TLDR: Bitcoin EFT fillings resubmitted, LN Markets all-time high, Kraken to share account info to IRS, Archway live on mainnet, Osmosis v16 prop, Binance deals with Exec departures and lots more!

Bitcoin Highlights of the Week

1. All of the spot Bitcoin ETF filings have been resubmitted. The sentiment is quite positive. Bernstein, $650 billion asset manager, says SEC is likely to approve a spot Bitcoin ETF.

2. Larry Fink, BlackRock CEO, publicly says that Bitcoin will revolutionize finance, that it is an international asset and the technology is fantastic.

3 Bitcoin Depot, world's biggest Bitcoin ATM company,  got listed on the Nasdaq.

4. Bitfinex announces return of assets to Recovery Right Tokens holders. The company has received assets from US Homeland Security that were stolen during the security breach in 2016.

5. Steven Lubka, Head of Private Clients & Family Office for Swan, reports that High Net Worth bitcoin buying has been ramping up. An assumption that price appreciation comes from healthy spot activity.

6. The Old Taylor, reported “smash buying bitcoin“ close to 1 bitcoin in Swan for her mom, as she desires to escape from the USD being inflated away. (Picture in the link!)

7. Better Beer launches a bitcoin treasure hunt, giving the customers the chance to win one of three bitcoins!

8. Scott Adams, american author and twitter profile with 996.7k followers, admits to owning bitcoin on Twitter spaces.

9. LN Markets hits an all-time high of $50 million monthly trading volume in June.

10. Wallet of Satoshi crossed over the 10 million cumulative Lightning payment mark.

11. Lightning Labs developers are releasing LLM Agent BitcoinTools that create AI agents that can hold a Bitcoin balance (on-chain and Lightning), send/receive #Bitcoin on Lightning, and also directly drive with a LND node. Bolt Card point of sale app for apple devices released.

12. A clever tutorial by Valentino, on how to set up a 2-2 multisignature wallet with Coldcard to manage inheritance.

13. A friendly reminder that bitcoin is winning, using as a reference the time when bitcoin was first included in a private company’s balance sheet back in August 10, 2020.

Ethereum Highlights of the Week

Dencun (Cancun + Deneb) upgrade

• Latest all core devs – execution (ACDE) call video. Notes from Christine Kim:

  • Impact of EIP6404/6466 SSZ transition on existing contracts using RLP: EIP6404 is low impact whilst EIP6466 is manageable due to upgradeability of 3 impacted projects [Reminder: SSZ EIPs already removed from Dencun upgrade]

  • Dencun updates: devnet issue tracker, plan to stress test EIP4844 on devnet 7 & in parallel develop full set of Dencun EIPs for devnet 8

  • Discussion on Engine API flag for EL to suggest CL use local block building

• EIP4844:

  • Last chance to contribute to KZG ceremony, closes July 23, use an account with at least 8 transactions

Client releases

• Consensus layer:

  • Lighthouse v4.3.0: bandwidth reductions and slasher breaking changes: broadcasting enabled by default & backend reverted to LMDB

• Execution layer:

  • Reth v0.1.0-alpha.2: Engine API stability improved, fixes for out of memory issues, RPC corner cases fixed including for tracing and added new metrics

For Stakers

• MEV-Boost dashboard adds charts for optimistic relaying, shows increased win ratio

Research

• Enshrined PBS proposal: payload-timeliness committee (PTC), subset of attestation committee votes on whether builder released their execution payload on time

• Transaction fee mechanism design, a proof that MEV makes it impossible for UX to be simple and for validators to be incentivized towards proper behavior 

• Distributed block building: privacy preserving knapsack auctions using MPC

Layer 2

• Patrick McCorry: overview of bridges

EIPs/Standards

• EIPs:

  • EIP7266: Remove blake2f (0x09) precompile

• ERCs (application layer):

  • ERC7265: Circuit breaker

  • ERC7272: Ethereum access token (authorize function calls from offchain service)

  • ERC7280: NFT metadata extension like JSON-LD

  • ERC7281: Sovereign bridged token (xERC20)

  • ERC7291: Purpose bound money (ERC1155 extension)

Stuff for developers

• Compare GitHub contracts against Etherscan verified code using Diffyscan

• Scaffold-ETH 2 updated to wagmi v1 & viem

• Svelte Wagmi: Svelte stores & functions using wagmi for connecting & signing

• Vitest-solidity-coverage: Hardhat plugin for solidity-coverage with Vitest

• Ape v0.6.12 (contract dev framework): adds EIP5202 blueprint support, coverage and install & compile dependencies

