👀 GameStop Launches Beta Version of Non-Custodial Crypto Wallet

Hello Defiers! Here’s what we’re covering today:

News

• GameStop Launches Beta Version of Non-Custodial Crypto Wallet
• Federal Reserve Survey Finds 12% of U.S. Adults Held Crypto Last Year
• Stablecoins In Regulators’ Crosshairs After Terra Collapse
• Stablegains Under Fire After Going All-In On Anchor
• Is It Different This Time? Analysts Explain This Year’s Crypto Crash
• Optimism Targets ‘Ethereum Equivalence’ With New L2 Upgrade
• ConsenSys Pushes Upgrade for Ethereum Validators Ahead of Q3 Merge

Tutorial

• What Is Blockchain?

Podcast

🎙Listen to the exclusive interview with Kevin Zhou:

Video

• Quicktake: Latest on Terra
• Conversations at Colony: Vol 1: A Web3 State Of Mind
• BTC is a terrible hedge against inflation. Or is it?

Elsewhere

• Coinbase becomes the first crypto company to enter the Fortune 500: The Block
• Wall Street Says a Fed Digital Dollar Spells Destruction for Banks: CoinDesk
• Crypto Industry Fights New OECD Restrictions: Bankless Times

Trending in The Defiant

• FTX Launches US Equities Trading with Stablecoins as a Funding Option
• Decentralized Social Graph Lens Protocol Goes Live
• Bitcoin and Ethereum Hash Rates Hit All-Time Highs Despite Bear Market

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GameStop Ups Web3 Push

👀 GameStop Launches Beta Version of Non-Custodial Crypto Wallet

By Samuel Haig

GameStop, the embattled video game store and meme stock, launched a non-custodial Ethereum browser wallet in beta on Tuesday. Users control their assets and must manage the wallet’s private keys themselves.

The wallet is available from the Chrome Web Store for the Chrome and Brave browsers, and an iOS version of the app is “coming soon.”

The new wallet precedes GameStop’s NFT marketplace, which the video game store expects to launch by September. In February, GameStop announced a partnership with Immutable X, an Ethereum Layer 2 for NFTs, to build the marketplace and launch a $100M development fund. Loopring will also help develop GameStop’s NFT marketplace.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

Crypto Adoption Surges in 2021

📈 Federal Reserve Survey Finds 12% of U.S. Adults Held Crypto Last Year

By Samuel Haig

Nearly one in eight U.S. adults owned crypto during 2021, according to a survey from the Federal Reserve on May 23.

In the central bank’s Economic Well-Being Of U.S. Households in 2021 report, the Fed found that 12% of the 11,000 U.S. adults surveyed held cryptocurrency last year.

About 92% of the Americans held crypto to speculate on its price. Last year, the combined market cap of crypto assets surged from $763B to $2.9T in November, before crashing to about $1.3T in 2022.

Just 2% of U.S. adults – or a sixth of those who held digital assets – used crypto to buy things. And only 1% used crypto to send money to friends and family.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

Stablecoins Under Fire

🎯 Stablecoins In Regulators’ Crosshairs After Terra Collapse

By Jason Levin

After Terra’s collapse last week, regulators across the globe have started to take aim at stablecoins.

Most of the regulatory concerns have been focused on algorithmic stablecoins like Terra’s UST. Unlike fiat-backed stablecoins like USDC and Tether which are collateralized by fiat currency or other securities, algorithmic stablecoins maintain their peg to their benchmark, usually the US dollar, via algorithmic operations encoded in their smart contracts.

On May 20, Bloomberg reported that Senator Cynthia Lummis, a Republican, and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a moderate Democrat, are working together on a proposal that aims to prevent crises like Terra’s collapse. Their proposed bill would require stablecoins to keep 100% reserves on hand and maintain a 1-1 peg with those assets, thus ending innovation around algorithmic stablecoins.

U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen said it was “urgent” for Congress to pass new legislation. “[Stablecoins] run risks which could threaten financial stability,” Yellen testified in a Senate Banking Committee hearing on May 10.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

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UST Contagion Continues To Spread

💥 Stablegains Under Fire After Going All-In On Anchor

By Aleksandar Gilbert

The pitch was simple. “Earn a stable 15% APY interest with our simple savings account,” reads a blog post detailing Stablegains’ launch in six U.S. states last August. “No hidden fees, no minimum balances, no commitment periods.”

Stablegains customers are now alleging they were scammed – misled by marketing that suggested the company was better diversified, when in fact, it had deployed all investor funds in Anchor Protocol, the now-infamous savings app on Terra.

As the UST stablecoin collapsed last week, Stablegains said its 4,878 customers would likely lose most of the $47 million they had entrusted to the company.

“All users’ holdings are in UST,” the company clarified in a webpage recently added to its website. It goes on to say that “it’s unclear but highly unlikely that the UST rate will return to its peg.”

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

Experts Weigh In On Crypto Downtrend

📉 Is It Different This Time? Analysts Explain This Year’s Crypto Crash

By Owen Fernau

The most popular tokens of 2021 – Layer 1s, GameFi, meme tokens, and DeFi 2.0 – are all down over 75% from their all-time highs. While the market braces for a crypto winter, one question swirls around traders’ minds: How low can it go?

Those who endured the harsh crypto winter of late 2018 and early 2019 might remember that BTC dropped 83% the following its 2017 high of $19,665, and ETH dropped 94% to $83 about 11 months after its former peak of $1,448.

