The biggest crypto news and ideas of the day |
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Deutsche Bank Launches L2 |
Banking giant Deutsche Bank is building out a layer-2 rollup network on Ethereum with Matter Labs’ ZKsync technology. Bloomberg reported the project Wednesday, and a representative for Matter Labs confirmed the story. The chain will be "a public and permissioned L2," Omar Azhar, the head of business development at Matter Labs, told CoinDesk over Telegram. When asked to elaborate, he referred a reporter to another participant in the project, Memento Blockchain, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Generally "public permissioned" means anyone can see what's happening on the network but only authorized participants can do certain things. The project is a sign of a renewed interest in blockchain technology among institutions, as prices for various cryptocurrencies reach all-time highs. It also echoes the private enterprise blockchains that were in vogue nearly a decade ago. Those systems were disconnected from public chains like Ethereum and Bitcoin, though they sometimes borrowed code from them. According to the Bloomberg report, the bank is creating the layer-2 network in order to address regulatory compliance issues that come with public blockchains in finance. (Regulated institutions have to know who they are dealing with, which is hard in completely open networks like the main Ethereum chain). The bank believes that by creating a layer-2 on top of Ethereum, it will improve the speed of transactions as well as address those compliance needs. |
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A message from The Interchain Foundation |
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Cosmos is expanding: Skip joins the Interchain Foundation.
The Interchain Foundation has acquired Skip, one of the leading Cosmos teams, to bring their excellence in engineering, product strategy, and execution in-house and usher in an era of growth for Cosmos, and its vision for the interchain. Skip will rename to Interchain Inc. and become the ICF’s main subsidiary, concentrating product, vision, and go-to-market for the Interchain Stack and Cosmos, led by Skip co-founders Barry Plunkett and Maghnus Mareneck. This acquisition marks a departure from the ICF’s distributed product development model and starts a new growth-driven stage defined by the alignment between the Interchain Stack’s vision, and the vision for a Cosmos Hub that is at the center of the ecosystem, driving user and liquidity growth for the entirety of the Cosmos’ interchain ecosystem. |
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Solana Breaks Transaction Record |
Solana's network activity lit up on Tuesday as the Pudgy Penguins NFT project debuted its native token, PENGU, on the programmable blockchain.
The layer 1 blockchain, considered a cheap alternative to Ethereum, registered a total transaction tally of 66.9 million, the highest since its inception in 2020, according to data source Artemis. To highlight how busy it was, Solana's transaction count eclipsed the total of all other major chains combined. Solana also led other blockchains in terms of daily decentralized exchange trading volume and daily active addresses but lagged Base, Ethereum and Tron in the stablecoin transfer volume.
Since the dawn of the ongoing crypto bull run in early 2024, Solana has been a go-to blockchain for retail investors looking to make a quick buck from memecoins, NFTs and other smaller tokens.
Tuesday was no different, as holders of original Pudgy Penguins, Lil Pudgys, Rogs, and Soul Bound Tokens (SBT) lined up for the PENGU airdrop, which began at 08:00 ET. The project reported over 100,000 claims in the first hour with over 4.7 million website views. PENGU debuted at a market cap of $2.3 billion but has since seen the value drop to $2 billion, according to data from Coingecko.
Solana's SOL token rose 3.2% to $229 on Tuesday, following the market leader bitcoin higher. However, the token has struggled to keep the momentum going today, receding to $217, likely representing caution ahead of the Fed rate decision. |
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Trump Has Already Rebooted Crypto |
Donald Trump's victory in the November presidential election is already ushering in a new era for crypto in the U.S., JPMorgan (JPM) said in a report Wednesday, noting that the total cryptocurrency market cap has jumped about 65% since his reelection.
"Not only does this new administration bring a sense of crypto friendliness, but it also has shown an eagerness to promote the asset class," analysts led by Kenneth Worthington wrote. The incoming administration has shown a willingness to talk about crypto market regulation and about how to keep future development in the U.S., the report said, adding that the president-elect has already nominated a number of people who will take part in the formulation of crypto policy and enforcement.
This means a floor has been established, in that the "worst regulatory environment for crypto" is in the past, the report said. The ecosystem is now expected to become a "safer, more transparent, and more productive industry (from a regulatory perspective) from this point."
Still, these positive tailwinds could take some time to have an effect. JPMorgan cautioned that the market might not see policy impacts for at least nine to 12 months into Trump's term.
