WhiteboardCrypto Newsletter - Nov 9

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

US election might favor crypto

The results are in, and Donald Trump has been elected to be President of the United States. We’re sure you’ve heard a ton about this already this week, so we won’t go into any detail and this is the only time in the newsletter we’ll talk about it. He has promised to support crypto, and we hope he keeps that promise. Additionally, a lot of pro-crypto candidates have won seats in the Senate and the House of Representatives, so that should help press things forward, which is also why we’ve seen Bitcoin optimistically hit new all time highs.

Learn more here.

Bitcoin dev conversation history moved

In an ironic move, the bitcoin-dev mailing list history has been uploaded to Google Groups after Linux removed support for the mailing list software. It’s ironic because Bitcoin is supposed to be decentralized, so having this stored on a centralized server is kind of funny. It doesn’t have any impact on the actual functionality of the Bitcoin blockchain and only serves as an historical record. This mailing list served as the primary correspondence mode for Bitcoin developers up until Feb 2024, so there’s a lot of history there. There are decentralized file storage services they could use, so it’s not entirely clear why they chose Google other than perhaps convenience and cost.

Learn more here.

Major blockchains actually lose money

While blockchains are supposed to be decentralized and self-sufficient, there is a lot of economic activity that goes on behind the scenes. Some examples include minting coins for stakers and miners, paying interest to liquidity providers, and distributing fee revenue. While these things tend to happen automatically, they actually have proven to be economically unsustainable in the long term. For instance, the Ethereum network mints new ETH for stakers at an average cost of $1.28 per $1 of revenue, and Solana averages $7.62 per $1! This is seen as a reasonable cost as adoption expands but improvements are being made across the chains to better manage the balance between supply needs and revenue, including burn mechanisms, lowering inflation, and more balanced transaction fees.

Learn more here.

Do CEXes charge listing fees?

It’s kind of a complicated answer, but the question has been heating up X this week with Binance and Coinbase arguing with Tron Founders and other token creators. The fear is that there is a “pay to list” model where the exchanges don’t DYOR into the token, and rather just list whatever is paid for. But that’s not actually (usually) the case, especially in the most popular CEXes that have big reputations to uphold. Most of the time, any “listing fees” aren’t actually to list the token, but an optional form of advertising for learn-to-earn programs or other promotional activities. This is a reminder that before you choose which CEX to use, you read the Terms and Conditions, and the listing requirements to make sure you’re comfortable with their models.

Learn more here.

Thanks for reading and I hope you learned something!

- Theodore