James' Crypto Weekly - July 28, 2021
News
EU plans to make Bitcoin transfers more traceable, with new proposal to changes EU law that would force companies transferring Bitcoin or other crypto-assets to collect details on the recipient and sender. Link
SEC chair Gary Gensler hints some stablecoins are securities, claiming “It doesn’t matter whether it’s a stock token, a stable value token backed by securities, or any other virtual product that provides synthetic exposure to underlying securities.” Link
Here’s an article on potential stablecoins crackdown by WSJ. Link (WSJ $)
Tether executives said to face criminal probe into bank fraud. Link
Binance paused operation for its stock token offering, a feature that lets users trade tokenized stocks of popular equities, due to ongoing regulation from governments worldwide. Link, Link2 (FT $)
FTX and Binance remove high leverage from their exchanges, both crypto exchanges will limit users at 20x maximum leverage. Link
Uniswap Labs restricts access to certain tokens through its interface, citing 'evolving regulatory landscape'. Link
Cryptocurrency exchange operators Huobi, OKCoin to close Beijing subsidiaries amid China’s crackdown. Link
Monero developers disclose significant bug in privacy algorithm, which allows onlookers to pinpoint real transactions among numerous “decoys.” The devs suggest users who don’t want to compromise their privacy should just wait at least an hour before transacting the XMR they have recently received. Link
Ethereum co-founder Anthony Di Iorio to sell Decentral and cut major ties to cryptocurrency claiming to diversify his investment to not just being the “crypto guy”. He also states that he would incorporate crypto into his future ventures, but crypto is really a small percentage of what the world needs.” Link (Bloomberg $)
Elon Musk, yes that guy again 🤷♂️, says SpaceX holds Bitcoin. He also says he owns some Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Dogecoin. Link
Circle, the company behind USDC stablecoin, releases audit claiming having 61% reserve in USD and equivalent. Link
Circle and Mastercard announced an engagement to use USDC to facilitate crypto-to-fiat conversions in a pilot program to expand the ability of issuers and crypto businesses to enable customers to spend their crypto assets. Link
Gnosis Safe added support for Polygon and Binance Smart Chain. Arbitrum, which is completing steps toward mainnet release, will join within the coming weeks. Link
Maker is shutting down its operation and going full decentralized with its community owned DAO, MakerDAO, taking over the protocol and the associated cryptocurrencies, MKR and DAI. Link
NFT marketplace OpenSea valued at $1.5B in $100M funding round led by A16z. Link
Market Data
Kusama’s Statemine parachin v2 upgrade, anyone can now create assets and NFTs on Statemine with a 1 KSM deposit for each asset class. Link
A Messari chart showing the top invested asset across 44 crypto venture & hedge funds is Polkadot followed by Terra and then tied for NEAR Protocol and Oasis Protocol. Link
Polkadot worldwide validators map. Link
Intro to Polkadot videos and slides from Encode Polkadot Club, good learning resources to get started with Polkadot. Link
BitForest wins the fifth parachain auction, there won't be any parachain auction for a while. Link
Substrate issue when adding ink smart contract pallet to parachain, no parachain is able to support ink smart contract yet. Link
Video tutorial on how to query staking parameters via polkadot.js app. Link
ETHCC4 video on Axie Infinity. Link
ETHCC4 video of Vitalik talking about things beyond yield farming on Ethereum, including build retroactive voting DAO, decentralized social network, and 1-click login with Ethereum). Link
ETHCC4 video on WalletConntect 2.0, highlighting multichain support, CAID (new id standard for multichain, basically account_id = accound_address@chain_id), improved UI with having multiple sessions with connecting Walletconnect once, decentralized infra using Waku, and introducing WalletConnect Cloud (hosted version of WalletConnect). Link
A deep dive into Axie Infinity and the Play-to-Earn business model. Link
Article on Retroactive Public Goods Funding, basically Ethereum's version of polkassembly 😂.) Link
Ethereum Reorgs After The Merge by Paradigm. Link
Mark Zuckerberg’s interview talking about Facebook’s Metaverse, which could be a potential threat to public blockchain’s metaverse since Facebook’s version could be free to start and is more accessible. Link
Dates of Note
Upcoming dates of note (new/changes in bold):
July 25-31 - IC3 Blockchain Camp (Virtual)
August 1 - Deadline to apply for Secureum’s Smart Contract Security Auditing Bootcamp
Between August 3-5 - Ethereum London hardfork goes live on mainnet
August 8 at 10pm CEST - Deadline to submit proposals for Sub0 Online
August 8 - Deadline to apply for Next Top Blockchain Startup Hackathon.
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-28-2021
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