• Huff style guide

• RareSkills: overview of contract security tools

• CTFs:

  • Curta CTF: Ping Pong

  • Secureum RACE #19: 8 question Solidity quiz & answers

• Guide to create custom Uniswap v4 hooks

• Reth-indexer: reads from Reth (EL client) database, indexes into Postgres & generates API

• Circomkit: simple interface & testing utilities to develop Circom circuits

Security

• Azuki DAO (disgruntled Azuki holders) 35 ETH exploit via missing check for signature replay

• Tincho: question driven approach to review code

Ecosystem

• Etherscan adds ENS to search bar auto-lookup

Notable at app layer

• Zora network (OP Stack L2) supported by OpenSea

• SUBMINT (ENS subname minting) live on mainnet, set pricing & token gate minting

• Gas guzzler of the week: VMPX ERC20 token required proof of work to mint

Regulation/business/tokens

• Gemini sues DCG, alleging Barry Silbert fraud

• Kraken ordered to hand over account info to IRS for users who transacted over $20k in a year

• CFTC Digital Asset Markets subcommittee include BlackRock, BNY Mellon, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, JPMorgan, Moody’s, Nasdaq, Polygon, Societe Generale and Uniswap

General

• Multichain (Anyswap) bridge $126 million exploit, revoke contract approvals

• Poly Network bridge $4 million exploit, apparent misuse of 3 out of 4 private keys

Cosmos Highlights of the Week

Archway mainnet is now live

Archway has successfully launched, congratulations to the team!

With Archway, builders across the blockchain industry will be able to capture the value they contribute through their applications.

You can also claim your ArchDrop, which is given as a reward to members of the Cosmos community, builders, and cross-chain explorers.

The eligible people are:1. Cosmos Hub ($ATOM) Stakers2. Axelar Bridge Users3. Terra Classic Contract Developers

Native $USDT is now live on KAVA

USDT, the most dominant stablecoin in the industry with a market cap of over $80 billion, can now be natively issued on Kava. This allows USDT to be provided to the entire Cosmos ecosystem through IBC.

Wormhole is coming to Cosmos

Wormhole, one of the most dominant bridges in the space, connecting over 20 blockchains, is joining the Interchain!

Welcome, Wormhole! 👋

Osmosis v16 prop is on-chain

This upgrade introduces concentrated liquidity, which enhances capital efficiency by allowing a position to be concentrated around a finite token ratio, rather than evenly across an infinite range as in classic pools

With this new upgrade, along with all the projects planning to build on top of Osmosis, the chain is poised to become one of the most technologically advanced DEX in crypto.

$QSR is now available

$QSR, the native token of Quasar, went through a bootstrapping phase on StreamSwap and is now available on Osmosis.

QSR serves as Quasar’s native token and supports chain-level activities, including transaction fees and proof-of-stake consensus.

Other Highlights of the Week

Binance Deals with Exec Departures

A report this week in Fortune alleged that a number of major executives at Binance had departed due to concerns over CZ's handling of the investigations from various U.S. regulatory agencies.

The SEC filed suit against Binance last month with a laundry list of allegations. This comes after the CFTC filed a suit against Binance earlier this year. The company is reportedly also under investigation by the DOJ. That's a lot of regulator attention!

Among the departing executives, the report notes, are General Counsel Han Ng, Chief Strategy Officer Patrick Hillmann and SVP for Compliance Steven Christie. CZ seemed to push back on the reasons given for the exits, highlighting "more FUD about some departures" in a recent tweet.

Bored Apes Suffer Volatility

While chatter around a potential Bitcoin spot ETF have been driving bullishness in the crypto space, the NFT world has been dealing with major volatility striking at some of its top collections.

The floor price of BAYC hit a two-year low this week, drifting to around 27 ETH – a sudden decline that also struck at other Yuga projects including Meebits and MAYC. While Bored Ape floors have recovered to over 34ETH at the time of writing, this is still an aggressive decline from the 69 ETH floor that the collection started 2023 with.

Polygon Labs Leader Steps Down

In a sign of the deepening challenges facing the Polygon team, Polygon Labs President Ryan Wyatt announced this week that he was leaving the company. Assuming the top role at the startup will tellingly be the company's Chief Legal Officer. Wyatt had come aboard the Polygon team after a long stint at Google leading their gaming efforts and has been responsible for much of Polygon's success with building out partnerships.

Polygon recently was dealt a significant blow when its native token MATIC was designated by the SEC as an unregistered security. Polygon Labs has refuted this classification.