If your family asked what’s the latest in crypto during Thanksgiving dinner this year, then this week’s newsletter is baked special just for them 🥧
Here’s the TL;DR of what went down last week:
CZ steps down from Binance and settles with DOJ for $4B
New L2 Blast gathers more than $500 million in locked assets in spite of controversy
Arbitrum ecosystem grows with new deployments
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🌩️ Storm clouds
Binance and CZ settle with US DOJ for $4B, and CZ steps down
Kraken sued by SEC on similar grounds as Coinbase (unregistered exchange trading unregistered securities, etc.)
Major hacks in recent weeks: KyberSwap, Poloniex, HTX/Heco bridge, dydx, Unibot
🔗 EVM rollups and L(n) developments
Blast, a new L2 from the creator of NFT marketplace Blur, announced upcoming launch and airdrop based on a one-way bridge into an anon multisig as well as promises of boosted staking yield for locked ETH and stablecoins, leading to a split between critics (including a Paradigm partner) vs. yield seekers who have poured >$500M worth of tokens into the multisig in a few days.
Treasure DAO (one of the largest apps on Arbitrum) opens community discussion around plans for a new Arbitrum-based rollup built around their MAGIC token
Rarible Protocol (NFT SDK/indexer/orderbook) integrated with Arbitrum after passing ARB governance proposal
L2 Kinto (a platform for KYC’d tradfi & defi) switches to Arbitrum Nitro from OP Stack
RaaS provider Conduit now enables independent node operators to run nodes for Zora and PGN
🪙 Wallets and account abstraction
Biconomy and Rhinestone release more details of their joint module/plugin store and registry for modular smart accounts
Dan Finlay follows up DevConnect presentation with idea for revokable permission delegations in wallets
New proposed ERC for smart accounts to manage NFTs
Wallet infrastructure provider Privy secures round A funding, led by Paradigm
🏦 Circle developments
Circle and Japanese bank SBI announce partnership to offer USDC as well as Circle’s wallet infrastructure to SBI’s retail and corporate banking clients
Circle (via CCTP) coming to Noble, bringing native USDC to the Cosmos ecosystem
Circle launches the Bridged USDC Standard for EVM L2s to enable bridged USDC in advance of full CCTP integration
🤖 Ethereum developments
Blast staking large portion of TVL into Lido, with potential to boost Lido’s staking share beyond 33% decentralization limit
Node operator P2P incorporating delay into block propagation to capture and share additional MEV with stakers
Core devs continue to work through Dencun hardfork implementation testing on devnets (#12 going live this week); Goerli testnet deployment unlikely before EOY
🦅 Governance moves
Cosmos Hub passes governance Prop 848, cutting token inflation 14% → 10%, and expected validator rewards from 19% → 13.4% in hopes of retaining staked economic security while supporting ATOM token price; Cosmos’ founder is proposing a fork, potentially resolving long-running tensions
Optimism Foundation submits gov proposal to build ApeChain on the OP Stack (following a similar proposal from Polygon last month)
Celestia and Pyth governance going live with mainnet launches