Decentral Block Post

Coming every Saturday, Hodler’s Digest will help you track every single important news story that happened this week. The best (and worst) quotes, adoption and regulation highlights, leading coins, predictions and much more — a week on Cointelegraph in one link.

Top Stories This Week

Mastercard taps Paxos to launch crypto trading for banks

Banks will soon be equipped to offer clients crypto trading and custody thanks to a new program called “Crypto Source” from Mastercard and Paxos Trust Company. As part of the program, Mastercard will cover some of the compliance, security and interface details while Paxos handles crypto custody and trading. Expected in the final quarter of 2022, the Crypto Source program will essentially provide the underpinning that will let banks offer crypto trading and custody to their clients.

Jack Dorsey unveils decentralized social with algo choice and portable accounts

Under the supervision of former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, a new social media platform called “Bluesky Social” has entered its private beta phase after years of anticipation. Underpinning the platform is a protocol known as the Authenticated Transfer Protocol (formerly named ADX). The protocol essentially removes the walls around user data, letting users move their accounts from platform to platform rather than having their profiles and information locked on a single platform.

Decentralized finance is beginning to embrace a hot new phrase: “real yield.” It refers to DeFi projects that survive purely on distributing the actual revenue they generate rather than incentivizing stakeholders by handing out dilutionary free tokens.

Where does this real yield come from? Are “fees” really a sustainable model for growth at this early stage?

It depends on who you ask. 

The DeFi ponzinomics problem is our natural starting point.

Ponzi farming

DeFi started to arrive as a concept in 2018, and 2020’s “DeFi summer” saw market entrants — DeGens — piling headfirst into DeFi to early mind-blowing returns of 1,000% a year for staking or using a protocol. Many attributed the real explosion of interest in DeFi to when Compound launched the COMP token to reward users for providing liquidity. 

Sunny Aggarwal has vivid memories of some of the worst days of his life earlier this year. The blockchain co-founder and his Osmosis protocol were hit hard by the Terra–LUNA collapse and are still recovering from its fallout today.

“The Terra crash hit us incredibly hard because we were one of the biggest DEXs for providing liquidity to TerraUSD and Luna Classic,” he explains, “At one point, it made up over 50% of our liquidity.” 

“I always tell people that the Terra Luna protocol was created by someone with either an IQ of 50 or 150. And frankly, I can’t tell which one.”

Aggarwal is a co-founder and leads the development of the $225-million Osmosis DEX, which, at one point, eclipsed $2 billion in TVL before the coming of the crypto winter.

The rise of cross-chain bridges 

Osmosis is a decentralized exchange (DEX) operating on Cosmos, the creator of the interblockchain communications protocol (IBC).

Coming every Saturday, Hodler’s Digest will help you track every single important news story that happened this week. The best (and worst) quotes, adoption and regulation highlights, leading coins, predictions and much more — a week on Cointelegraph in one link.

Top Stories This Week

Starting in early 2023, Coinbase’s payment service, Coinbase Commerce, will facilitate crypto payments for customers purchasing Google’s cloud services thanks to a deal between the two companies. Google will only allow certain crypto assets for payment, including Bitcoin. Initially limited to certain participants, the option to pay with crypto will eventually be expanded to other customers, an executive at Google Cloud told CNBC. Google Cloud has taken several other steps toward crypto and blockchain industry involvement in 2022. 

BNY Mellon, America’s oldest bank, launches crypto services

Banking giant BNY Mellon has entered the crypto custody field, offering certain customers Bitcoin and Ether custody services via a new platform. The 238-year-old bank will provide bookkeeping for clients’ crypto in a similar fashion as it does for traditional assets, while also handling clients’ private keys. BNY Mellon’s CEO of securities services and digital, Roman Regelman, said: “With Digital Asset Custody, we continue our journey of trust and innovation into the evolving digital assets space, while embracing leading technology and collaborating with fintechs.”

Crypto is currently languishing like the internet did in 1996 with slow speeds and few practical use cases, says Steve Newcomb, chief product officer of Matter Labs.

But a major increase in bandwidth and security soon after saw the internet become a crucial part of daily life across the globe — and we’re right on the cusp of that happening for crypto in the next few months.

“Nobody trusted their credit card on it and everybody thought it was a fad and there weren’t any use cases for it,” Newcomb explains. 

“And then we had 10x moments in bandwidth and then SSL came, and HTPS where you got that lock — that was a 10x moment in trust. Suddenly in 2005 ecommerce just went through the roof.”

Crypto’s ‘10x’ moment could finally be here, with zkSync’s Ethereum Virtual Machine compatible mainnet launching on October 28. EVM is essentially the operating system for Ethereum and enabling it to work using zero knowledge rollups means everything running on Ethereum can seamlessly port over to experience a huge jump in speed and lower costs. 

Coming every Saturday, Hodler’s Digest will help you track every single important news story that happened this week. The best (and worst) quotes, adoption and regulation highlights, leading coins, predictions and much more — a week on Cointelegraph in one link.

