WhiteboardCrypto Newsletter - May 24

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

Fun Fact: May 22 was Bitcoin Pizza Day! 15 years ago the first use of BTC was as a currency, not an investment, and some poor guy bought two pizzas for 10k bitcoin. Today, that’s worth $1.2b. Let’s hope that wasn’t all the bitcoin he owned!

MKR tokens to expire

The Maker protocol recently rebranded to Sky, and the MKR token is shifting to the SKY token. If you have MKR, you’ll want to make sure you swap it for SKY as soon as possible because as of September you will start being penalized if you still hold MKR.

Learn more here.

Proposed GENIUS Act prefers corporations

The GENIUS Act was voted down earlier this month, meaning that the Senate couldn’t vote on whether it should pass or not. It seems that the Democrats weren’t happy with parts of it, because after the Republicans made some changes, enough Democrats changed their vote for it to pass. This means that a full floor vote can happen now, which would put the Act into action, so to speak.

The Act deals primarily with stablecoins, the cryptocurrencies that are pegged to the value of a fiat currency like the US dollar. The changes are meant to ensure better consumer protection, limits on big tech, strict foreign issuer requirements, efforts for clarity in issuers’ branding, expanded enforcement powers, and more.

It also includes a ban on yield-bearing stablecoins, which ultimately ends up hurting consumers. Why? Because companies that issue stablecoins use consumer money to purchase treasuries or other short-term yield-bearing assets as part of how they issue and manage new tokens. So, the companies will receive the yield but will not be able to share it with consumers.

In related news, Hong Kong just passed their own stablecoin bill.

Learn more here.

Ethereum can scale!

A project called Succinct has proven that Ethereum can scale. This led to further Ethereum update proposals, focusing on the execution layer. Some people who have been critical of the chain recently are saying that this could save it. While the updates will take a few years to be fully realized, if it works as people suspect, there will be exponential growth after that.

Learn more here.

Solana can scale too!

Solana Labs’ spinoff Anza proposed upgrades to the Solana network, called Alpenglow, that focus on consensus to make the network “as fast as light”. The upgrades would replace the current consensus mechanism altogether. It could launch as early as the end of 2025, or early 2026 if it passes governance votes. But not everyone is convinced that the proposed changes would be beneficial, stating that it would only take 7 malicious validators to successfully attack the network. The validity of that claim isn’t proven yet, but it’s definitely something to keep in mind.

Learn more here.

Sui DEX hack

A hacker tricked the math on a DEX on Sui, called Cetus, and ended up minting new coins and stealing about $233m worth of assets. Cetus was able to pause its smart contracts to block some of the funds and buy time for Sui validators to intervene. And they did - a “large number of validators” decided not to process transactions for the stolen funds, and managed to freeze about $160m of the funds. This calls into question how decentralized Sui actually is, since a fully permissionless chain wouldn’t be able to freeze funds like that.

Learn more here.

Thanks for reading and I hope you learned something!

- Theodore