Daily Bullets 💊: Going Mainstream! - Reddit Enlists FTX and Arbitrum to Allow Paying Gas Fees Using Fiat

💊 M6 Daily Bullets 💊 Tuesday, August 9th

Aug 09, 2022

The crypto market continues displaying difficulty maintaining bullish momentum - with most bullish moves being short lived. Bitcoin wasn’t able to hold $24k and fell back to low $23k. ETH visited $1800 before falling back to sub $1700. Crab and grind conditions continue. Ongoing narrative of the day: people continue discussing the implications of Tornado Cash’s sanctions while entities such as Circle, Infura, and Alchemy have signaled their compliance.

Circle froze the USDC funds in Tornado Cash's sanctioned wallets, and the GitHub accounts of the Tornado Cash team appeared to be suspended. Highlights fight for privacy in crypto

Crypto API and node infrastructure providers Infura and Alchemy are the latest centralized entities in the cryptocurrency space to blacklist the US Treasury-sanctioned crypto mixer Tornado Cash

Arbitrum, one of the leading Ethereum Layer 2 scaling platforms, has partnered with Reddit to bring its Community Points system onto a public blockchain and launch a token

An Ethereum fork token that does not yet exist, dubbed ETHW, is trading under $100 across several crypto exchanges after debuting at $30

The issuer of USDC, Circle intends to fully and solely support the Ethereum proof-of-stake (PoS) chain post-merge

The GameStop wallet is now fully integrated with Immutable X L2 protocol

Redacted v2 is now live

DeBank: Ethereum is now becoming the most prospective chain for Web3 applications. A hard fork would bring a big disaster for the entire Web3 ecosystem. Therefore team will NOT support any forked chains during Ethereum's PoS merge transition

Deribit settlement for all instruments will take place on the ETH foundation supported chain => ETH Proof of Stake (PoS) = ETH2

Two more lawsuits for Coinbase - both plaintiffs claim that Coinbase made fraudulent and deceptive representations regarding the company’s business

Bitcoin miner Marathon reported a net loss of $191.6 million in the second quarter of 2022

Core Browser Extension Adds Support for Ethereum, Setting a New Standard for UX across Avalanche, Bitcoin and EVM Blockchains

South Korea's most popular metaverse blockchain Klaytn is set to benefit from deeper liquidity and improved token swaps through a new partnership with DeFi protocol 1inch Network

Kujira $USK stablecoin launch

Tron DAO Reserve adds Wintermute as USDD’s 9th whitelisted organization - allows to mint and redeem USDD

CurateDAO launched an Avalanche-based “curate-to-earn” platform where participants can earn by contributing to databases

Econia v2 is live - Custodian Capabilities and Standalone Swaps

Hubble Exchange is now live on Mainnet

Hashstack's going zk-native - working with StarkWare to become one of the first zk-native lending protocols on StarkNet

Blast API’s Incentivized Testnet Code-Named Houston Is Ready to Launch

📊 Data:

Nansen Smart Money Holdings Token Inflow and Outflows: Tracking what the whales are up to…

Inflow: USDC ($39M), aUSDC_v2 ($5M), WBTC ($4.8M), USDT ($2.8M), HEX ($1.6M)
Outflow: WETH ($40.4M), aWETH_v2 ($20.2M), DAI ($9.4M), BUSD (734k), MPL ($715k)

Nansen NFT Hot Contracts:

Defimons Apartments: $114k
Yieldification: $47k
Nouneys: $12k

🎓 Research:

Ground Up Guide: zkEVM, EVM Compatibility & Rollups - source

ZachXBT - tracking down French phishing scammers that’ve stolen millions - source

The Current Scene in DAO Compensation - source

Vitalik Idea: stealth addresses for ERC721s - source

Binance NFT Marketplace: All You Need to Know About It - source

🖼 NFTs/Metaverse News:

Moonbirds and its sister project, Oddities, will switch to a public domain usage mode - anyone can now commercially reproduce and use the art without notifying the owners. Holders upset

Game studio Arrivant is taking its Project Eluüne: StarGarden title cross-chain and will launch on Polygon in addition to its current home on Solana

