WhiteboardCrypto Newsletter - Jan 18

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

Fun fact #1: New York Attorney General Letitia James is going to serve scammers notice of their lawsuits via airdropped NFTs.

Fun fact #2: Blockchain-based data storage provider Arweave has sent data to the moon, literally.

Mango Markets closing down

If you are a Solana user and have funds on the Mango Markets DEX, you’ll want to make sure you take them out as soon as possible. Mango Markets was charged by the SEC for being an unregistered broker and selling unregistered securities. The shutdown is largely due to the amount of funds needed to pay the court fees and settlement, and that keeping the exchange going would actually lose the Mango DAO money.

Learn more here.

Celestia proves its mettle

Celestia is a data availability (DA) layer built with the Cosmos SDK that is meant to replace Ethereum and offer lower fees, allowing L2s to perform the execution and settlement of transactions to post to Celestia, just like they normally would with Ethereum. Celestia has become increasingly popular in the past few weeks with new NFT mints and other types of transactions, which have increased the size of the blobs posted on the network. A major question for new DA layers is whether or not they can actually scale. Celestia allows for larger blob sizes than Ethereum, with a more consistent fee structure, though the network isn’t getting as much usage as Ethereum so a direct comparison isn’t really possible yet. Still, it’s cool to see it able to handle what is basically a 10x increase in activity without any problems.

Learn more here.

Indian telecom partnering with Web3

One of the largest telecom companies in India, called Jio Platforms, has partnered with Polygon Labs to bring in Web3 capabilities to Jio’s existing platforms. What exactly that means is yet to be seen, but since Jio services over 450m users, that’s a huge leap in adoption of crypto.

Learn more here.

ZKsync wins RWA

Real world assets (RWAs) have been a big narrative in crypto in the past year or so as ownership of physical assets is brought on-chain to prove ownership and distribute rewards. RWAs include things like cellular services, real estate documentation, and investing in independent farms. Ethereum’s layer 2, ZKsync, is the second-largest blockchain for RWA projects now, hosting 23% of market share, following Ethereum as the first-largest. So if you’re interested in more cost-efficient RWA trading, you may want to check it out.

Learn more here.

Ethereum Foundation transparency

The Ethereum Foundation (EF) has received criticism over the years for not being more active on social media, with an emphasis on disclosing grants, treasury movements, and more. The EF is the nonprofit organization that supports the Ethereum ecosystem, largely composed of developers but also project leads and a variety of other experts and afficionados. The criticism has been heard and the EF announced that they will be more active on social media to disclose what they are working on and be more connected to the community.

Learn more here.

Thanks for reading and I hope you learned something!

- Theodore