James' Crypto Weekly - July 16, 2021
News
Binance temporary suspends payments from EU’s Sepa network. Link (FT $)
Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC) would come in early September, the report will outline the benefits and risks of CBDCs, as well as cryptocurrencies and stablecoins more broadly. Link
ECB starts next Digital-Euro stage with investigation phase, lasting 24 months and aims to address key issues on design and distribution. ECB also states that a digital euro would complement cash, not replace it, and the implementation would take about three years. Link (Bloomberg $)
Uniswap V3 is officially on Optimism (be careful it is alpha version). Link
DeFi Education Fund, DEF, sold half of its 1M UNI allocation in exchange for 10.2M USDC, claiming that the majority of DEF’s expenses will be dollar-denominated and by diversifying half of the 1m total allocation provides the DEF with a sustainable budget to weather any market downturns. Link
Equilibrium created and implemented the first ever Binance Smart Chain bridge on Kusama that enables bi-directional asset transfers between BSC and Substrate-based networks, Polkadot and Kusama. The Bridge is now live on their testnet. Link
Multi-chain dApp hub Plasm Network rebrands to ASTAR Network. Link
USDC stablecoin backer circle to go public in $4.5B SPAC deal. Link
First legal DAO, Decentralized Autonomous Organization, approved in Wyoming. Link
Square is creating a new Bitcoin platform to provide non-custodial, decentralized financial services. (isn’t that just DeFi? 🤷♂️) Link
Market Data
A research from CCAF at Cambridge Judge Business School reveals that China’s share of total Bitcoin mining power has declined from 75.5% in September 2019 to 46% in April 2021 – before the restrictions were even imposed. In the same period, the United States’ share of total Bitcoin hashrate increased from 4.1% to 16.8%, putting it in second place. One of the standout observations is the almost six-fold increase of mining share in Kazakhstan. An energy-rich country located in Central Asia, it has seen its share rise from a mere 1.4% in September 2019 to 8.2% in April 2021, catapulting it to third place in global mining power share. The Russian Federation (6.8%) and Iran (4.6%) complete the top five. Link
Karura, the first Kusama parachain, stopped producing blocks on 6/30 due to crash caused by an extrinsic (State changes that come from the outside world) used on the final day of RMRK's NFT sale. Link, Github issue
Moonriver, the second parachain on Kusama, stopped producing block on 7/9 after a runtime upgrade threw its Collator nodes out of sync with the Relay Chain nodes, the issue has been fixed. Link
A dashboard to track number of unique users (wallets) per DeFi project (DEXes and money markets). Link
Parachain.info, a Polkadot & Kusama ecosystem projects directory. Link
Polkadot proposal to change polkadot nominating minimum stake to 40 DOT and increase to 22500 total nominators. Link
Compound proposal to lower the governance proposal threshold from 100,000 COMP to 65,000, reducing the difficulty to create new governance proposals. Link
Uniswap proposal to raise quorum threshold from 40m UNI to 60m, due to the fact that most UNI voting power is held by investors and team members, either directly or through delegation, so raising quorum threshold could allow these holders to block proposals through inaction. (Vote closed with unchanged on Snapshot) Link
Good read on understanding Compound's new Governor Bravo contract. Link
TLDR:
Article on what to look for when evaluating validators for staking on Polkadot and Kusama. Link
Article on the intrigue behind Kusama’s parachain auctions, which mostly are backed by whales now. Link
MakerDAO enables flash minting for DAI. Link
Token Terminal now supports P/E ratios for protocols. Link
A good article on GEV, Governance Extractable Value. Link
Rollup’s potential market share. The article argues that rollups are the idea solution for achieving scalability while maintaining security and decentralization. However, the majority of end users only care about ease of accessibility, which they are less likely to migrate from the side chain solutions that are currently being used as the temporary scalability fix. Link
Cointelegraph’s piece on a multichain future that will accelerate innovations. Link
Dates of Note
Upcoming dates of note (new/changes in bold):
July 20 09:00 GMT - Bidding ends for Kusama’s fifth parachain slot auction.
July 19-23 - The League of Bridge (with a with a cross-chain pitch event on 23rd)
July 20-22 - EthCC4 (Paris)
July 21 -ETHécole Conference (Paris)
July 25-31 - IC3 Blockchain Camp (Virtual)
Between August 3-5 - Ethereum London hardfork goes live on mainnet
August 8 at 10pm CEST - Deadline to submit proposals for Sub0 Online
August 27 - 29 - EDCON2021 (Shenzhen & Online)
TBA - Devcon
Follow me on twitter: @_polkadotjames
Permalink for this week’s issue: https://jamescryptoweekly.substack.com/p/july-16-2021
Did you get forwarded this newsletter? Sign up to receive it weekly