Cardano Rumor Rundown September 1, 2022

Hey Everyone!

Let’s go….

Newly Covered Today:

1. Daily volume on OpenSea has dropped 99% in 90 days! https://cointelegraph.com/news/looks-bare-opensea-turns-into-nft-ghost-town-after-volume-plunges-99-in-90-days
2. Here’s the latest Vasil upgrade status report from IOG. https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1565028360136400896
3. ReadyPlayerMe indoor avatars along with multi-player racing are now live in Carda Station. https://twitter.com/Carda_station/status/1564815029052100608
4. AADA is apparently launching its borrowing and lending platform on September 13. https://twitter.com/AadaFinance/status/1564877533199351811 https://twitter.com/mandriuska/status/1564890212148420608
5. Sorry crypto! It turns out code is not law. https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/31/23330458/crypto-dot-com-typo-mistake-refund-audit https://twitter.com/Andrea_Tosato/status/1564782498093080576

Previously covered, but still interesting:

1. The giant gulf between the Cardano approach to smart contract standards and that of our competitors is highlighted amid the Nomad bridge exploit coverage. https://twitter.com/IOHK_Charles/status/1554648163532689408 https://twitter.com/sherlock_hodles/status/1554650723291381761
2. Southrye makes an interesting observation about what I would call one of the bigger differences between Solana and Cardano. https://twitter.com/Southrye/status/1554679752430161922
3. Looks like Michael Saylor’s Bitcoin bet isn’t playing out how MicroStrategy expected. He is no longer CEO. He is now only the Chairman. https://twitter.com/Mayhem4Markets/status/1554560424267366409 https://finance.yahoo.com/news/michael-saylor-microstrategy-ceo-bitcoin-204325431.html
4. Here’s John Woods on the possibility of Algorand/Cardano collaboration. https://twitter.com/StakeWithPride/status/1555001121508249601
5. This article contains allegations that may cast a heavy shadow of doubt on the purported total value locked (“TVL”) of the Solana ecosystem. https://www.coindesk.com/layer2/2022/08/04/master-of-anons-how-a-crypto-developer-faked-a-defi-ecosystem/
6. Pavia has unveiled the first look at one of the eight districts in the Pavia Plaza. This one appears to be Japan themed. https://youtu.be/4YCQPPo_O1U https://twitter.com/Pavia_io/status/1555210549423644674
7. The former President of the New York Fed says a full blown recession is either already here or will be very soon. https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/04/economy/recession-inflation-fed-dudley/index.html
8. BlackRock and Coinbase are now working together to bring crypto exposure to institutional clients. https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/04/economy/recession-inflation-fed-dudley/index.html
9. The US Treasury has added a bunch of Tornado Cash mixer related ETH addresses to their naughty guy sanctions list. Reports are also coming in that Circle has frozen USDC belonging to some of these Tornado Cash users. Hilarious reactions followed. https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/financial-sanctions/recent-actions/2022080 https://twitter.com/bantg/status/1556712790894706688 https://twitter.com/juthica/status/1556648502658318337 https://twitter.com/bantg/status/1556656916234965000 https://twitter.com/econoar/status/1556752321773576193
10. PWC just did a big metaverse survey of 5k consumers and 1k business leaders that indicated 67% of companies are actively engaged in metaverse projects (beyond just experimentation) and 82% expect metaverse activities to be a part of their normal business activities in the next three years. https://www.pwc.com/us/metaversesurvey
11. FutureFest is putting on a metaverse concert event on Wednesday at 7pm ET. https://twitter.com/futurefestxr/status/1556688896825516032
12. I think we have found the perfect insult: “that’s web2 thinking”. https://twitter.com/matiwinnetou/status/1556681984789086208
13. Celsius and Voyager users are currently worried bankruptcy proceedings might involve a clawback of certain withdrawals from these centralized financial platforms. https://twitter.com/TheRealPlanC https://twitter.com/SimonDixonTwitt/status/1556574979524804609
14. Someone actually did dust a bunch of .eth wallets with ETH from TornadoCash. https://twitter.com/josephdelong/status/1557011056572129280
15. Coinbase reported a $1.1 billion net loss in Q2 vs. $1.59 billion in net income last year in Q2. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/09/coinbase-coin-earnings-q2-2022.html
16. Reports are coming in that Curve was exploited for $573k. https://twitter.com/WatcherGuru/status/1557104364690489346 https://twitter.com/CurveFinance/status/1557104676830601216
17. Bank of England researchers are worried the use of cryptoassets in the metaverse could lead to systemic risks. https://bankunderground.co.uk/2022/08/09/cryptoassets-the-metaverse-and-systemic-risk/
