Sunday Review 20/10/2024
Happy Sunday, Observers!
The narrative of a Bitcoin “Uptober” is in full swing now that its price has finally broken the $65,000 resistance level it has been stuck on for the past seven months.
The breakthrough has been largely due to the institutional interest in cryptocurrency coming from the United States, which went up another two levels this week: first, with Michael Saylor's announcement of his intentions to start running a “Bitcoin bank;” and second, with ETFs once again hitting a weekly trading record.
The price surge contradicts the currency's popularity as measured by Google Trends: the number of searches for Bitcoin on the search engine has been the lowest in the past twelve months and some of the lowest in the last four years.
🔥 Highlights Of The Week
- Ex-PayPal Digital Currencies CFO teams up with Ripple for a green blockchain project;
- Worldcoin rebrands as "World" and expands partnerships with new biometric devices;
- Paxos launches a stablecoin payment platform with Stripe for USDC and PYUSD.
📈 Crypto Markets
🍭 Crypto Highs And Fun Times
- Vitalik Buterin has been on the news a lot lately. The co-founder of Ethereum has published his ideas on the future of the world’s leading decentralized ecosystem. The three-part roadmap “Possible futures of the Ethereum protocol” posted over the course of this week has many technicalities that, given the success of previous network upgrades, can be summed up in one take: Ethereum will remain a lighthouse of decentralization.
- Following the airdrop of the $HMSTR token, the number of Hamster Kombat’s monthly users took a profound dip. Undeterred by the setback, the team behind the popular Telegram mini-game has shared the storyline of its Season 2, which will have more diversified game techniques and new objectives. The wheel never stops!
😈 Crypto Naught And Sloppy
- The SEC almost missed a deadline to appeal its year-long case against Ripple. At the very last minute, the appeal went through, but not without tonnes of criticism of the agency regarding its erratic behavior and also not without a fair share of conspiracies mounting about how Ripple’s donation to the democratic campaign was influencing the legal process.
- Blobs are a type of transaction that allows more data to be carried into blocks. Since being introduced on Ethereum at the Duncun upgrade, they have allowed for a significant reduction of L2 fees. However, the new “Ethscription” protocol—a variation of the well-known Inscriptions—is reversing the process by driving blob fees.
The Durov Saga
How Is Durov’s Arrest Connected to Telegram’s Crypto Expansion?
Telegram’s founder was arrested in August in France. While the reason given was his connection to criminal activity on the platform, Telegram’s activities in Web3 could be the real cause. Like Facebook’s Libra/Diem, authorities can be sensitive to private money initiatives by large social networks.
Sasha Markevich
Almost two months after Telegram’s founder and CEO Pavel Durov was arrested by French authorities, the reasons for his arrest remain a mystery. The official "lack of cooperation with authorities" and "child pornography spread" narrative was hotly contested from the get-go, and as online sleuths do their digging, it seems more and more a bogus claim to hide ulterior reasons.
Token Launch: $DBR by DeBridge
deBridge Unveils $DBR with Airdrop to 491,000 Wallets
The token represents an important step towards decentralization. It empowers token holders to make key decisions regarding the governance of the protocol.
Alexander Mardar
Having established itself as one of the most secure bridge protocols, DeBridge is now launching its own token: $DBR.
The platform offers bridging functionalities, cross-chain trading, and cross-chain message transfer between multiple blockchains. It has recently introduced DeBridge Hooks to allow users to attach arbitrary on-chain actions to orders, which are executed upon fulfilment.
Despite its high fees, the protocol has become one of the top bridges in the crypto space, generating over $360 million in bridging volume and collecting around $424,000 in fees in the last month alone, mostly from Ethereum and Solana transfers.
🔫 Quote Of The Week
“The team wasn’t expecting this level of interest,”
The marketing white lie is attributed to Sandy Peng, an adviser for Trump’s crypto project World Liberty Financial. While the new crypto protocol did raise $5 million in the first few hours after launch - which caused its website to crash - interest has been low and defrauded many expectations, mostly because of its highly unfair token allocation.
However, if measured by the political capital it collected from crypto investors, a quick scroll on crypto X does make it seem that the WLF is a huge success.
Members Discussion