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Partnerships and Marketing Updates

Our partnerships team has been busy networking with various dapp developers on the IC. We have our wallet integrated with the largest NFT marketplaces on the IC - Entrepot, CCC, Cetoswap, Gigaverse, DSCVR, and others. Please see a non-exhaustive list of partners here.

We have hit 500k+ views on Twitter per month, launched our blog, and are seeing an uptick in growth from our SEO.

What's in Today's Email?

• IC Ecosystem News
• This Week in Our Blog
• NFT Market Snippets
• Around The World
• Worth Listening to
• By the Numbers
• Meme Time
• Weekly Opinion Piece

IC Ecosystem News

♾ Blockchain Billionaires: Congratulations to the DFINITY Foundation and all members of the ICP community! The Internet Computer Protocol officially surpassed one billion blocks on Wednesday, demonstrating to the world that the IC is truly poised to become the world's internet computer--scalable, fast, and decentralized.

♾ Fundamentally Stable: Finterest, the first collateralized lending protocol on the Internet Computer, announced that they are developing icUSD--a fully collateral-backed stablecoin native to the IC. This is the second major product announcement the Finterest team has made recently, the first being about FinnyFeed, an on-chain, lightweight price feed that developers can use to query supported asset prices freely. icUSD is pegged to the US dollar.

♾ Very Social: DSocial, a video sharing dapp, recently made it possible for creators to monetize on its network. Paid subscription models are now available, functioning similarly to well-known web2 service Patreon. This important infrastructure upgrade brings us one step closer to creating a healthy economy within the ICP ecosystem, attracting creators and audiences who want to break away from the Big Tech dominated web2 platforms.

♾ Hear Ye, Hear Ye: Psychedelic Collective, one of the biggest presences in the IC (their portfolio includes Plug wallet, Sonic DEX, DAB registry, Jelly NFT marketplace, and many more), recently held a town hall meeting on Twitter Spaces. The event was followed up with a Medium post of "wishes" that some members of the ICP community viewed as antagonistic and challenging the direction of the DFINITY Foundation, perhaps motivated by Psychedelic's own personal reasons. Founder and Chief Scientist Dominic Williams took to writing a response that day on Nuance, a blogging platform on the IC. Read Psychedelic's open letter here, and Dom's response here.

This Week in Our Blog

1. This is an oft-repeated phrase in the world of finance: bull markets make you money, bear markets make you rich. What it means is that bear markets can provide incredible investment opportunities... but only if you know what to look for. Read our case study analysis on two web3 giants that were built during the last crypto winter to see what they had in common.

Building in a Bear Market

Let’s be frank; things don’t look great on a macro scale right now. The entire crypto market has been in a relentless downward trend since last November. The so-dubbed “crypto contagion” stemming from the collapse of Terra (UST—an algorithmic stablecoin) has spread to crypto lender Celsius and

InfinitySwapInfinitySwap

2. Another week, another MAJOR partnership! As our talented developer team works to create the most advanced and robust DEX the internet has ever seen, our marketing branch is hard at work forging powerful relationships that will strengthen the entire ecosystem. Read more about our strategic partnership with Gigaverse Labs, creator of ICPunks and, most recently, an NFT bridge that allows Ethereum assets in and out of the Internet Computer.

InfinitySwap Forms a Strategic Partnership with Gigaverse Labs

InfinitySwap and Gigaverse Labs have announced their intention to collaborate on a variety of different levels in order to bring further value to the Internet Computer ecosystem. Here at InfinitySwap, we are delighted to announce yet another noteworthy partnership. Gigaverse Labs are delighted to in…

InfinitySwapInfinitySwap Editor

3. Native Bitcoin integration has never been done before on any chain, and it will open up a world of possibilities. Explore all of the things that could be done with Bitcoin and the Internet Computer Protocol via our think piece:

8 things that could happen after the Internet Computer’s Bitcoin Integration

In the cryptosphere, Bitcoin represents the hardest of money. Most crypto investors choose to invest at least part of their portfolios into Bitcoin because, by and large, it represents the culmination of the entire crypto market. Most people believe that if anything in crypto is going to do well, it

InfinitySwapInfinitySwap Writer

NFT Market Snippets

🎨 First and foremost, we want to provide you with more information regarding our collaboration with DKLord and Egido Val, the creators of OG Medals and IC Bucks. The NFT collection will be called Infinity Gems, and there will be a total of 2000 NFTs in this limited-edition collection. Holders will receive perks when using our InfinitySwap platform. The launch will begin with a token airdrop because burning a set number of tokens will be how a person “mints” the NFT. We are excited to provide more information on our blog soon. For now, you can see this post by DKLord on DSCVR to learn more about the token airdrop for OG Medals and IC Bucks holders. There will also be a token airdrop for early InfinitySwap wallet adopters, so be sure to get your wallet today!

🎨 Entrepot has announced a massive partnership with the talented developers at MODCLUB. The goal is for Proof of Humanity (PoH) to provide protection against bots for future NFT project launches. The Flower Power DAO is voting on whether to use MODCLUB’s PoH to whitelist addresses for the Pineapple Punks that are not already going to BTC Flower (airdrops) or ETH Flower (whitelist) holders. This would completely eliminate a public sale for the much-anticipated collection if the proposal is accepted and enough people perform the PoH.

