Bitcoin as a legal tender, Terra NFTs, Astro Wars, and much more...
2 down, 193 more to go
Central African Republic becomes the 2nd country to adopt Bitcoin as a legal tender. Following the footsteps of El Salvador, the Central African Republic has become the second country to adopt Bitcoin as a national currency. A bill governing the use of cryptocurrency was adopted unanimously by parliament last week, said a statement signed by Obed Namsio, chief of staff of President Faustin-Archange Touadera.
It’s worth noting that the Central African Republic is one of six nations that use the Central African CFA franc, a regional currency governed by the Bank of Central African States (BEAC), that is backed by France and pegged to the Euro.
With this move to adopt Bitcoin, the landlocked African nation has demonstrated its clear intentions to undermine the CFA franc and shown a big middle finger to the French economic system.
With this announcement, two out of 195 total UN-recognized nations have adopted Bitcoin as a legal tender. Only 193 more to go…
NFT Alpha: Check out Terra NFTs
Well, let’s just accept that we all missed out on BAYC. But here is the thing. Most Terra NFTs have just begun their growth phase vs Ethereum and there is massively higher growth potential if you scoop the right projects.
To understand the Terra NFT scene, go check out the top NFT marketplaces such as RandomEarth, One Planet, or Knowhere. Prior to buying any NFT, it’s recommended to DYOR (do your own research) for the specific NFT collections by checking out their social media handles, joining Discord, comparing floor prices across the marketplaces, and most importantly sales volume.
P.S: Here’s a great dashboard on Flipside Crypto tracking total volume trafficking through Terra NFTs across the top two marketplaces - RandomEarth & Knowhere.art
⚔️ Astro Wars are here
Similar to Curve Wars on the Ethereum ecosystem, where different protocols fight to accumulate Curve governance tokens to point liquidity to their choice of pools, Astro wars have arrived on the Terra ecosystem with the first set of players joining the battlefield including Retrograde Money, Apollo DAO, Reactor Money, Spec Protocol, and Orion Money.
Talking about these contenders, Retrograde is trying to mimic the ‘Convex’ protocol on Terra optimizing to accrue the most vxASTRO and therefore offer the largest and most sustainable boost to Astroport liquidity providers.
Apollo DAO, on the other hand, will be competing against Retrograde with their own Convex model allowing Astro holders to deposit their Astro tokens into Apollo, providing them a high yield on their tokens (both in Astro and Apollo), without the need to lock up their Astro.
Worth a Read
Recently, Cobie - a well-known figure on CT (Crypto Twitter) posted a blog about the “death of staking” and it’s surely worth a read. In this blog, Cobie contends the bastardization of the term ‘staking’ by various DeFi protocols.
As he mentions, “ Instead of receiving rewards for contributing to chain security with collateral at stake, modern “staking” just seems to mean idk we give you more coins as a reward if you don’t sell your current coins lol.”
https://twitter.com/DegenSpartan/status/1515593450531753985
Check it out here: https://cobie.substack.com/p/apecoin-and-the-death-of-staking
Airdrop Season: Claim your $OP
This week, Ethereum Layer-2 Optimism finally announced their token $OP and an airdrop with over 250k eligible addresses. The token will govern protocol upgrades, project incentives, and more.
In a tweet thread, Optimism announced the launch of token & airdrop with over 250k eligible addresses underlying a set of criteria and proportionally rewarding addresses for healthy use of the ecosystem. There is an overlap bonus for hitting 4 or more criteria.
You can check eligibility for airdrop here
P.S: Don’t be sad if you missed the $OP airdrop, there’s already a lot of speculation regarding an Arbitrum (another Ethereum Layer-2) airdrop 🪂. You might want to bridge your funds to Arbi and make a transaction to qualify for the airdrop.
P.P.S: Evmos Chain just dropped a rekdrop (just another name for airdrop) for Ethereum and Osmosis users. Check your eligibility here
BAYC Land Sale: $100 Million spent on gas
Recently held BAYC Otherside Metaverse Land resulted in nearly $100M (34k ETH) spent in gas fees by users trying to grab a piece of land. As per a twitter thread by Syndicate DAO’s co-founder Will Pepper, the BAYC land contract had nearly zero gas optimization tricks that could have saved a vast amount of that gas.
As per Will, the contract used ERC721Enumerable extension which is used to track the owners of an NFT on-chain. Mints that remove the ERC721Enumerable extension save around 70% in gas costs. This tiny change would have saved around $70M.
Talking about smart contract flaws, Aku Dreams’ (an NFT project) contract had a massive flaw that locked away 11k ETH (34 Million USD) forever. That some ETH which will never see the daylight ever again.
NiceNode: Now, run your Ethereum node with just one click
The current options to run a node require technical skills to open a terminal and run commands or install a new operating system. Well, not anymore. Running a node should be as simple as downloading an app.
Check out NiceNode, an app that runs, monitors, and controls a node. It comes with features such as:
See the node's status like sync progress, peers, storage usage
Enable MetaMask connections Button
Run Geth in light client mode (*experimental)
Fully open-source
Head to nicenode.xyz to check out for yourself.