WhiteboardCrypto Newsletter - Nov 23

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

Fun fact: You don’t need us to tell you that a bunch of assets are hitting all time highs. We don’t focus on price action at WBC, rather on education about how and why, but increasing prices generally means more people are understanding the value of the technology and trusting it financially. We're excited, and we hope you are too!

Monad testnet launches

As an upcoming layer 1, Monad claims 10k transactions per second and a 1 second block time as tested in the devnet launched in March. Now, the public testnet has gone live so people are eager to test if this is true. These fast speeds are dependent on validator nodes’ hardware though, so actual large-scale implementation may not be as successful as the lower-traffic devnet.

Learn more here.

California makes DAO members liable

Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) are a new form of governance only fully realized within the crypto community over the past ten or so years. Various types of DAO structures are being tested, but the point is that no one person or group of shareholders control the network, as a traditional company would. Despite being decentralized, a California court has ruled that Lido DAO members can be held liable as if they were in a general partnership within the state. This ruling applies specifically to Lido DAO but could be extended to any profit-driven DAO that also has identifiable individuals controlling operations.

Learn more here.

DeSci moves into drug testing

Getting funding to test drugs is not an easy task because there are tough guidelines, laws, and ethical grounds that need to be considered before any testing is approved. It also requires a ton of upfront capital. A solution is being tested in the decentralized science (DeSci) space where drug developers using the Pump Science platform can launch a token that represents fractional rights to the chemical compound that can be licensed and sold to consumers. DeSci has found many unique ways to fund research that otherwise struggled. Pump Science does need to approve the tokens before they are sold publicly, so it’s not a total free for all, and hopefully that means the projects will be safe.

Learn more here.

‘Just a chill guy’ meme troubles

If you’re on X or TikTok, you’ve probably come across the ‘Just a chill guy’ memecoin image lately. The value has sky-rocketed to almost a $500 million market cap. The problem is, the original artist named Phillip Banks, never consented to its use. He has copyrighted the artwork and plans to take legal action against any for-profit use of the image. In response, a wallet was created by X account @chillguycto that will supposedly receive donations for the artist and/or charity. At the time of writing, the value held in the wallet is over $200k but it is fluctuating with the price of the tokens.

Learn more here.

Gensler resigns

Gary Gensler of US SEC fame has announced his resignation as of Jan 20, 2025. President-elect Donald Trump had stated he would fire Gensler when he took office, so Gensler has saved him the trouble by resigning on his own. Gensler was known for ‘regulation through enforcement’ of the crypto industry. His replacement has not yet been announced.

Learn more here.

Sui network outage

Layer 1 up-time is an important metric for the success of the network. Solana has had many outages over the years, though that doesn’t seem to have impacted its viability much as it remains the in the top 5 crypto by marketcap. Sui, a newer layer 1 network that is touted as a competitor to Solana, has gained traction over the past year. But this week it experienced its first outage, which lasted about 2 hours and was caused by a bug in its transaction scheduling programming that crashed the validators. The network was patched and so the issue should not happen again.

Learn more here.

Apple users need to do updates

If you are an Apple product user, make sure you do the latest software updates as they fix a vulnerability that could lead to bad actors taking control of your device and/or accessing any data stored in your browser including private keys and passwords.

Learn more here.

Thanks for reading and I hope you learned something!

- Theodore