Top Stories This Week

Musk’s deal for Twitter looks set to go with original $44B price tag

Elon Musk is back on track to buy Twitter. The billionaire originally decided to buy the social media network back in April 2022, settling on a price tag of roughly $44 billion. He subsequently attempted to cancel the agreement, claiming inadequate transparency from Twitter regarding the firm’s financial health as well as fake account and spam bot prevalence on the platform. Musk now intends to complete the original $44 billion deal, according to a legal filing.

EU regulators ban cross-border payments from Russian crypto accounts

In light of recent escalations in the Ukraine-Russia war, the European Union has banned crypto activity between member regions and Russia, no matter how small the transaction. The ban covers “all crypto-asset wallets, accounts, or custody services, irrespective of the amount of the wallet,” according to an Oct. 6 statement from the European Commission. Russia, on the other hand, has taken the opposite stance, evident in its approval of cross-border crypto activity in recent weeks.

Want to sue a crypto project that ripped you off? That will be $1 million, thank you. Luckily, there are options for those who face the daunting prospect of spending a small yacht’s worth of money in lawyer fees for their chance at crypto justice.

In practice, the majority of victims of international blockchain scams find themselves with little hope of recovering their money. According to crypto law expert Jason Corbett, a normal court case to recover $10 million–$20 million dollars in the blockchain sector can easily cost between $600,000 and $1 million, with an average timeline of 2.5 years.

But there are a range of cheaper and better options to get a successful outcome — if you learn how to work with the system. Legal investment funds can finance your case for a share of the judgement — sort of like a VC firm for lawsuits.

“The vast majority of lawsuits — up to 95% — are privately settled before they go to court,” Corbett says.

Common blockchain disputes

Corbett has six years of experience in crypto law as a managing partner of international blockchain-specialized boutique law firm Silk Legal. Speaking with Magazine about his new crypto litigation financing project Nemesis, Corbett notes a clear “increase in disputes stemming from deals gone wrong, contractual breaches and bad actors over the past months” due to the bear market, which has seen many projects go sideways.

Episode 3 takes an introspective approach, focusing on why we, as consumers, are so susceptible to wanting more than we need. By overconsuming, we are fast-tracking climate change, destroying ecologies, exponentially increasing waste, and finding ourselves caught on a hamster wheel. While materialism gives us a temporary high as it feeds our insecurities, it does not resolve them. Conscious consumers choose and invest in brands that reflect their values, resisting advertising and peer pressure. Making product prices reflective of the true environmental and human cost might also temper consumerism, but as long as we measure countries by gross domestic product and companies by revenue, deleterious consumption will remain a priority for governments and private sector. So collective change is the only way to address systemic issues.

Our first episode investigates how consumerism is causing many of today’s global economic, social and environmental problems, and how individual livelihoods and national economies are driven by it. As populations, purchasing power and materialism grow, we must confront the biggest challenges – the linear economy, globally interconnected supply chain, depletion of natural resources and fear of missing out. We have tools such as policy and legislation, but we also have to focus on behaviour. And of course, we need to discover – even if that means re-discover – and scale up solutions to make twenty-first century consumption sustainable. This episode sets the tone and content for the series.

In episode 12, we recap the series and look at what consumerism should and could look like going forward. Our speakers bring expertise in the circular economy, plastics and biomimicry, and each has a view on policy and responsibilities. Today, most producers and a growing number of consumers will not deny there is a problem with the take, make and dispose model, but there is, and will be, a groundswell of roadblocks. From monolithic governments to multinationals and start-ups, our speakers bring solutions, which are taking advantage of technological advantages or have been staring at us for centuries – or both.

In episode 11, we scrutinise ethics. Today, profits, gross domestic product and growth take precedence over our environment, health and happiness, regardless of the consequences. We explore how we can realistically and holistically change this. After all, hundreds of millions of individuals globally are unable to meet their needs, all while subsidising the affluent and powerful. Private sector must refrain from congratulating itself for selective, superficial, incremental steps, especially when making decisions thousands of miles away from the people and environment that they affect. We address why governments must not abdicate responsibility, even if it means listening to those who may not have deep pockets or degrees, but who know a decent quality of life means. Consumers must also feel agency. As ever, our speakers share some practical lessons we can all learn from.

Episode 8 presents the challenges that the food industry must overcome to accommodate the 10 billion human population forecast for 2050, while restoring nature and mitigating climate change. There is much to ‘chew over’, from production to storage, trading, transport, packaging, marketing, purchasing, consumption, waste and hunger. As with our earlier sector-specific episodes, we cannot avoid policy, but we should not wait for it. Our speakers share their own solutions, as well as others’, to keep food nutritious, safe and moving.

Following the meteoric rise of ‘fast’ fashion, there is now increasing pressure to re-think textiles and apparel. In episode 7, we probe into the industry challenges, from the over-production, self-regulation and environmental impact to consumer behaviour and greenwashing. Yet fashion shapes cultures and identities, and so we need solutions. Our speakers provide them, including their own work and other brands. Awareness and respect along the production and consumption cycle is key. If we shift how, what and why we acquire, and if what we wear is given as long a life as possible, we will not just save the planet. We will reignite our relationship with clothes.