Bitfinity Weekly: Learning (and Growing) Together
Welcome to Issue #70 of Bitfinity Weekly for our #BITFINIANS community. If this newsletter was forwarded to you, sign up here.
What's in Today's Email?
- Global Crypto News
- This Week in our Blog
- NFT Market Bytes
- Tweet of the Week
- Meme Time
- A Matter of Opinion
Global Crypto News
🦊 Mask Off: On Tuesday, MetaMask launched a feature that allows users to sell $ETH for fiat directly through its Portfolio dApp. MetaMask (which is the most popular cryptocurrency wallet current in use) has limited this feature to users in the U.S., U.K. and parts of Europe for now. MetaMask has added that they plan to expand this function for "native fast tokens on layer 2 networks" in the future.
👑 Market Makers: Tensions seem to be growing between Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin and the MakerDAO community. MakerDAO's co-founder Rune Christensen recently advocated for the project to fork Solana for a future appchain migration. This garnered public criticism from Buterin, who additionally took to the Discord of MakerDAO's rival Reflexer Finance to comment on the importance of active community governance to reinforce support for "staked ETH". Buterin also sold his stake of 500 $MKR (MakerDAO's governance token), which led to an immediate price dip of over 5%.
🎒 Back to School: El Salvador, famous for its Bitcoin 'laser-eye maxi' president, Nayib Bukele, is implementing a pilot program for adding Bitcoin education in all of its schools by 2023. El Salvador became the first country to recognize Bitcoin legal tender in September 2021; now through this collaborative venture with non-profit entity My First Bitcoin, Bitcoin Beach (El Zonte, a Salvadorean costal town that has integrated blockchain payments), and the Ministry of Education, El Salvador will become the first country to formalize crypto public education.
🧞 11,000 Years of Longing: Faruk Fatih Ozer, the founder of failed cryptocurrency exchange Thodex, has been extradited from Albania to Turkey and sentenced to 11,196 years in jail under counts of money-laundering, fraud, and organized cime. Thodex, which was founded in 2017, was one of Turkey's largest exchanges until its implosion in April 2021. Ozer reportedly fled Turkey with investor assets totaling $2b at the time, though the indictment estimates the true amount to be $42m.
⚖️ Practical Equilibrium: Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and other prominent crypto figures (SpankChain co-founder Ameen Soleimani, Chainalysis researcher Jacob Illum, and academics Matthias Nadler and Fabian Schar) have joined forces to co-author a research paper on a new privacy protocol that potentially works as a regulation-friendly alternative to Tornado Cash. The protocol, dubbed 'Privacy Tools' aims to use zero-knowledge proofs to verify the legality of user funds without revealing their full transaction history.
This Week in our Blog
The two most dominant models of blockchain are PoW (Proof-of-Work) and PoS (Proof-of-Stake), the biggest examples being Bitcoin (PoW) and Ethereum (a PoW blockchain that switched over a PoS model in 2022). In this article, we go over the differences of the two, and discuss what they mean in the topic of sustainability.
Hans
Decentralized Finance is often billed by crypto advocates as a means to help bridge the ever widening gap between the rich and the poor. In this article we analyze what DeFi adoption could do for the unbanked and disadvantaged:
Gasi Tariekiprete Favour
DeFi holds tremendous possibility to lift up all communities by offering financial services while reducing microtransaction fees that make even simple banking difficult, especially for those in developing nations.
Hans
NFT Market Bytes
🧹 Streamlinooors: Binance's NFT marketplace is winding down support for Polygon-based NFTs, according to an official blog post published this Friday. Binance's Sandbox NFT Staking Program, which allowed users to stake Sandbox Land NFTs to earn $SAND rewards, will be completely shut down on Sept. 26th. Support for all NFTs on the Polygon network will be terminated on the same day, and users will have until Dec. 31st to withdraw their Polygon NFTs from the marketplace. Binance did not clarify the reason for this abrupt move.
🎵 Now I'm A Belieber: Canadian pop singer Justin Bieber, in collaboration with anotherblock (a web3 music platform) and producer Axident, released an NFT of one of his songs from 2015, titled "Company". The NFT, which launched this Thursday, is limited to 2000 collection size and distributes among its holders a 1% royalty share of streaming revenue.
📮 New Policy Order: Google recently updated its cryptocurrency advertising policy to permit advertisements for NFT gaming ads. The policy change, which goes into effect on September 15th, requires that all entities seeking to advertise their NFT game on Google acquire appropriate Google Ads certification as well as adhere to Google's policy on gambling games--this may be a bit tricky for many web3 advertisers who incentivize players with staking, as Google's policy prohibits staking based rewards, even if the reward is another NFT.
Tweet of the Week
Good morning, Lugano! 🌞 Embrace the NFT revolution with Bitfinity as we celebrate and support artists from all walks of life, unleashing their creativity through stunning digital art 🎨🚀@LuganoNFTfest pic.twitter.com/HH7FrF1QYa
— Bitfinity Network (@bitfinitynet) September 8, 2023
Meme Time
A Matter of Opinion
Two years after pioneering the use of Bitcoin as legal tender, El Salvador is taking another bold step towards cryptocurrency adoption by introducing Bitcoin education in its public schools. This progressive initiative, which aims to educate school children about Bitcoin as well as other cryptocurrencies, reflects a growing recognition of the importance of financial literacy to empower individuals in an increasingly digital financial world.
It is not enough to simply encourage adoption of cryptocurrencies if we are to create a fairer, better world for everyone. Blockchain technology and DeFi innovations are great tools, but in order for these tools to be best utilized by the greatest number of people, we must encourage an environment of education. In other words, it's not enough to hand someone a new tool, we must also hand him the knowledge to wield and use that new tool effectively.
Education is such an important piece of the bigger picture, which is why we here at Bitfinity have been publishing weekly articles and this newsletter for well over a year to keep you informed. We hope that by doing our part to foster discussion and learning, we can help to create a community where we can continuously learn from one another in order to better our individual lives as well as the world around us.
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*Disclaimer: While every effort is made on this website to provide accurate information, any opinions expressed or information disseminated do not necessarily reflect the views of Bitfinity itself.
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