WhiteboardCrypto Newsletter - Aug 19

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

You can now buy crypto with Apple Pay

Metamask has partnered with financial tech firm Banxa to allow users to buy crypto using Apple Pay. The hope is that this will allow people to onramp to crypto without the need for a centralized exchange, but Banxa does require KYC (know-your-customer) personal details for users. However, some people who have tried this say their banks blocked the transactions anyway, so it may not be as simple as it sounds.

Learn more here.

Speaking of user adoption…

Visa published a proof of concept that will allow users with a self-custodial wallet to pay gas fees with their credit card. Basically, this would work for purchases from merchants using the Ethereum blockchain. Say, for instance, that you wanted to sign up to the WhiteboardCrypto Club. If it was possible, we might have an option to pay with ether. But maybe you don’t have enough ether in your wallet to cover the cost. If your wallet allowed integration with Visa, that’s fine! You can make the purchase entirely through your wallet but using your credit card. And to keep your identity safe, they use account abstraction, which is a relatively new protocol on Ethereum (ERC4337), which is a very technical thing that is explained more in the link below.

Learn more here.

Coinbase has lots of good news

The world’s third-largest exchange is now fully regulated and functioning in Canada. Users can purchase crypto with Interac Debit directly from their bank with no fees. And if you use the Coinbase Wallet app, it integrates seamlessly with the exchange. On top of that, their new Base blockchain is quite busy already, already holding 5th place of total value locked in the layer 2 ecosystem, surpassing Polygon and Starknet. On top of that, the exchange was just the first to be approved to list fully regulated and leveraged crypto futures in the US.

FarmVille creator enters web3

Ever played FarmVille or Words With Friends? Zynga, the gaming company behind these well-known apps, is launching a web3 game called Sugartown later this year. They’ll use Ethereum NFTs and will only be playable via web browsers. This could be big for web3 gaming, as Zynga’s web2 games have been wildly successful.

Learn more here.

OpenSea makes creator fees/royalties optional

Recently, OpenSea, the leading NFT marketplace on the Ethereum blockchain, had made royalties built-in to NFT collections. Basically, this meant that if an artist launched their NFT project via OpenSea, there would be an additional fee to the buyer that would go to the artist, even for resales. They also blocked sales on NFT marketplaces that did NOT have this fee built in. But, users didn’t like this, so they are now making it optional. Artists will be able to decide for themselves if they want to have mandatory fees included, and users will be able to see which NFTs have mandatory fees or not.

Learn more here.

Thanks for reading and I hope you learned something!

- Theodore