18. A law firm representing Pavia has released a “case study” on their work with Pavia. https://twitter.com/StephensonLawHQ/status/1557360513654423559
19. More surprises from the Coinbase quarterly filing: the SEC has sent subpoenas to Coinbase regarding its stablecoin and yield generating products. https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0001679788/000167978822000085/coin-20220630.htm#ibd16326c8f82466fbb851d71853b44a8_262
20. Virtua gives us a first in-world peek at a game inside their metaverse. https://twitter.com/VirtuaMetaverse/status/1557411483809636352
21. Don’t forget, the Pavia merch claim for plot holders will start today (Aug 11) and run for two weeks. https://discord.com/channels/897161313120321536/897682883471347763
22. Artifct has released some images in their discord that seem to be related to avatars for their moon metaverse. https://discord.com/channels/882364185244237884/920120911414300773
23. CardaStation also provided some in-world footage of the community center they are building. https://discord.com/channels/908827661504237599/909005782790586379
24. Pavia just unveiled their rebrand and new website. https://pavia.io/ https://twitter.com/Pavia_io/status/1557769622320996352
25. Pavia also gave us a much more extensive unveiling of the first district of the Plaza. It’s a narrated fly through with some interesting details. It sounds like the next district will be Cyberpunk. https://youtu.be/EhHuP4Z-aDk
26. Cardano Node 1.35.3, which should be the Vasil hardfork combinator event version if all goes according to plan, was released today (Aug 11). https://github.com/input-output-hk/cardano-node/releases/tag/1.35.3
27. There are some people debating whether the Ethereum Merge will result in tax liability. One of the items discussed is whether ETH holders will essentially be receiving a new coin if proof-of-work miners keep the old chain (and the old PoW ETH coins) alive. https://twitter.com/LucidCiC/status/1557710488955301889
28. Lots of people took a quote from Vitalik about centralization of Ethereum out of context today (Aug 11). He was actually talking about the importance of sharding. https://youtu.be/kGjFTzRTH3Q?t=2167 https://twitter.com/NerdNationUnbox/status/1557260572621766660
29. Wow! The Netherlands arrested the developer of Tornado Cash on Friday (Aug 12). The stakes just got a little higher in crypto. I suspect a lot of crypto platform developers will feel a little less easy about relying on their open source/decentralized credentials as a shield against government action. https://www.fiod.nl/arrest-of-suspected-developer-of-tornado-cash/
30. An interesting point has been made that validating blocks in ETH 2.0 that contain Tornado Cash or other sanctioned transactions would be a violation of the sanctions while not validating those blocks can also lead to financial penalties (“inactivity leaking”) in ETH 2.0. The fear is that this could lead to protocol-level censorship to accommodate sanctions. https://twitter.com/lex_node/status/1558521705244594181
31. Virtua has released a new episode of their podcast with some hints as to what they are building and some interesting discussion around building a virtual world that will operate across different technologies (browser, PC, mobile, etc). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BSl7no82nM
32. The last two episodes of CopiCafe (the Cornucopias podcast episodes 18 & 19) have revealed some interesting details including screen shots of the mobile game, that the fourth zone of Cornucopias will be inspired by the Canary Islands, the Custom Dome sale may happen in the next two weeks if they can beat the Vasil hardfork, development of land staking is in its final stages, & a custom dome video will be coming next week. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvGAGNv86Y0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnUlXU_tRZY
33. Cornucopias has released the pricing on their custom domes in discord. https://discord.com/channels/829374949587419137/842583414439542805
34. The Robbery Forest strikes again. This time it’s reported to be 1.2 billion printed in AUSD. https://twitter.com/WatcherGuru/status/1558735108672065538 https://twitter.com/AcalaNetwork/status/1558785360670298112
35. IOG Researchers are at Crypto 2022 in Santa Barbara to present the “Ofelimos” Proof of Useful Work (PoUW) paper. https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1559170170307985409
36. The Cardano Island Land Claim Event is going down next week! https://twitter.com/VirtuaMetaverse/status/1559261587298467841
37. Orbis has released the whitepaper for their L2 ZK-Rollup Protocol. https://papers.orbisprotocol.com/whitepaper.pdf https://twitter.com/orbisproject/status/1559178331433512960
38. WingRiders held a community vote on issues related to the Nomad Exploit Incident. https://twitter.com/wingriderscom/status/1559177924699471873
39. Here’s a great thread from Maladex on why total value locked (“TVL”) makes no sense at all as a metric in crypto. https://twitter.com/CardanoMaladex/status/1559552276234215424