Theta Networks will issue Galaxy NFTs as part of new drive to offer Samsung users an innovative consumer experience, including access to virtual events via ThetaPass

STEPN has announced the launch of GMT Earning Plans

Nas Academy and Invisible College partner to offer online Web3 learning library, with access granted via NFT

This Week in Music NFTs - August 8

🌍 Crypto Twitterverse:

Jeremy Allaire @jerallaire

1/ Yesterday, US Treasury designated for sanctions ETH addresses associated with Tornado Cash. As a US regulated FI subject to Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) requirements, Circle, together with our partner @coinbase, restricted the movement of USDC funds in these sanctioned addresses.

BowTiedIguana @BowTiedIguana

READ THIS THREAD OR GO TO JAIL FOR 30 YEARS (sorry not kidding) Tornado Cash added to US sanctions list - $437m of assets blocked. What is OFAC, what are sanctions, and what does this mean for DeFi 👇

Larry Cermak 🫡 @lawmaster

This is a really serious problem. As long as RPC providers comply with U.S. sanctions or even regulations, nothing is truly permissionless. Need non-US based stable alternatives

ノーネーム @0xdev0

It's happening. @infura_io and @AlchemyPlatform are now blocking RPC requests to @TornadoCash Centralized RPC services are one of the cancers that undermine the core benefits of crypto. As long as they dominate the market, no protocol is truly permissionless. https://t.co/3TI3QmDgmD

Edgy - The DeFi Edge 🗡️ @thedefiedge

Today: • U.S.A sanctions Tornado Cash • Holdnaut (CEX) has frozen withdrawals • Circle blacklists Tornado cash addresses (freezes USDC) • Github suspends accounts of Tornado contributors (@bantg) This is why decentralization is essential - it's freedom.

Wifey @WifeyAlpha

A short thread on late stage bear market rallies 🧵 In the later stages of bear market rallies there are numerous signals both quantitative and qualitative. We will start for the former and end with the latter. 1/6

Maker @MakerDAO

The Merge is coming up and an Ethereum PoW fork is a real possibility. What are the potential risks Maker faces in the event of an Ethereum PoW fork? 🧵 1/

Messari @MessariCrypto

1/ Blockchain networks are transparent by nature. Although this may be great for data analytics companies to track user transactions, most users could be opposed to flaunting their financial status. Let's explore On-Chain Privacy. 🧵

Montana Wong @Montana_Wong

Ethereum is about to experience a once-in-a-lifetime phenomena called the "Triple Halvening" after the upcoming Merge. What this is, and how this will drastically affect every ETH holder 👇

📈 Fundraises:

Messari plans to raise fresh financing at a $300M valuation, roughly a year after Messari raised a $21M round

NFT media management platform Pinata raises $21.5M in combined seed and Series A funding

CreatorDAO, which provides capital and operational support to "creators," raised $20M in a seed funding round led by a16z

Blockchain analytics platform Merkle Science Raises $19M to take on Bridge exploits

RISC Zero raises $12M to build a blockchain using zero-knowledge proofs

Lysto, a blockchain startup that is building verification tools for gamers, has raised $12M in a pre-Series A funding round

Line Games' web3 gaming arm Nerdystar announced a $5.8M seed round to produce blockchain games based on some of the brand's most successful web2 titles

NFT marketplace OpenSea has backed minting service Fair.xyz in a $4.5M round

Vespene Energy, which converts methane gas released from landfills into power for bitcoin mining, closed a $4.3M funding round

Mobile gaming platform MetaverseGo announced a $4.2M seed funding round to allow users to sign up and start playing games like Axie Infinity and Cyball using just a cell phone number

Cashmere, a company that offers enterprise wallet management for users of the Solana blockchain, closed a $3M seed funding round

Cross-chain gas infra GASUtopia Raises $3M to build a universal gas in Web3

Native Payment Infrastructure, Airswift, Raises $2M in Pre-Seed Funding

Buzzmint, a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform for utility-led NFT/token projects, raised an undisclosed amount in Seed funding

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