WhiteboardCrypto Newsletter - Aug 12

Welcome back to this week's edition of our WhiteboardCrypto Newsletter!

A bit of feel good news: SBF is in jail for breaking his bail terms by witness tampering.

Base Mainnet Launches

Coinbase’s layer 2 network launched on Wednesday and it already has over 100 dApps that are live. They are having a campaign called “Onchain Summer” in which they are dropping NFTs to users, among other rewards.

Learn more here.

Mystery $4.5M Ether Burn

Crypto continues to amaze. A pseudonymous user known as nd4.eth burned 2500 ether at the end of July, which is about $4.5 million. There’s seemingly no reason for removing these tokens from circulation, and we doubt it was an error because there are designated burn addresses, one of which was the receiver of this ETH.

Learn more here.

SEC Appealing XRP Ruling

In no surprised to anyone, the US Securities and Exchange Commission is appealing the ruling we covered a few weeks ago declaring that the XRP token is not a security, nor is most of the activity that occurred with it.

Learn more here.

PayPal Launches Stablecoin

PayPal has launched a USD stablecoin on the Ethereum network called PYPSD. It is backed by US dollars, short-term US Treasuries and “similar cash equivalents”. Users can transfer the stablecoin between PayPal accounts as well as to external wallets. This will likely make mass crypto adoption much smoother as so many payment platforms are already integrated with PayPal.

Learn more here.

Curve Hacker Returns Some

Remember the $70M Curve hack that caused everyone to worry that DeFi was toast? Well, the hacker returned over $12M of that, which is nice and all but it’s not even half. A message was included with the return transaction that reads: “I saw some ridiculous views, so i want to clarify that I’m refunding you not because you can find me, it’s because I don’t want to ruin your project, maybe it’s a lot of money for a lot of people, but not for me, I’m smarter than all of you…” Curve is offering a $1.85M bounty for whoever finds the hacker’s identity. Since the hack, the coin has recovered and people are less afraid of defi liquidations due to it.

Learn more here.

Thanks for reading and I hope you learned something!

- Theodore