WhiteboardCrypto Newsletter - Aug 24

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

Balaji's Network State

In Singapore, Balaji Srinivasan's 90-day experiment, “The Network School," is a pop-up city focused on education, fitness, and earning through crypto. This initiative reflects his ideas on creating a new type of society, where learning is rewarded with crypto-credentials and participants focus on growth and innovation. He explains its purpose is to “articulate a vision of peace, trade, internationalism, and technology, even as the rest of the world talks about war, trade war, nationalism, and statism.” People have to apply to attend this test launch.

Learn more here.

NEAR Protocol Upgrade

The Layer 1 NEAR Protocol launched its Nightshade 2.0 upgrade, which boosts transaction speed by 400% and improves validator efficiency, also speeding up transactions by approx. 5x. This upgrade enhances the network's scalability, making it faster and more cost-effective for users.

Learn more here.

Optimism Stops Fault Proofs

Optimism, a layer-2 solution for Ethereum, launched their much-anticipated Fault Proof system in June, which was a necessary step towards decentralization. The system allows users to challenge transaction throughput in case there is a malicious actor. But this week they discovered some flaws that made them temporarily stop the system so they can work on a patch that will upgrade the smart contracts and implement a hard fork. In the meantime, the Optimism Foundation is the sole proposer of transactions. User funds are apparently not at risk.

Learn more here.

Tron’s BTC reserve withdrawal

Tron’s founder, Justin Sun, withdrew 12,000 BTC from the USDD’s stablecoin reserves without consulting the community, raising concerns among Tron users. Roughly 98% of the reserves backing USDD are now in Tron’s native TRX token, which is reminding people of the TerraUSD stablecoin due to its dependence on LUNA. There is still a high collateralization ratio - 230% - but that is dependent on the value of the TRX token now. When USDD launched in 2022, it was an algorithmic stablecoin just like TerraUSD, dependent on the TRX token. BTC was introduced after the TerraUSD collapse to avoid a similar situation, so the withdrawal now is having people ask a lot of questions about the stability of the stablecoin.

Learn more here.

Thanks for reading and I hope you learned something!

- Theodore