WhiteboardCrypto Newsletter - Sept 9

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

Fun fact: A 3 hour X space provided an update on SBF in jail. A summary was provided by @AutismCapital.

Another fun fact: Metamask enabled crypto to fiat withdrawals. It’s getting increasingly easier to on- and off-board to crypto. But it does come with a ~9% withdrawal fee.

MakerDAO to move to Solana?

Well, maybe not exactly, but it does plan to use Solana code in the mid-future. Maker’s plan has always been to migrate from Ethereum to its own chain, but the announcement that it plans to use Solana’s codebase was a major hit to the Ethereum ecosystem. Vitalik Buterin, one of the main faces in Ethereum, sold all his MKR (Maker’s DAO token) upon the news.

Learn more here.

Vitalik makes news with a new privacy protocol

Not only is he strongly opinionated about the Maker situation, he also is innovating in the space (as usual). In the light of the Tornado Cash debacle (remember, the privacy app that allowed users to hide their funds, but has since been sanctioned by the US and the devs are being arrested around the world?), Vitalik, among other devs in the Ethereum space, wrote a paper for a new protocol that uses zero-knowledge tech to prove that the user hasn’t interacted with any sanctioned wallets. One of the major issues with Tornado Cash was that known bad-actors (hackers, terrorists, etc) had used the protocol and it wasn’t possible to tell who had interacted with them or not. Vitalik’s “Privacy Pools” would keep transactions private while confirming that they are good actors.

Learn more here.

Visa comes to Solana too

The major credit card company, Visa, is using the Solana blockchain to allow merchants to accept the USDC stablecoin, further enabling crypto adoption. This isn’t the first time Visa has worked with crypto payments, but previously it had worked with exchanges rather than a blockchain directly. Hopefully, this will make transactions even cheaper since the exchange won’t be taking a cut.

Learn more here.

Thanks for reading and I hope you learned something!

- Theodore