Binance + MasterCard = Crypto Adoption
This week in web3 Wednesdays:
- 🤝Mastercard ties up with Binance to enable payments in crypto
- 🍿CT Drama – Ava Labs (Avalanche) attacks Solana & cons SEC in evil conspiracy with a bought law firm, Roche Freedman
- ⛓️Ethereum: The Merge is coming
- 😍Coinbase announces ETH liquid staking, launches cbETH token
- ✊Tether holds firm on decision NOT to freeze Tornado Cash addresses
- 📖All about decentralized stablecoins
🤝Mastercard ties up with Binance to enable payments in crypto
The CEO of Mastercard Michael Miebach recently announced a partnership with Binance to let people use crypto to make purchases at over 90 million Mastercard merchants worldwide.
According to Miebach's Twitter teaser, the pilot version of the Binance card will be launched in Argentina on August 23. Once it is rolled out globally, this single partnership can push crypto adoption to a massive level.
🍿CT Drama – Ava Labs (Avalanche) attacks Solana & cons SEC in evil conspiracy with a bought law firm, Roche Freedman
Well, there's a new drama on CT this week and this time it’s Ava Labs and it’s founder Emin. As per a website called CryptoLeaks, allegedly, Ava Labs bought out a law firm with 1% of the AVAX supply so that the law firm stages litigations and class action lawsuits against competitors such as Solana and dfinity, as well as Emin's personal enemies.
The website shared a dozen of videos making a claim that, allegedly, through litigation, the law firm gained insight into competitors via discovery, and this info was shared with Ava labs. That gave them a huge advantage strategically.
Allegedly, this not only gave Ava Labs internal information on competitors but obviously also hurt competitors and set them back, costing them money and resources to fight a huge lawsuit, which benefited the AVAX price.
Check out this video shared by CryptoLeaks of Kyle Roch making this ‘evil deal.’
⛓️Ethereum: The Merge is coming
As we all have been waiting patiently as the merge timeline inches closer, the Ethereum foundation has called upon validators to upgrade their clients.
As per the latest announcement by the foundation, the transition, known as The Merge, must first be activated on the Beacon Chain with the Bellatrix upgrade. After this, the proof-of-work chain will migrate to proof-of-stake upon hitting a specific Total Difficulty value.
The Bellatrix upgrade is scheduled for epoch 144896 on the Beacon Chain – 11:34:47am UTC on Sept 6, 2022. Whereas, the Terminal Total Difficulty (TTD) value triggering The Merge is 58750000000000000000000, expected between Sept 10-20, 2022.
Read the full merge mainnet announcement here.
😍Coinbase announces ETH liquid staking, launches cbETH token
As per the latest announcement by the company, Coinbase will add support for Coinbase Wrapped Staked ETH (cbETH) on the Ethereum network (ERC-20 token).
Coinbase Wrapped Staked ETH (cbETH) is a utility token that represents ETH2, which is ETH staked through Coinbase. cbETH can be sold or sent off-platform, while ETH2 will remain locked up until a future protocol upgrade.
Holders of ETH2 (staked ETH on Coinbase) can "wrap" their ETH2 & receive cbETH through http://Coinbase.com. Wrapping functionality will be rolled out to eligible users progressively throughout the day.
Read the cbETH Whitepaper for complete details.
✊Tether holds firm on decision NOT to freeze Tornado Cash addresses
In the latest announcement, Tether has refused to toe the line along with USDC to unilaterally freeze addresses associated with Tornado Cash.
The company states, “Unilaterally freezing secondary market addresses could be a highly disruptive and reckless move by Tether. Even if Tether recognizes suspicious activities on such an address, completing a freeze without the verified instruction of law enforcement and other government agencies might interfere with ongoing and sophisticated law enforcement investigations.”
This is an impressive move from a centralized company refusing to self-impose censorship and setting a good precedent for all those DeFi platforms that folded under regulatory pressure, fearing what comes next.
📖All about decentralized stablecoins
Ever since the collapse of Terra UST, there’s been a vacuum created for the decentralized stablecoins. Subsequently, we came across rumors and announcements about various DeFi protocols like Aave, Curve & Kujira launching their own decentralized stablecoins.
Well, on DeFiLlama there are total of 63 decentralized stablecoins and thankfully DefiIgnas has researched all these decentralized stablecoins to answer three main questions about each one of these stablecoins.
- How do they function & keep the peg?
- What are their use cases and risks?
- What makes them special?
Check out the Twitter thread to find answers to these questions about all these decentralized stablecoins.