Trump's nomination for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) chair is one piece missing from the administration's pro-crypto agenda, the Wall Street bank said. The position is important because of its likely role in regulating bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH). |
Sapien: Is AI Work the Future of the Gig Economy? Step aside, Uber – there’s a new gig in town. They said AI would take your jobs, but instead, it’s creating one of the fastest-growing gig opportunities we’ve ever seen. Despite the notion that AI will replace most jobs in the future, the shift from human to automated work may push the gig economy into overdrive in the next few years. Companies are already investing a significant portion of their budgets in AI training, spending up to 80% of both time and financial resources on data labeling alone. Continue reading here. |
Dogecoin Pup IP Owner Raises Debate |
An intellectual property (IP) ownership could soon end up in a fight of digital dogs.
Own The Doge DAO, a collective that holds the original ‘doge’ meme, on Tuesday said it had acquired the rights to use pet shiba inu Neiro’s images and was holding a community discussion on which NEIRO token can continue to use the dog’s liking. “We’re pleased to announce that @kabosumama has officially granted our DAO the Neiro IP,” Own The Doge said on X. “When Atsuko revealed the name of her new adopted dog, Neiro, many tokens were launched in an attempt to capitalize on her name and story.”
“However, since then, these various tokens have battled each other to become the ‘real’ Neiro, with no agreed criteria. But it does not have to be this way. Our DAO owns the IP rights for Neiro,” the post said, adding that the doge community could join the DAO and vote for which token they considered the “real” one.
The ongoing discussion will let the community and outside members comment and find a way forward to use Neiro’s IP, before being put into an actual on-chain proposal voted on by DOG token holders.
Neiro is the shiba inu adopted by the human owner of Kabosu, the dog that inspired the “doge” meme, after she passed away in July. The announcement of a new dog spurred the creation of numerous NEIRO tokens on Solana and Ethereum at the time — with two such tokens surging to hundreds of millions in market capitalization and enjoying active communities as of Wednesday. |
The Takeaway: Optimism's Jing Wang |
This profile, by Danny Nelson, is part of CoinDesk's Most Influential 2024 package. For all of this year's nominees, click here.
Ethereum (ETH), the largest smart-contracts blockchain, for years has had a scalability issue. As more users joined the Ethereum ecosystem, the network became more expensive and slower to use. To solve part of that issue, starting in 2019, Ethereum community members came out with their own scaling solutions, called layer 2s, or rollups. Optimism (OP) was one of the first on the market. Now, Optimism’s technology is widely used by many entities to create their own layer-2 networks. In 2024, Kraken, Uniswap, World Network (formerly Worldcoin) and Sony’s Blockchain Lab all tapped Optimism’s tech to create their own scaling blockchains. As the OP team has been able to convince some of crypto’s largest institutions to use their technology and join its ecosystem, Optimism’s founding team, led by Jing Wang, is nominated for CoinDesk’s 2024 Most Influential list. “If you have to put the finger on the pulse of the lifeline of the Optimism Collective, it is Jing Wang,” said Ben Jones, another co-founder of Optimism and a director at the Optimism Foundation, to CoinDesk in an interview. The founding team consists of some Ethereum OGs including Wang, Jones, Karl Floersch, Mark Tyneway, Kelvin Fichter and Kevin Ho. But their story dates back to 2016 when Wang was introduced to Floersch, a former researcher at the Ethereum Foundation (EF), ahead of creating Optimism. “The first time that we met, we were in a circle. We were all talking, and every time a new person entered the circle, Jing would make it a specific point to make them feel included, and ask them a specific question, to integrate them into the rest of the experience,” said Jones when asked about his first solo encounter with Wang. “That's definitely not changed. In fact, she’s become only more capable of that kind of stuff at larger and larger scales at the time as a leader of the Collective.” Wang got her start in crypto first through the Bitcoin world, but expressed frustration with the lack of women participating in that developer ecosystem, according to a talk she gave at a16z’s crypto startup school in July 2023. It was Vitalik Buterin, the Ethereum creator who also used to be a Bitcoin maxi, who convinced her to look into Ethereum, and introduced her to Floersch. At the EF, Floersch took Wang under his wing, and gave her a “textbook” writing project. (The other project that was offered to her was a coding project, but ultimately was given to another mentee, Hayden Adams, who eventually created Uniswap from that, the largest decentralized cryptocurrency exchange on Ethereum today, according to DefiLlama.) The “textbook” project that Wang began to focus her time on was Plasma, a scaling design that predates rollups, which eventually became the precursor to what Optimism is today. “That’s pretty f****** crazy,” said Wang at the a16z talk about the beginnings of Optimism and Uniswap, “but that’s how it started.”
Read the full article here.
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