40. Ethereum is having a crisis of conscience over the inevitable censorship & loss of permissionlessness that will come out of the Tornado Cash sanctions. https://twitter.com/sassal0x/status/1559357892645437440 https://twitter.com/econoar/status/1559271411658526720 https://twitter.com/freeslave06/status/1559350621714653192
41. The censorship is already there as a practical matter as shown in this interesting thread on more centralization trouble in the world of Ethereum staking/block validation. https://twitter.com/varun_mathur/status/1558905077523484672
42. CZ very convincingly makes the case that the large corporate institutions are already here in crypto. https://twitter.com/cz_binance/status/1559642866787426314
43. The Pavia avatar merch drop for plot holders has finally arrived. https://merch.pavia.io/ https://twitter.com/Pavia_io/status/1559852416820027395
44. Worried about quantum computing and crypto? There’s already movement in the space that can be incorporated into Cardano. https://twitter.com/JohnAlanWoods/status/1559847847264141313
45. There is so much political strife in ETH over the censorship issue that the different sides are literally adopting flags at this point. This is how civil wars start. Poloniex is now even hinting at supporting both the proof-of-stake ETH and the proof-of-work ETH Forks. https://twitter.com/ercwl/status/1559284150749765641 https://twitter.com/Poloniex/status/1555085757450272768
46. We now have more information on the first Virtua metaverse game and a naming contest. https://twitter.com/VirtuaMetaverse/status/1559940305310420992
47. Cardano metaverses seem to be doing just fine compared to what Meta put out just two days ago (Aug 15). https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2022/08/17/does-mark-zuckerberg-not-understand-how-bad-his-metaverse-looks/ https://twitter.com/day25/status/1559842465477435399
48. Pavia is contemplating additional use cases for the Pavia avatar merch like making the pieces keys to access special OG areas and etc. https://twitter.com/Pavia_io/status/1560186546988400640
49. The Cardano community loves watching the “Bankfull” Podcast boys get dunked on these days. After all their Cardano comments…it’s live by the sword, die by the sword. https://twitter.com/_Checkmatey_/status/1560013273545719810 https://twitter.com/AllenWu29331265/status/1560064947711000576
50. Here’s some very interesting discussion on Hydra vs. ZK-Rollups in Cardano. https://twitter.com/_KtorZ_/status/1560008315597365252
51. Lots of talk about the potential censorship problems in the ETH All Core Devs call today. Just a reminder that Cardano currently doesn’t have these problems since different architecture (e.g. No Flashbots-esque MEV-centric middleware). https://youtu.be/jJaCaS0WbIw
52. LiqwidDAO wants to form a Nonprofit Association in Switzerland to be situated in a jurisdiction with some regulatory clarity. https://discord.com/channels/759807412688388136/981259898551664650
53. Virtua has released some images of the condo towers. https://twitter.com/VirtuaMetaverse/status/1560353042997940225
54. C’mon Canada! Selective caps on crypto transactions now?!? https://twitter.com/mochains/status/1559971309597122560
55. Cornucopias Custom Dome information is here along with game play footage. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1S3m_04-6hGmBPmeP74sZzbIFJIIPeoTC/preview https://twitter.com/RobGreig3/status/1560984962995818499
56. Charles addressed the dialogue around 1.35.3 on Friday (8.19) and it looks like everything has been resolved by August 20.The path for all SPOs to upgrade to 1.35.3 looks clear. https://twitter.com/IOHK_Charles/status/1560666160861184001 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K85M3c4VfBQ https://twitter.com/IOHK_Charles/status/1561077286807318529
57. Apparently, MuesliLending will be a thing. https://twitter.com/MuesliSwapTeam/status/1560672945210503169
58. Coinbase has done a great job of summing up the regulatory progress in crypto in a single chart. https://twitter.com/brian_armstrong/status/1561455357448183808
59. Ready Player Me who Cardano knows as the avatar provider to metaverse projects like Reach and Pavia just got a $56 million Series B from a16z. https://twitter.com/readyplayerme/status/1562032070251032576
60. Nick Szabo made a very important prediction about Ethereum half a decade ago that seems to be coming true (in a bad way). Luckily, Cardano is suffering the same fate. https://twitter.com/phyrooo/status/1562118994353700864
61. Virtua gave us a little peek at what looks like the actual location of the towers on Cardano Island. https://twitter.com/VirtuaMetaverse/status/1562145145901891588
62. Cornucopias has dropped their custom dome video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aL_4dTFKyJk
63. The 1.35.3 adoption continues to climb today (Aug.24). https://pooltool.io/networkhealth
64. Vasil Progress today is showing 40% of blocks in Epoch 359 and 54% of Nodes reporting version 1.35.3. https://pooltool.io/networkhealth
