Dencun Day Is Here 🎉
In today’s edition: 🚀 Bitcoin's fresh ATH, 🧳 CZ’s strict travel schedule, 📈 GBTC’s “mini” spinoff, 👩⚖️ Bitcoin Fog founder’s guilty verdict, and more!
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Union is the first sovereign interoperability layer pioneering trustless bridging between appchains, L1s, and L2s without depending on trusted third parties, oracles, multi-signatures, or MPC. Looking to future-proof blockchain bridging, it is the only protocol that fully addresses the sovereign bridging trilemma, unlocking a horizontally-scaled future.
Sreeram Kannan, founder of EigenLayer, and Olaf Carlson-Wee, founder and CIO of Polychain Capital, an investor in EigenLayer, say that the developer ecosystem around EigenLayer is sprouting up very fast, which reminds Carlson-Wee of the developer excitement in Ethereum’s early days.
They discuss the potential of EigenLayer, which uses a restaking mechanism to allow ETH stakers to reallocate their staked ETH and Liquid Staking Tokens (LSTs) to bolster security for other protocols. They cover how it could turbocharge Ethereum’s rollup scaling roadmap and enable Ethereum to become a stack of decentralized software as a service providers. Additionally, they discuss the potential risks associated with restaking as well as how EigenLayer could work with AI.
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Fountain, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Pandora, Castbox, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform. Or watch it on YouTube.
What’s Poppin’?
by Sage Young, Jacob Oliver, Nelson Wang and Sam Sriram
Gnosis Chain and ZKSync Have Already Upgraded to Be Compatible With Ethereum’s Upcoming Dencun Hard Fork
As Ethereum’s hotly-anticipated Dencun upgrade approaches, some protocols have upgraded their own networks for compatibility ahead of time.
Binance Former CEO CZ to Surrender Passport Under Modified Bail Bond
Former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao will have to notify pretrial services before any interstate travel within the US in addition to surrendering his passport to a third-party custodian.
Grayscale Files to Spin Off Lower-Fee ‘Bitcoin Mini Trust’ From GBTC
The new offering from Grayscale will trade under the $BTC ticker and the distributions will not trigger a capital gains tax.
Bitcoin Fog Operator Found Guilty of Conspiracy, Money Laundering for Darknet Markets
According to prosecutors, Roman Sterlingov facilitated the laundering of approximately $400 million from October 2011 to April 2021. His defense team has vowed to appeal.
Tether Assists US DOJ and FBI With $1.4 Million USDT Asset Seizure
Stablecoin issuer Tether says it played a pivotal role in assisting the U.S. DOJ and FBI with seizing $1.4 million worth of Tether’s USDT stablecoin from a tech support scam network.
Daily Bits…✍️✍️✍️
🚀 Bitcoin surged past $73,000, hitting a fresh all-time high of $73,603 before retreating to trading around the $73,300 range.
🇳🇬 Government officials in Nigeria are pressing crypto exchange Binance to reveal its top 100 users in the country, as well as its transaction history for the past six months. Officials detained two senior Binance executives two weeks ago.
🎈 Solana-based NFT marketplace Tensor intends to issue a governance token, TNSR, but it remains unclear if the issuance will be in the form of an airdrop.
😎 Stablecoin issuer MakerDAO will release major features from its “Endgame” plan in quick succession this summer via a launch season. A month after the release of the first phase, which is known as New Brand Reveal, two new ecosystem tokens — NewStable and NewGovToken — will become available.
💰Investors are buying Grayscale’s Chainlink Trust at a 700% premium, which is an all-time high for the trust’s premium.
🥊 Financial heavyweights, including Goldman Sachs and BNY Mellon, have battle-tested the Canton Network in a pilot which allowed the firms to transact and settle tokenized assets.
🤔 JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said he would defend people’s right to buy bitcoin, despite his own reservations about the asset. Dimon had previously called bitcoin a “hyped-up fraud” and “worthless.”
💸 Crypto exchange Coinbase is planning to sell $1 billion in debt to institutional investors in the form of convertible senior notes, as a way to cover debts and operational costs. Coinbase’s stock is up 333% over the course of the past year.
Today in crypto adoption…
🇸🇬 OKX, a crypto exchange, secured an in-principle approval for a Major Payment Institution license from the Monetary Authority of Singapore. The exchange identifies Singapore as a “priority market.”
The $$$ Corner…
🦄 Modular network project Elixir raised $8 million in a Series B funding round, which brings the startup close to unicorn status with its $800 million valuation.
🤝 Crypto asset manager CoinShares completed its acquisition of Valkyrie’s fund business, a move which will see Coinshares gain roughly $530 million in assets under management.
🎮 Studio 369, the developer of crypto video game “MetalCore,” raised $5 million from backers including Spartan Group, Delphi Digital and Bitkraft Ventures.
What Do You Meme?
Recommended Reads
Wired: Binance’s Top Crypto Crime Investigator Is Being Detained in Nigeria
Unchained: What Is the Cancun-Deneb (Dencun) Update on Ethereum?
Multicoin Capital: Publisher-Exchanges: Consumer Applications and the Attention Theory of Value
📈 Your Market Update 📉
BTC is up 1.9% trading at $73,312
ETH is up 1.2% trading at $4,053
BTC dominance: 49.8%
Crypto market cap: $2.9T
*All data as of today, 06:03 am ET. Source: CoinGecko
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