Ethereum likely to Merge on Sept. 15

This week in web3 Wednesdays:

• ⌛The long-awaited Ethereum merge is finally happening on Sept 15th
  
• 👮Tornado Cash’s developer got arrested in the Netherlands
  
• 📢Do Kwon’s first interview since the Terra crash
  
• 💡Time for non-USD pegged stablecoins?
  
• 📖Delphi Labs’ The Complete Guide to Rollups
  

⌛The long-awaited Ethereum merge is finally happening on Sept 15th

Last week Ethereum network completed its final test prior to The Merge with the successful Goerli testnet implementation.

The successful test has moved the Ethereum network closer to the full transition from proof of work to proof of stake, bringing certainty that The Merge is now imminent and likely to be implemented on September 15th or 16th

👮Tornado Cash’s developer got arrested in the Netherlands

Following the US Treasury department’s sanctions against the crypto mixer Tornado Cash, the Dutch authorities have arrested the project’s open-source developer.

In an unprecedented move, this is the first time a coder has been arrested for simply writing an open source code which is equivalent to a knife manufacturer getting arrested for criminals committing crimes using the knife.

Learn more about the implications of this move in this thread.

📢Do Kown’s first interview since the Terra crash

Zach Guzman, founder & host of Coinage Media, has got the opportunity to sit down with Terra Founder Do Kown for his first interview since the project’s $45 billion collapse.

To watch the interview, you can mint a FREE Subscriber NFT from @coinage_media by connecting your wallet at https://coinage.media

💡Time for non-USD pegged stablecoins?

The US treasury sanctioning a peace of code and subsquent freezing of USDC by Circle Pay has raised some important questions regarding the viable seizure-resistant stablecoins. If we look at Bitcoin, it might not support smart contracts or offer DeFi, it has a core feature built right into it and that is – seizure-resistance.

If we plan to build a new web3 world on top of new crypto technologies, we mustn’t forget the why we buit the crypto in the first place. Today, we’re in process of building a decentralized world, but it won’t work without decentralized money. And we don’t have one.

A twitter user Vaska has put forth some good arguments about non-USD pegged stablecoins emerging to tackle the issues. She argues that alternatives will emerge. For providers based in countries with crypto-friendly regulation, there hasn't been a better time to introduce non-USD stable-coins.

Read the complete thread here.

📖Delphi Labs’ The Complete Guide to Rollups

Delphi Labs has published a very comprehensive report about Rollups and modular blockchain. The report delves fairly deep into the modular economics, Ethereum Rollup stack, and Celestia Rollup stack.

Some key takeaways from the Report as noted by Phil Lao are:

1) Fees

- L2 fees are dominated by calldata costs today. But costs will plummet

- Long-run L2 fees will be mostly L2 gas

- L1 is not constrained by execution performance, but L2 certainly will

- Need better EVM execution

2) L1 Security

- Price of the L1 token matters for security

- The higher the price, the more expensive an attack

- Price = speculation (growth) + fee revenue (value) + Store of Value premium

- Security conscious devs: beware of low-fee revenue networks with SOV narrative

3) The future of Ethereum and the EVM depends on the continued evolution of the EVM execution environment. As DA (Data Availability) solutions come online, the constraint moves from DA costs to L2 gas costs. Thus, "let a thousand augmented evms flourish".

Read the full report here.