🎨 Gigaverse Labs has completed their ICP x ETH bridge allowing Infinity Frogs holders to bridge their NFTs to the Gigaverse marketplace for secondary sales. Holders will pay a gas fee in their MetaMask wallet when bridging the asset, but once that process is complete, the NFT acts like any other on the Internet Computer with a standard 0.0001 ICP transaction fee for transfers. We’re proud of the work being done by our partners. Gigaverse’s NFT market is yet another place you will be able to use your InfinitySwap wallet!

Around the World

🧊 Full On Meltdown: Despite last week's positive news that crypto lender Celsius was paying off its loans, raising the hopes of its customers (who have been unable to withdraw their funds for weeks), they filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy earlier this week. Not all is lost, however, as Chapter 11 allows for restructuring with some financial protection from creditors. With luck, there may be some remittance for those who were impacted by Celsius' crisis.

🏰 The MATIC Kingdom: Disney announced six companies will be joining its 2022 Accelerator Program to help build out the international media conglomerate's presence in web3 and related sectors, such as VR and AI. Polygon ($MATIC) was the only blockchain selected for this program, causing a surge in the coin's price immediately upon the news. Polygon is a Layer-2 scaling solution for the Ethereum blockchain.

🌊 Freezing Waters: OpenSea, the largest NFT marketplace in the world, is laying off 20% of its workforce, declaring that crypto winter is here:

” … [T]he reality is that we have entered an unprecedented combination of crypto winter and broad macroeconomic instability, and we need to prepare the company for the possibility of a prolonged downturn,”

-OpenSea CEO Devin Finzer

🔱 Shadow Fork 9: Some good forking news. Crypto investors seem to be cautiously hoping that Ethereum may see a price rebound by the end of the year, betting on a positive market reaction when the Merge goes live. The Ethereum Foundation recently completed the Sepolia trial run, and this week passed another Merge milestone when its ninth shadow fork went live.

Worth Listening to

By the Numbers

484,850,292.1091 ICP

Total ICP minted (as of 8 am EST, July 17 ,2022 - icscan)

1,408,821 ICP

Total NFT Trading Volume (as of 8 am EST, July 17 ,2022 - nftgeek)

Weekly Meme

Weekly Opinion Piece - Max Chamberlin - CEO

In this part of our status update, Max shares some technical updates.

Developer Updates

We have focused on building an AMM and also a framework that can enable DEFI on the Internet Computer.  Here a number of challenges have been tackled:

1. Canisters do not have an easy way to reshare methods making code reuse on the IC more limited than it needs to be
2. On the IC, a developer needs to monitor their canisters cycles and storage/memory
3. Whilst the IC has greater possibilities when upgrading canisters, the developer flows for upgrades had not been entirely worked out

Our canister-sdk addresses these issues with a set of tools that greatly simplifies and enhances the development process for dapps on the IC. Below we include a short summary of the tooling built:

Infrastructure

• Canisters have a way to inherit methods from other canister interfaces, similar to inheritance in Ethereum using traits in Rust
• Utility Interfaces for monitoring a canisters metrics - cycles, memory, and storage, which can be inherited by any canister built with our framework
• Decentralizing cycles top-up for canisters. This feature enables users to bid for a canister’s tokens by providing cycles and is implemented through a trait that other canisters can inherit
• Hooks that run prior to an update to reduce the cost of polling methods on the IC, such as the canister heartbeat
• An upgrade workflow to enable canisters to be upgraded easily from a CI interface and command line tools to support this
• a mini framework for running property tests on canisters

Through the development of this infrastructure, we believe we have created a viable framework for DEFI in Rust on the Internet Computer, which will enable new applications to be brought to market safely and at a lower cost.

AMM

For the AMM, we have built the following:

• Liquidity bootstrap pools that enable token launches with greater capital efficiency
• A utility  that enables the aggregation of metrics across pools for a given token

We are targeting an August launch. Our test net has been ongoing for several months now, and we are targeting an August launch for the AMM.  We are currently working on the implementation of the following:

• Creating a viable, stable storage library for IC canisters. This will enable a user to directly write multiple state objects directly in stable storage, thereby removing the need to write state held in memory to stable storage within the pre-upgrade hook, which can be error-prone (a failure occurring in the pre-upgrade hook can prevent a canister from ever being upgraded).

Wallet

The wallet application has been launched with a sleek user interface and compatibility with Internet Identity, enabling a user to store their tokens and NFTs. The aim is to make this wallet cross-chain and support BTC.

We believe the technical progress we have made will ensure that our project stands out. Although we have only been working on partnerships over the last month, we have seen significant traction, onboarding  7 major partners, with several to be confirmed in the coming days and weeks.

Once again, the team would like to thank you for supporting us on this journey, and look forward to providing future updates as we launch.

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*Disclaimer: Note that cryptocurrencies can be volatile and speculation should not be construed as financial advice in any capacity. All opinions of the author are their own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or position of InfinitySwap or its staff.