65. Apparently Tether want’s the world to know they haven’t frozen any TornadoCash related addresses. But, they’ll be happy to comply as soon as they are told to do it. https://tether.to/en/tether-holds-firm-on-decision-not-to-freeze-tornado-cash-addresses-awaits-law-enforcement-instruction/ https://twitter.com/Tether_to/status/1562468486886346753
66. It looks like MuesliSwap is now in Private Beta Mainnet for its Hybrid Dex. Vasil era dApps are starting to feel very close. https://twitter.com/MuesliSwapTeam/status/1562425751005442051
67. Coinbase is now getting in on the staking derivatives party. I wonder how much of the total delegation of ETH will end up centralized in this way. https://twitter.com/CoinbaseAssets/status/1562476695357358080
68. Congressman Emmer is formally asking Janet Yellen how OFAC can sanction something that’s not a person or an entity but just code. https://twitter.com/RepTomEmmer/status/1562084891247902721
69. It looks like you can now add data to your ADA Handle. https://twitter.com/adahandle/status/1562832083289968640
70. IOG has released a really nice video on the Mongolia trip. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FmWy1MjuN4
71. IOG has released a Vasil rollout status thread. https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1562865831708528645
72. Carda Station will be releasing a bunch of new features on August 30th including ReadyPlayerMe indoor avatars. https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1562865831708528645
73. Cardano is the top ranking cryptocurrency ecosystem in terms of “brand intimacy”…whatever that is. https://mblm.com/lab/brandintimacy-study/industries/crypto/
74. It looks like the Tornado Cash developer arrested by Dutch authorities used to work for a firm that supported the FSB. https://fortune.com/2022/08/25/tornado-cash-developer-russian-fsb-linked-compan
75. Hi! Welcome to JP’s house of S&M. My name is Jerome Powell and I’m going to cause you “some pain.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJ3sEeArWlw https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/26/powell-warns-of-some-pain-ahead-as-fed-fights-to-lower-inflation.html
76. It looks like we made it to 79% of SPOs upgraded to 1.35.3 today (Aug 28). https://pooltool.io/networkhealth
77. Cardano is among the cryptocurrencies that will be serviced by the new venture between Mastercard and Binance. https://twitter.com/cz_binance/status/1563713718902558720
78. Cointelegraph published an article on crypto as an inflation hedge by Maladex founder Jarek Hirniak. https://twitter.com/CardanoMaladex/status/1563970082362892288
79. There are disturbing allegations around a law firm & a certain Cardano competitor chain. https://twitter.com/cz_binance/status/1563993112451682307
80. IOG will be launching a free self-paced Haskell Bootcamp course in September. https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1563239111120781315
81. Here is a detailed rundown of the Vasil upgrade status of stakepools, exchanges, dApps, and downstream components. https://iohk.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/7981157534105-Third-party-readiness-for-Vasil-upgrade
82. Apparently, even ZK-Rollups on Ethereum are more expensive than Cardano’s base layer. https://l2fees.info/blog/rollup-calldata-compression https://twitter.com/dmihal/status/1564261243329937413
83. Check out this map showing World Mobile airnodes in Zanzibar. https://wmtscan.com/
84. IOG has donated $4.5 million for a new Blockchain Research Hub at Stanford University. https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/08/29/cardano-builder-iog-funds-45m-blockchain-research-hub-at-stanford-university/
85. IOG has open sourced Mithril. https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1564278732050817029 https://github.com/input-output-hk/mithril
86. There is a lot of metaverse attention these days. Blackpink won a “Best Metaverse Performance” award at the VMAs while Eminem and Snoop actually performed as PFPs in a metaverse-like setting. https://twitter.com/MTVNEWS/status/1564031771821457409 https://twitter.com/MTVNEWS/status/1564078580602208256
87. It looks like Charles has invested in Pezesha, a Kenyan lending platform. https://twitter.com/hildamoraa/status/1564564886331559936
88. Tell me that Ethereum already knows it’s staking system is terrible without telling me it already knows. https://twitter.com/StakeWithPride/status/1564583964429279233
89. A Solana DeFi platform accidentally “closed” its application and now “it’s not recoverable”. https://twitter.com/OptifiLabs/status/1564367455220219904
90. ADA Realm is showing us more of their avatars. https://twitter.com/AdaRealm/status/1564676410945552392
91. Even the FBI is talking about the Robbery Forest now. https://twitter.com/FBI/status/1564337233217273857
92. Future Fest has fleshed out some more of its ideas around human gig work in the metaverse. https://twitter.com/futurefestxr/status/1564702490964025345

~Army of Spies