass facial verification to meet Binance's "Intermediate" verification. Link
Paxos renames its stablecoin product Paxos Standard (PAX) to Pax Dollar (USDP), claiming everyone will be able to instantly recognize the new ticker, USDP, as a dollar-backed stablecoin. Link
Centre and Coinbase announce that Circle will now hold the USDC reserve entirely in cash and short duration US Treasuries. Link
Full DNS namespace integration for ENS is now live on Ethereum mainnet, which enables the owner of a DNS second-level domain name (a DNS name with one dot in it) to import the same name for use on ENS. Link
Ledger adds support for Lido, users can now participant in ETH2.0 staking straight from Ledger Live. Link
Acala engineering team has configured the custom-built Acala EVM+ to provide a development environment analogous to Ethereum and a fully Ethereum-compatible experience for DeFi users (MetaMask), while still getting the full power, speed, and customizability of Polkadotâs modular blockchain framework, Substrate. Link
Optimism release new Gateway interface which enables arbitrary token deposits and withdrawals to Optimistic Ethereum. Link
1inch Aggregation Protocol is now live on Optimistic Ethereum mainnet. Link
PayPal launches crypto services in UK to buy, hold, and sell cryptocurrency. Link
Substack now accepts Bitcoin for payment. Link
Visa buys a CryptoPunk. Link
đ Market Data
Compound Grants, Kraken, Lido, Synthetix, Graph Protocol, and Uniswap Grants are donating 250k each to Ethereum Foundation to support Ethereum execution-layer client teams. Link
Head of gaming at YouTube says he is bullish on NFT's. Link
Compoundâs forum thread on possible steps to restructure the disorganized protocol governance. Link
OpenZeppelin releases Governor libraries for building DAO related smart contracts. Link
Bridges in Crypto-Space, An analysis of the many cross-chain communication protocols connecting crypto-space. Link
A16zâs investment in Yield Guild Games (YGG), a DAO to loan under-utilized income-generating NFT assets to people who are otherwise unable to access them. Link
A16z is open sourcing its token delegate program. Link
Manta Network and Acala have successfully implemented cross-chain communication on testnet using XCM, a cross-chain message system designed for Polkadot. Link
In this implementation, various steps were taken to prove different functionality:
The teams successfully transmitted Acala assets from the Acala chain to Mantaâs chain.
The assets were also successfully privatized on Manta Network.
The private asset was reclaimed back to the original asset on the Acala network.
đď¸ Dates of Note
Upcoming dates of note (new/changes in bold):
August 31 18:00 CST -Â Polkadot web3 talk
September 9 5:30pm GMT+1 -Â Polkadot Hack Launch Event
September 15-17 -MetaCartel MCON Denver
TBA -Â Devcon
Kusamaâs second batch of parachain slot auctions:
Follow me on Twitter:Â @_polkadotjames
Permalink for this weekâs issue: https://jamescryptoweekly.substack.com/p/august-28-2021
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