Right now, around six months after BTC and ETH’s all-time highs, the two largest cryptocurrencies are down 56% and 59%, respectively. If this cycle copies the last, BTC would sink from highs of $68,789 to $12,000 and ETH would fall from $4878 to below $300.

Of course, no two cycles are the same. “This is uncharted territory. Since crypto started, we’ve been in a decade-long bull run with low to zero interest rates,” DeFi analyst The DeFi Edge told The Defiant. “We’re facing inflation rates at a 40 year high. Crypto needs more money to grow and it’s a horrible environment now.”

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

Optimism Innovates Rollups

🦄 Optimism Targets ‘Ethereum Equivalence’ With New L2 Upgrade

By Samuel Haig

Ethereum scaling solution Optimism today announced Bedrock, an upgrade that improves speeds and cuts costs for those that trade on the L2.

Optimism is a rollup: a Layer 2 scaling solution that batches transactions on another blockchain, then feeds them back to Ethereum as a single transaction. Rollups enjoy the security of Ethereum’s mainnet while reducing transaction fees.

The L2 network did not say how much cheaper Bedrock would make transactions or when it would come out. Simple transfers on Optimism currently cost about $0.28. Optimism said the new upgrade also improves node sync speeds by up to 50 times.

With Bedrock, Optimism said it’s shooting for “Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) equivalence”.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

ConsenSys Readying For The Merge

🤖 ConsenSys Pushes Upgrade for Ethereum Validators Ahead of Q3 Merge

By Samuel Haig

Ethereum scaling solution Optimism today announced Bedrock, an upgrade that improves speeds and cuts costs for those that trade on the L2.

Optimism is a rollup: a Layer 2 scaling solution that batches transactions on another blockchain, then feeds them back to Ethereum as a single transaction. Rollups enjoy the security of Ethereum’s mainnet while reducing transaction fees.

The L2 network did not say how much cheaper Bedrock would make transactions or when it would come out. Simple transfers on Optimism currently cost about $0.28. Optimism said the new upgrade also improves node sync speeds by up to 50 times.

With Bedrock, Optimism said it’s shooting for “Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) equivalence”.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

Tutorials

⍺What Is Blockchain?

By Rahul Nambiampurath

Over the last decade, blockchain has become integrated into the daily vernacular. For a good reason — thanks to Bitcoin, blockchain technology has been implemented across numerous industries.

Having proven itself with Bitcoin, blockchain is likely to become the key technology behind many central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). The question then is, what is so innovative about blockchain technology?

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

The Tube

📺 Latest on Terra

📺 Conversations at Colony: Vol 1: A Web3 State Of Mind

📺 BTC is a terrible hedge against inflation. Or is it?

Elsewhere

🔗 Coinbase becomes the first crypto company to enter the Fortune 500: The Block

Exchange operator Coinbase has become the first crypto company to make the Fortune 500 cut — an annual list of America's largest corporations by revenue — ranking at 437. The move comes despite Coinbase's current struggles induced by bearish market conditions. This is because Fortune has ranked companies for its 2022 list based on their 2021 revenues.

🔗 Wall Street Says a Fed Digital Dollar Spells Destruction for Banks: CoinDesk

Wall Street bankers are arguing that the Federal Reserve launching its own digital dollar could crack the foundations of banking as we know it, according to letters that industry lobbyists sent to the U.S. central bank on Friday. “Current research overwhelmingly undermines the purported benefits of a CBDC and instead indicates that a CBDC would seriously disrupt the financial system, significantly harming consumers and businesses,” said Greg Baer, who runs one of Wall Street’s lobbying arms in Washington, the Bank Policy Institute.

🔗 Crypto Industry Fights New OECD Restrictions: Bankless Times

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) stated at a meeting in Paris on Monday that they want to change bank sector rules to stop Bitcoin holdings held abroad from being kept secret from tax services. They might end up extending them further than the laws which apply to money laundering and banking, currently enforced by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) on crypto.

Trending in The Defiant

• FTX Launches US Equities Trading with Stablecoins as a Funding OptionSam Bankman-Fried, the meme-loving billionaire founder of crypto exchange FTX, is back in the news. A week after Bankman-Fried purchased a 7.6% stake in Robinhood, FTX has launched its stock trading platform, FTX Stocks, in beta.
• Decentralized Social Graph Lens Protocol Goes LiveThe team behind DeFi mainstay Aave has launched Lens Protocol, a decentralized social graph that allows developers to build web3 social media platforms all run on the Polygon network. Using Lens, users can mint a profile, follow others, and create and collect posts all on-chain.
• Bitcoin and Ethereum Hash Rates Hit All-Time Highs Despite Bear MarketCryptocurrency miners continue to pump computing power into the Ethereum and Bitcoin networks despite their tokens’ recent price drop. The hash rate for Ethereum hit an all-time high on May 13, when it topped out at more than 1,126 terahashes per second, according to ycharts.com. Bitcoin’s hash rate peaked two days later at over 254 million terahashes per second, per blockchain.com.

🧑‍💻 ✍️ Stories in The Defiant are written by Owen Fernau, Samuel Haig, Jason Levin, DeFiDad, Aleksandar Gilbert, and yyctrader, and edited by Edward Robinson, yyctrader, and Camila Russo. Videos are produced by Robin Schmidt, Alp Gasimov and Daniel Flynn. Podcast is led by Camila, edited by Alp.

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