All Been Crypto — Week 24 Dec 2021
Its Christmas and so naturally been a more quiet week, but one characterized by some late rally. Newer chains were generally outperforming with AVAX, MATIC +20% and Luna another whooping +50% bringing BTC dominance down to 38.5% and overall market cap above 2.5tr. In the news been rather light. We had some updates on Ethereum L1 and L2s and every institution seems to be out with their predictions for 2022. I’m sure you got your fingers on enough of them but in case you don’t free to reach out. In generally everyone expects more institutional adoption, probably more nation states to follow El Salvador, more regulation and further advancements into metaverse, Web 3.0, DAOs ect.. basically decentralization. As such I’ve also picked headlines along these themes. I do hope these weeklys are useful for you and wish you and your loved ones a Merry Christmas!
Bat Tai Chi — btc21@mail.com
HEADLINES:
ETH Update L2s and POS Testnet
Probably the most newsworthy this week was Uni’s vote to deploy on Polygon brining the major DeFi platform onto ‘L2’. (L2 in brackets because Polygon is not a true L2 (yet) and in my opinion is still a side chain). Nevertheless MATIC hit ATH also helped by an announcement that the project will co invest $200ml together with Seven Seven Six, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian’s venture capital firm into Web3 social media and gaming projects and a partnership cooperation with Opera (similar to what they did with SOL a few weeks back). In other L2 news Optimism announced to remove whitelist so now anyone can deploy smart contracts on the network. Currently there’s about 300ml TVL in the network with more than half of that in Synthetix a derivs liquidity protocol.
But also the parent Ethereum had some update, Proof of Stake Testnet Kintsugi Merge is now live. The Kintsugi testnet provides the community an opportunity to experiment with post-merge Ethereum and begin to identify any issues. Once feedback has been incorporated into the client sofware and the specifications, a final series of testnets will be launched. In parallel, testing efforts will continue ramping up. After this, existing long-lived testnets will run through The Merge. Once these have upgraded and are stable, next up is Ethereum mainnet’s transition to proof of stake which is said to be 2022.
Justin Sun Resigns as CEO of TRON to become Grenada Gov Official
Justin Sun is one of the colourful characters you have to watch in crypto. He made millions in crypto and got famous for cancelling a dinner with Warren Buffet he bought for 4.6ml and most recently bidding for a spot on Bezos spaceship. His ties with Chinese gov and internet money together with his less transparent investment approach have also brought him many critics among his 3.3ml twitter followers. (to put that into context Vitalik got >3ml). This week he came out with another major surprise. In a series of tweets accompanying an open letter, he shared the news of his acceptance of the invitation and appointment of the Grenadian government to officially serve as the WTO ambassador and permanent representative of Grenada. At the same time he’ll step down as CEO of TRON as he plans to “focus on the legitimization of blockchain technology on a nation-state level”. He might be onto something here Justin
2022 NFTs are entering politics
Shrina Kurani, a Democrat running for a House seat in California, is seeking to engage the crypto community on legislative issues. She’s used a clever way of funding her campaign by issuing 2022 NFTs on Solana — not this might be more of a marketing gig but for next year DAOs and NFTs are definitely going to play a much bigger role in campaign funding. And if it brings in politicians that are more crypto friendly that’s ultimately a good thing. It was only earlier this month that we saw another DAO supporting free Ross Ulbricht being created. Ross was the creator of the Silk Road an early dark net marketplace through which many came in touch with BTC for the first time. He is now serving 3 times lifetimes in prison. We just have to be wary that Web3 doesn’t turn into another centralized version of Web2 with big corporations running the show.
QUOTES:
You don’t own “web3.” The VCs and their LPs do. It will never escape their incentives. It’s ultimately a centralized entity with a different label. Know what you’re getting into…
Jack Dorsey
I’ll give you a hint: We do not see room for cryptocurrency on the Russian financial market
Bank of Russia Deputy Governor Vladimir Chistyukhin
We are partnering with @UnderArmour, @UAbasketball, and @StephenCurry30 to bring history into the metaverse
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