TLDR: BlackRock files for a Bitcoin Trust, Uniswap v4 is announced, EigenLayer goes live, Binance joins the Lightning Network, Maker DAI’s Savings Rate (DS) increases to 3.49%, Strike launches in Mexico.

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Bitcoin Highlights of the Week

1. $10 trillion BlackRock officially files the 15th of June 2023 for spot Bitcoin Trust.”If approved, the Bitcoin ETF would open doors to a new wave of adoption and provide investors with an unprecedented opportunity”. - Nik Hoffman

2. Blackrock had silently expressed their interest for Bitcoin in a different manner in the previous quarter, as they increased their exposure to Microstrategy by 1.85% with a total of 598,092 shares worth $156 million.

3. Strike launches instant, cheap remittances to Mexico. It now allows users to send faster and cheaper cross-border payments from U.S. to phone numbers, debit cards and bank accounts in Mexico.

“In 2022 Mexico received a record $60 billion in remittances from the US alone, making up around 95% of total remittances received from abroad” - Strike release

4. Binance joins the lightning network with a 10 bitcoin channel with Kraken and 5 bitcoin channel with OKEX. The channels came from the same address of 50 bitcoin.(There is still a pending confirmation by Binance, but if its a troll, it might be a well capitalized one.)

5. Mutiny wallet, a Progressive Web Apps, gained popularity as Damus gets in trouble with Apple by allowing the Zap button (how users express their “likes” to other users with monetary value through bitcoin) to exists in the app without paying any dividends to them. We might see progressive apps get popular as they can’t be censored by Apple/Google, no download needed.

6. Michael Saylor’s keynote at Bitcoin Prague is out! In this talk he discusses the impact of monetary inflation on wealth preservation, the investment challenges we all face, the defects of various monetary instruments and why Bitcoin is the best global solution for those in the search of a store of value.

7. River released their report of Bitcoin vs the $156 Trillion Global Payment Industry, where it covers:

• What's happening in the cross-border payments industry.

• The under-discussed risks of CBDCs

• The number of Bitcoin users globally

• Who is using Bitcoin for payments

• How Bitcoin compares to other payment methods

• How to grow Bitcoin adoption & More

8. Bitcoin development nonprofit, Brink, has received a significant financial boost with a pledge of $5 million from Jack Dorsey's #startsmall organization. The pledge, totaling $1 million per year for the next five years, aims to support Brink's efforts in funding Bitcoin developers and ensuring the long-term sustainability of Bitcoin's core codebase.

9. Formosa went public on the illustrious Toptal Engineering blog. Formosa enhances crypto wallet management by leveraging easy-to-remember, themed security sentences rather than traditional and disparate recovery keywords.

10. Brinana, a forbes writer, posted an article on Nostr and shared how she received “zaps” from 47 people, earning 65100 sats. Bitcoin and Nostr are allowing content creators to work under the value for value model and to keep 100% of the contributions. Something that can’t be done in either: Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Patreon, or even OnlyFans.

Ethereum Highlights of the Week

Dencun (Cancun + Deneb) upgrade

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

  • Deneb scope: EIP7044 (perpetually valid signed voluntary exits) & EIP4788 (beacon root in EVM); considered for inclusion: EIP7045 (increase max attestation inclusion slot) & EIP6988 (prevent slashed validator being elected block proposer)

  • Discussion on reorgs increasing and proposal to change sub-slot timing for block production, attestation & aggregation

  • Discussion on staking with more than 32 ETH per validator

• EIP4844:

  • Latest EIP4844 implementer call video. Notes from Terence 

  • Dankrad’s additional testing to size blobs per block

  • EIP4844 devnet 6 launched

  • KZG ceremony has over 110k contributions, lobby is empty

• Consensus-specs v1.4.0-alpha.3: patch to increase BLOB_SIDECAR_SUBNET_COUNT to 6

Layer 1

• Erigon archive node running on $500 hardware

• Dedaub: EIP6404/6466 SSZ transition impact on contracts using RLP [Reminder: SSZ EIPs were already removed from Dencun upgrade]

• Beacon API checker: CLI to check API responses across clients, in Rust

Client releases

• Consensus layer:

  • Prysm v4.0.6: bug fixes & optimizations to shorten block proposal time for edge cases

  • Teku v23.6.0: rewards beacon-api endpoints & how Teku fixed its May non-finality issue

• Execution layer:

  • Erigon v2.45.2: staged sync fix

For Stakers

• Payload’s block analytics dashboard, beta

Research

• Data visualization on May loss of finality incident

Layer 2

• Optimistic Erigon client supports Optimism mainnet

• Arbitrum sequencer batch posting post-mortem

• Layer 2 MEV and decentralizing sequencing

• Frax Finance plans Fraxchain rollup using its LSD as the gas fee token 

EIPs/Standards

• ERCs:

  • ERC7169: Tranche sequence

  • ERC7182: Interface naming conventions: 

Stuff for developers

• Foundry:

  • Pre-v1 updates: fuzz-runs CLI flag, 0 basefee, batch transactions on Optimism and readCallers cheatcode

  • Fuzzy DeFi: code properties for Uniswap v2, Olympus DAO & Compound v2 forks

  • Forge-safe: build Safe multisig batch transactions using Forge scripting

• OpenZeppelin Contracts v4.9.2: MerkleProof library patch, potential issue in multiproof leaf validation

