In the News

1. Twitter will test out using USDC. A select few creators will be able to receive earnings in the blockchain-based USD stablecoin.

Stripe (the payment processing company) has recently introduced support for the USDC stablecoin, a cryptocurrency that is pegged 1:1 to the US Dollar, meaning there are mechanisms in place to ensure the value remains at $1. Stripe has said a chosen few creators will be able to take the money they earn on Twitter in USDC rather than a normal fiat currency.

2. NFT Development team “Akudreams” accidentally locked up $34 Million as a result of a bug.

Akutars, an NFT project that tried to mint via a dutch auction (an auction process where the price decreases until there are bidders) was hit with BOTH a bug and exploit last week. A bug in the code that allowed users to mint meant that $33 million of Ether will be locked forever. There was also an exploit where those who did not bid high enough, would not receive their bids refunded back. The team has said they will be refunding 0.5 ETH to users who underbid and will be airdropping NFTs to those who were successful. The team will retry a minting process with improved code today.

3. Silk Road founder agrees to use $3 billion in stolen BTC to pay debt to US government

Ross Ulbricht founded the Silk Road, an online drug market place in 2011, back then, many people used Bitcoin to buy and sell various items (including drugs and weapons). Ross was arrested back in 2013 but has significant Bitcoin holdings as a result of founding the marketplace. In 2020, the US government seized Ross’s 69,370 Bitcoins and Ross has since forfeited the claim to them in order to pay off debts owed to the government.

4. Beanstalk loses $182 million to exploit

An individual used a flash loan (more on these another time) to gain access to a large amount of the protocols governance token’s which was then used to create a fake proposal that gifted funds from the Beanstalk treasury to a specific wallet. The user got out with nearly $80 Million USD but the protocol lost assets worth over double that.

5. Justin Sun (founder of TRON) is launching a stablecoin on the Tron network
Similar to the recently popular LUNA stable coin UST, the Tron network will now also be home to another stablecoin (USDD). USDD is another algorithmic stablecoin, meaning it uses an automatically adjusting supply to maintain a peg of $1 USD. Stablecoins like USDC and USDT maintain their peg by being backed by an equal value of USD dollar or securities in bank accounts. According to Justin Sun, users will be able to earn a “risk-free” interest rate of 30% by lending out their USDD.

What are we Reading?

• ApeCoin and the death of staking

  • Once again Cobie is clear and insightful in this piece on why protocols use staking as a way of preventing users from just outright selling their tokens. And a good way to learn more about ApeCoin, the token airdropped to all BAYC hodlers.

• The Death Star Depth Chart

  • If you’re interested in trading and spend a lot of time staring at the moving order book (like I do), this one is for you. You can even check out a 3D order book made by the author here

• This thread on why APY’s in crypto often appear to be so high

  • In crypto, you might often see ridiculous APY’s like over 1,000%. This can be tempting and confusing for many, this thread goes over the reasons why you are able to earn these rates when your bank gives you pennies