Make Web3 Your Obvious Choice
This week in Web3 Wednesday:
- Polygon-Solana Feud: Polygon paid millions to poach Y00ts NFT off of Solana
- Meme token BONK breathes life into the Solana ecosystem
- ENS recorded over 2.8M domain registrations in 2022
- Circle's recent attestation report shows 65% of USDC's reserves – or $28.6 billion – are invested in its government money market fund
- Flare token airdrop finally happens after a two-year wait
- Launch Alert: Obvious launches its mobile-first self-custody wallet on Play Store and App Store
Polygon-Solana Feud: Polygon paid millions to poach Y00ts NFT off of Solana
If you've survived more than one crypto bear market, then you know pointing fingers and blame games are not rare during these times.
Well, we got another one of these in our hands. Polygon and Solana ecosystems has been at odds with each other for a while now. Like all crypto wars, it started on Twitter with one ecosystem member pointing out the limitations of another ecosystem and vice versa. It even got one of Polygon’s co-founders involved in a public spat on Twitter.
Meanwhile, the Solana ecosystem has been struggling, especially with one of its biggest backers (FTX) going down, 90% of TVL being wiped out, SOL token price down bad, and its top projects jumping ship.
It has come to light now that Polygon might be involved in incentivizing Solana’s top NFT project to jump ship. Per the latest post by y00ts founder on Discord, DeLabs (creators of y00ts and DeGods) received a $3m non-equity grant from Polygon. Well, now you know why these projects are leaving Solana for Polygon.
Meme token BONK breathes life into the Solana ecosystem
Days after dipping below $10 for the first time in almost two years, the Solana blockchain’s SOL token started rallying in the first week of January, riding on the BONK.
A surge of interest in BONK, a new meme coin, has coincided with SOL’s upward trajectory. BONK is a meme token that was airdropped to participants in the Solana ecosystem on Dec. 24, which has quickly ascended to a $100M-plus market capitalization.
ENS recorded over 2.8M domain registrations in 2022
Ethereum Name Service (ENS) saw a lifetime record number of domain registrations in 2022 amid a broader market frenzy in which some traders treated the domains as investments.
Data from Dune Analytics shows that more than 630,000 unique wallets created 2.82 million domain names, with 459,000 classified as “primary names.”
Primary names are ENS addresses that resolve to a user’s crypto wallet and can be used as a proxy to search for information on blockchain explorers, such as Etherscan. The 2.82 million figure represents over 80% of all registrations since the service started in 2017.
Circle's recent attestation report shows 65% of USDC's reserves – or $28.6 billion – are invested in its government money market fund
Since November 2022, Circle, the company behind collateralized-stablecoin USDC, has invested over 65% of its USDC reserve in the Circle Reserve Fund, a government money market fund managed by BlackRock.
This seems like a win for USDC users. Circle is yielding some of its control over USDC's reserves to an external manager subject to SEC regulation, ultimately making USDC safer. This also improves transparency, since USDC users can now get regular updates from BlackRock.
Flare token airdrop finally happens after a two-year wait
The Flare token airdrop finally happened after a two-year wait, with billions of tokens distributed to millions of recipients on Monday.
Originally scheduled for distribution in 2020, the airdrop occurred at 6:59 p.m. EST on Monday. The token distribution saw 4.28 billion FLR tokens — Flare’s native coin — shared among qualified recipients who were selected based on a snapshot taken in December 2020 that captured wallets holding at least 1 XRP at the time.
Launch Alert: Obvious launches its made-for-smartphone self-custody wallet on Play Store and App Store
Obvious is a mobile-first self-custody wallet that brings together assets across EVM & non-EVM chains and powers your cross-chain transactions by giving you safe, fast, and affordable bridging & swapping routes within the app.
What makes Obvious Wallet your obvious choice? Check out this thread.