• Uniswap v4: customize liquidity pools using hooks, flash accounting using ERC1153 (transient storage) in Dencun upgrade, work in progress, 4 year business source license

  • V4-template: template for creating Uniswap v4 hooks

  • Huff hooks: Uniswap v4 hooks library in Huff, work in progress

• Bytecode.zip: deploy zipped & wrapper contracts from the browser

• Titanoboa (Vyper interpreter) jupyter notebooks integration: sign via browser

• Ethers.js ENS multicoin provider plugin 

• ABIType: adds conversion from JSON ABIs to human-readable ABIs at runtime & type-level

• RainbowKit v1.0.2: adds WalletConnect v2 support

• 4byte collider: script to find function signatures with colliding 4byte selectors 

• Wallet Test Framework: switched to viem and added more tests

• Passkey based Account Abstraction signer for contract wallets

Security

• Sturdy Finance, $800k exploit, price manipulation via read-only reentrancy

• Signature malleability: proof of concept showing attack using compact signatures

Ecosystem

• Holešky testnet (Goerli successor) genesis planned for September 15 (Merge day) with 1.5 million validators, majority run by client teams

• EF Q1 grantees share $13 million in funding

• ETHPrague hackathon winners & videos

Enterprise

• BOCI (Bank of China) issued CNH 200 million ($28M) in tokenized notes

Notable at app layer

• Maker Dai Savings Rate (DSR) increases to 3.49% on June 19

• Uniswap v4 vision: more generalized v3 allowing different tradeoffs via hooks for customized pools

• Uniswap Foundation bridge assessment

• EigenLayer stage 1 live on mainnet, reached guarded launch limits; restaking dashboard

• Sound (music NFTs) live on Optimism

• The Goose NFT sold for $5.4 million from 3AC collection

• Rough sailing lately for NFT infra projects: JPG pausing and NFF (Backed) winding down

Cosmos Highlights of the Week

New dYdX interview!

dYdX, the largest derivative DEX in our ecosystem, has decided to move from an ETH L2 to its own app-chain on Cosmos. To understand more about this decision, @chjango interviewed Nathan Cha, who’s leading marketing at dYdX.

The dYdX v4 is planned to go live at the end of September 2023. For more information about this decision, in addition to the interview above, you can read the following blog post: https://dydx.exchange/blog/v4-full-decentralization

Stride has launched the first-ever liquid staked index token!

The IBCX is an index backed by a diversified basket of Cosmos tokens, governed by the ION DAO.

IBCX now has its own liquid staked derivative which is the stIBCX!

Thanks to Stride, over 80% of the stIBCX basket consists of LSTs (Liquid Staked Tokens). Additionally, as more Stride LSTs become available in the future (e.g., stAXL and stATK), the unstaked tokens in the stIBCX basket will be converted to LSTs.

Partnership Quicksilverzone x Quasar!

Quicksilver & Quasar will work to develop Quasar’s Interchain ETF, which will track an index of key Cosmos tokens.

ETF holders will be able to earn staking rewards and vote on on-chain governance proposals.

Congratulations on this partnership! Looking forward to seeing the Quasar Index Token (QIT) hit the market.

Catalyst will be deploying on Sei Network!

Catalyst aims to solve liquidity fragmentation across chains using the unit of liquidity concept, which facilitates direct asset-to-asset swaps both cross-chain and on-chain with the same liquidity.

With this collab, Sei and Catalyst will enable cross-chain liquidity between the Sei ecosystem and other crypto networks.

Users from different ecosystems will be able to utilize Sei’s high-speed trading capabilities, thereby injecting additional liquidity into the Sei ecosystem.

Nolus Protocol: Streamswap has concluded!

Following a successful bootstrap phase on Streamswap, all the proceeds have been utilized to establish a pool on Osmosis. Now, you can directly access $NLS tokens on Frontier at frontier.osmosis.zone.

For more information about Nolus, you can watch our video here:

https://twitter.com/imperator_co/status/1668360043853496321?s=20

Other Highlights of the Week

Uniswap approve Axelar

Uniswap announced that Axelar is approved to support the next phase of its cross-chain development. “Axelar employs a proof-of-stake mechanism with sound cryptoeconomic guarantees to secure the protocol,” Uniswap noted, following a rigorous assessment

Frax Finance to launch Ethereum Layer 2 named Fraxchain

The team behind Frax Finance, known for creating the Frax stablecoin, has unveiled its strategy to introduce a Layer 2 blockchain: Fraxchain. The team said the network will be directed towards creating a smart contract platform with a strong emphasis on decentralized finance.

Dmitri Cherniak's 'The Goose' NFT sold for $6.2 million at Sotheby's auction

Dmitri Cherniak's Ringers #879 NFT, also called "The Goose," sold for $6.2 million in a Sotheby's auction. The original estimations for the bid were between $2 million and $3 million, but a seller nabbed it at a final bid price of $5.4 million, plus auction house fees.

Crypto donors raise $500,000 to support ZachXBT in lawsuit

The crypto-community has raised over $500,000 to support anonymous crypto investigator ZachXBT, who announced he is being sued for defamation. The anonymous, on-chain lurker shared the lawsuit in a tweet along with a digital wallet address for donations to help cover his legal costs, which he estimates could exceed $1 million.