WhiteboardCrypto Newsletter - June 1

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

Solana will pay validators more

Solana governance proposal SIMD-0096 was passed on May 27. It proposed to stop burning priority fees and instead pay them to validators. Priority fees are optional SOL fees to boost the speed your transaction would be put through. Burning tokens is meant to control inflation, and currently, the priority fees are split 50/50 between validators and burning. Eliminating burning could lead to higher inflation, but the way the system works now is easy for people to pay a validator directly to speed up their transaction which would be beneficial for both the user and the validator, so this proposal is meant to keep it more fair and efficient for everyone.

Learn more here.

Ethereum Name Service proposes to migrate to layer 2

ENS is a popular naming service that allows wallet addresses to appear more human-readable, so you could have wallet.eth instead of 0×789…etc. This has traditionally worked on Ethereum mainnet, but in ENS v2, an upcoming upgrade, they want to migrate the service to a layer 2 network. Layer 2s are meant to increase scalability and decrease fees, so many services that were previously on mainnet (layer 1) are moving to layer 2s.

Learn more here.

PayPal USD goes live on Solana

PayPal has introduced its stablecoin, PayPal USD (PYUSD), on the Solana blockchain. This follows its earlier launch on Ethereum. The goal is to make PYUSD more useful by using Solana’s fast and cheap transactions. PayPal plans to increase the use of PYUSD in three stages: making people aware, showing its usefulness, and making it common everywhere. On Solana, PYUSD will have features like private transfers and notes with payments to improve how people use it.

Learn more here.

US and UK might share crypto rules

Hester Peirce, a US SEC commissioner, proposed a joint "sandbox" for U.S. and U.K. crypto companies to experiment with new technologies under the same rules in both countries. This is part of a larger effort to encourage collaboration and improve the regulatory environment for crypto. Despite ongoing regulatory challenges, Peirce believes this approach could help smaller firms compete with bigger ones and encourage growth in the crypto industry.

Learn more here.

Thanks for reading and I hope you learned something!

- Theodore