The Growing Buds of Terra DeFi
In May earlier this year, when Terra fell over its head and crashed, wiping approximately $60B worth of value, the biggest loss was not just monetary but the sudden death of Terra's ecosystem and the community.
The Terra community lost everything from Mirror Protocol’s real-world synthetic assets and Anchor protocol’s best-in-class UX to a well-grown DeFi and a budding NFT ecosystem. But not all is lost.
It’s been seven months since the crash, and the Terra ecosystem is already looking like one of the more exciting DeFi hubs on Cosmos (again). In these past months, the Terra ecosystem has revived itself from death with old protocols setting their new posts on Terra and extended ecosystem and a range of new protocols being launched on Terra every other week.
From money market, DAO Tooling, on-chain event handler, prediction & derivative markets to trustless private transactions, risk management marketplace, NFT infra-layer, DEX-aggregators, and whatnot.
This time, however, Terra is not building in isolation. The launch of Interchain Alliance speaks to the goal of building the Cosmos ecosystem up as a whole. So, will Terra become the king of Cosmos' ecosystem (again) and rise from the ashes again? The name Phoenix for Terra 2.0 surely hints at a bright future. However, only time will tell what the future holds for Terra 2.0.
This week in Web3 Wednesday:
- Trump drops an NFT collection on Polygon
- Visa proposes account abstraction for recurring auto payments
- Bitcoin address tied to defunct crypto exchange QuadrigaCX wakes up
- Airdrop Alert: Mars Protocol airdrop announced
Trump drops an NFT collection on Polygon
I’m sure Trump dropping an NFT collection was probably not on your 2022 bingo card, but here we are.
The former US president Donald Trump has launched a collection of $99 digital trading card NFT – an edition of 45,000 NFTs featuring the former president in various fantasy costumes and poses.
As of now, the collection has already sold out, and its current floor price is about 0.19 ETH, or about $230 – more than double the original price of $99. Fun times, isn’t it?
Visa proposes account abstraction for recurring auto payments
A team of researchers and engineers across Visa is working together to study the foundations of various blockchains — including the security, scalability, interoperability, and privacy of different protocols — and propose possible use cases.
As a part of ongoing research, Visa has outlined a methodology for bringing auto payments to the blockchain. In a new technical piece, Visa outlines how to write a smart contract application for a self-custodial wallet, meaning a wallet that is controlled exclusively by the user and the associated private key.
This application could allow users to set up a programmable payment instruction that can push funds automatically from one self-custodial wallet account to another at recurring intervals without requiring the user's active participation each time by leveraging the potential application of Account Abstraction – a new type of account contract that can delegate the ability to initiate a payment by a user account to a pre-approved autopayment smart contract, mimicking the process you use today to set up a recurring card payment.
The market goes up and down while innovation keeps rising.
Bitcoin address tied to defunct crypto exchange QuadrigaCX wakes up
Remember that one time when a centralized exchange suddenly disappeared with users’ funds? Well, not just a one-time thing, isn’t it?
But this was different since the founder and CEO of this defunct exchange mysteriously ‘died’ taking the exchange’s cold wallets’ private keys with him. But the thing is, last weekend, more than 100 BTC moved from these cold wallets. So who has access to these cold wallets? The dead guy, his wife, Sifu, or someone else?
Well, I have my bets on – we’ll never know.
MetaMask launches PayPal integration for ETH purchase
MetaMask, the most popular web3 wallet, began rolling out a fiat on-ramp for ETH in partnership with leading payments processor PayPal on Dec. 14.
Select U.S. users can now purchase Ether from within the MetaMask app by tapping its “buy” button and logging into their PayPal accounts. The service will be made available to all eligible U.S. users in a matter of weeks.
Airdrop Alert: Mars Protocol airdrop announced
Mars Protocol, one of the most unique DeFi lending protocols on the Cosmos ecosystem, has announced an airdrop. Backed and being built by Delphi Labs, Mars Protocol is soon launching a new Cosmos-SDK Layer 1 appchain.
The airdrop criteria for qualification include users who held:
- $UST before and after the depeg.
- $MARS pools on Astrport DEX
- MARS - $UST deposited on ApolloDAO and SpecProtocol
- Mars Lockdrop
Check out this thread to learn more and claim your airdrop.