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Welcome to The Node! This is Benjamin Schiller to take you through the latest crypto news. In today's news: Bitcoin falls below $58K; Matter Labs lays off 16% of staff; jailed Binance exec pleads with prison guard in video; SEC Commissioner Mark Uyeda calls for tailored S-1 for digital assets. The Takeaway: Students should be among the earliest adopters of Web3. But, currently, they’re not using the tech in the numbers we might expect, says Benjamin Sturisky, research analyst at Delphi Digital and president of Gator Blockchain. Read more below.👇 |
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Continuing what's become a firmly established pattern over the past few weeks, cryptocurrencies slid sharply lower early in the U.S. trading day. Ninety minutes after U.S. stock markets opened for trade following Monday's Labor Day Holiday, bitcoin (BTC) was down 1.5% to $57,800 while ether (ETH) was lower by 3% to $2,442, its weakest level since early February. The broad market gauge CoinDesk 20 Index was down only 1% as a handful of constituents were posting modest session gains, led by lumens and litecoin (LTC). The selling in crypto took place alongside a sizable slide in stocks, led by a 2.4% decline in the Nasdaq and a 1.5% fall for the S&P 500. |
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Matter Labs, the main developer behind the Ethereum layer-2 protocol ZKsync, laid off 16% of its employees as part of a restructuring to adapt to "the different type of technology and support" developers building on system now require, CEO Alex Gluchowski said in a post on X. "We went through a large org planning exercise, and it became clear that the talent and roles we have today do not perfectly match our needs," Gluchowski wrote in his Tuesday post. Matter Labs may have as many as 200 employees according to its LinkedIn profile, so the layoffs could amount to more than 30 people. ZKsync is jostling for market share in the crowded field of Ethereum layer-2 networks, protocols built atop the main blockchain that provide an alternate venue for transactions to be settled, with the goal of doing so faster and cheaper. The proliferation of layer 2s may indicate that the sector needs to be reframed and looked at through a use case-specific lens, Gluchowski suggested in a recent interview with CoinDesk. Matter Labs released its Elastic Chain in June to tackle fragmentation between this multitude of layer 2s by enabling them to plug into its interoperability layer. "I think that we will not need too many general purpose layer 2s, but we do need some application specific L2s or community specific L2s,” he said in the interview. "We have projects launching on the Elastic Chain that are just gaming chains, which does not really need to be sharing infrastructure block space with DeFi or financial applications.” |
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'Why Are You Doing This To Me?' |
Tigran Gambaryan, the Binance executive who has been detained in Nigeria since February, limped into an Abuja courtroom on Monday, dragging his left leg behind him, after prison authorities denied his request for a wheelchair. In a video uploaded to X (formerly Twitter) on Monday afternoon, a distressed Gambaryan pleads with a prison guard escorting him into the courtroom for help walking. “I’m not okay, this is f*cked up,” Gambaryan said in the video, as he clutched the guard’s wrist for support. When the guard stepped away, leaving Gambaryan with only a single crutch to lean on, Gambaryan turned to a small crowd of onlookers and said: “He was told not to help me. He said there’s instruction – this is f*cked up. Why couldn’t I use a goddamn wheelchair? This is a show. I’m a f*cking innocent person. Why are you doing this to me?” After several visibly painful steps, Gambaryan reached again for the guard’s arm for support, but the guard snatched his arm away, telling Gambaryan: “Don’t hold me, please. You can walk.” “I can’t f*cking walk, my spine is – this is f*cked up. I’m a f*cking human,” Gambaryan said in the video. “I’m not f*cking okay.” |
SEC Commissioner Floats New S-1 |
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) should create a special version of the S-1 form for digital assets, SEC commissioner Mark Uyeda said at the Korea Blockchain Week in Seoul, South Korea. The agency's current form, the primary application companies must fill out to register securities in the U.S., does not do justice to digital assets and other unusual financial products, Uyeda said. The regulator has not done enough for digital asset products looking to register in the country, he said. Uyeda has been one of the few supporters of crypto in the agency, in stark contrast to SEC Chair Gary Gensler who has been a vocal opponent of the industry. Uyeda noted that the regulator can work with crypto companies to figure out what parts should be added or removed from the present version. |
The Takeaway: Gen Z Isn't Buying It – Yet |
This is a guest post by Benjamin Sturisky, president of the Gator Blockchain club at the University of Florida: The future of crypto lies in the hands of a generation that does not appreciate it. As a sophomore in college, I have witnessed this firsthand. In theory, college students should be the most open to using consumer-facing applications with incentive structures. They are too old for their parents to cover their expenses but not old enough for a full-time job. However, they are skeptical of crypto products. From my vantage point, the hesitation to use these applications stems from a lack of trust in the system, or that the incentives are simply too good to be true. People believe this primarily because of the content they are consuming. In a world of Instagram and TikTok, crypto is losing a major information war. The majority of content on these platforms pertaining to crypto is disingenuous (at best) and malicious. This content is popular because "sob stories" rack up views. People posting videos of how they got "rugged" on a memecoin or lost their money in a hack attracts 100x more views than posting about the benefits of crypto. The mainstream media largely only references crypto when a crisis happens, like the FTX collapse. We see news talking about the collapse of a crypto exchange but do not see the stories of how Bitcoin saves people's lives in Latin America. This selective media reporting, along with the malicious content on social media, is causing younger generations to feel apprehensive about the crypto industry and position their careers elsewhere. We can solve this through education. Firstly, it is important to understand that you can't onboard someone by feeding them content their brain is hardwired to disagree with. This can be reversed by showing students the good that has originated from our industry and how it can benefit their daily lives. For example, it means showing people how to interact with Blackbird to earn free food, or Helium to be paid to have cell service. We can also combat malicious content by producing our own that tells the other side of the story. While the majority of communication happens on Twitter and Telegram, Gen Z is relatively unused to these applications. To flip the script, we need to push out content on Instagram and other social media sites showing the good of crypto and the ways it is benefiting people across the world. University blockchain clubs are playing an important role in this. Through workshops, onboarding sessions, and boot camps, these groups are arguably playing the most important role in ensuring the crypto industry does not die out. Read the full op-ed here.
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