🖼 Artists Say NFT Markets Betray Web3 by Nixing Royalty Payments

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

News

• Artists Say NFT Markets Betray Web3 by Nixing Royalty Payments
• ETH/BTC Ratio Soars To Nine-Month High Ahead Of The Merge
• Ethereum Repels Rival Layer 1s as Merge Looms

👀 Defiant Premium Story for Paid Subscribers (📜Scroll to the end!)

• Arbitrum Transactions Quadruple After Upgrade

Podcast

🎙Listen to the exclusive interview with Zcash’s Zooko in this week’s episode:

DeFi Explainers

• What Is Solana?

Elsewhere

• BNB Chain announces zero-knowledge proof scaling technology: The Block
• Crypto Oversight Should Resemble Traditional Bank Rules, Fed Official Says: CoinDesk
• Hot off the press: our latest Allocation Update covering projects that received funding in Q1 and Q2!: Ethereum Foundation

Trending in The Defiant

• Bellatrix Euphoria Short-Lived as Markets Slide
• Curve Releases Interface Code For Stablecoin
• A16Z’s Latest Bet on NFTs: Free Licenses for Everyone

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NFT Markets

🖼 Artists Say NFT Markets Betray Web3 by Nixing Royalty Payments

X2Y2’s Move to Make Royalties Optional Triggers Outcry and Soul-searching in NFT Land

By Aleksandar Gilbert

ART On a hot and humid Tuesday night, collectors flocked to a sweltering art gallery in Lower Manhattan. It was their one opportunity to snag a physical copy from Justin Aversano’s “Cognition,” a series of 364 mixed-media pieces the grieving artist created in 2014 after the death of his mother.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

Market Action

📈 ETH/BTC Ratio Soars To Nine-Month High Ahead Of The Merge

Ether Is Up 5% In A Week While Bitcoin Has Declined 3.5%

By yyctrader

ETHER IS UP Ether is up 6% in the past 24 hours as traders remain optimistic ahead of Ethereum’s transition to proof-of-stake consensus, now just a week away. Global markets rallied on Wednesday as a weaker U.S. dollar saw the Nasdaq and S&P 500 post gains of nearly 2%.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

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Layer 1s

🏆 Ethereum Repels Rival Layer 1s as Merge Looms

Smart Contract Network Draws 90% of Protocol Revenue

By Samuel Haig

DOMINANT Ethereum remains the dominant Layer 1 smart contract network by a wide margin during the 2022 bear market, raking in 90% of L1 protocol revenue since mid-March.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

DeFi Explainers

🧐 What Is Solana?

A Step-by-Step Guide to the Blockchain Challenging Ethereum

By Rahul Nambiampurath

CHALLENGERS As Ethereum cultivated its ecosystem of decentralized applications (dApps) in recent years, Solana popped up on the blockchain scene and became one of its top challengers.

Elsewhere

🔗 BNB Chain announces zero-knowledge proof scaling technology: The Block

Binance’s Layer 1 BNB chain has announced its own zero-knowledge (ZK) proof scaling technology, which it coined zkBNB.

🔗 Crypto Oversight Should Resemble Traditional Bank Rules, Fed Official Says: CoinDesk

Michael Barr, the former Ripple Labs adviser and Michigan University law school dean who is now the U.S. Federal Reserve’s vice chairman for supervision, said crypto activities need greater regulatory oversight.

EF Ecosystem Support Program @EF_ESPHot off the press: our latest Allocation Update covering projects that received funding in Q1 and Q2! blog.ethereum.org/2022/09/07/esp… In the first half of 2022 we organized an Academic Grants Round alongside our usual grants program, awarding over $17.6 million to grantees including…

blog.ethereum.orgAllocation Update: Q1 and Q2 2022 | Ethereum Foundation Blog9:11 AM ∙ Sep 7, 2022178Likes48Retweets

Trending in The Defiant

• Bellatrix Euphoria Short-Lived as Markets SlideFor a second there, Layer 1s were pumping like it was 2021. Smart contract platforms, also known as Layer 1s, started the week with a bang as Ethereum’s ETH, Solana’s SOL, Avalanche’s AVAX and others were all up more than 3% as of midday New York time.
• Curve Releases Interface Code For StablecoinCurve Finance was the epicenter of the stablecoin wars in 2021. Now it’s getting ready to launch its own stablecoin even as the cryptocurrencies have come under intense scrutiny in the wake of Terra’s failure in May and a looming regulatory crackdown.
• A16Z’s Latest Bet on NFTs: Free Licenses for EveryoneWho owns what when someone owns an NFT? It’s not always clear. When Actor Seth Green’s Bored Ape was stolen, for instance, it brought plans for a show with the animated character into question.

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

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Defiant Premium Story for Paid Subscribers

📈 Arbitrum Transactions Quadruple After Upgrade

Surge of Activity and Addresses Bolsters L2 Blockchain

By Samuel Haig

QUADRUPLED Activity on Arbitrum, Ethereum’s leading L2, quadrupled after its Nitro upgrade, with daily transactions hitting all-time highs during consecutive days this week. According to data from Arbiscan, there were 319,000 transactions executed on the blockchain network on Sep 1, the day after Arbitrum’s Nitro upgrade went live.

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Arbitrum transactions surged to almost 443,000 on Sep 6, four times that of Aug. 24.

The surge in activity coincided with thousands of new addresses transacting on Arbitrum each day. More than 1.2M different wallets have used the Arbitrum chain to date.

Daily transaction count on Arbitrum. Source: Arbiscan.

Arbitrum Nitro promised to deliver better speed and lower fees by introducing advanced calldata compression and an improved sequencer. It also replaced Arbitrum’s custom-built Ethereum Virtual machine (EVM) emulator with the EVM from popular Ethereum client provider, Go Ethereum.

Smart Contracts

An EVM is the computation engine that enables the execution of smart contracts written in Ethereum’s coding language, Solidity.

The upgrade worked, and Arbitrum’s fees ranked among the lowest on L2 despite the record levels of activity; simple token transfers cost $0.02 and DEX transactions priced at $0.05, according to L2fees.

By comparison, Optimism, Ethereum’s second-largest L2, are priced at $0.08 and $0.12, with 121,422 transactions executed on the network over the past 24 hours, according to Etherscan. Around 1.1M transactions are processed on the Ethereum mainnet daily.

Incentives

Arbitrum posted its previous record of 287,019 daily transactions in late June amid the Odyssey event, which was supposed to comprise an eight-week campaign promoting the network's adoption through NFT incentives.

But transaction fees skyrocketed amid the surge in activity, with fees even surpassing those on Ethereum’s mainnet, prompting the campaign to be paused. Onlookers expect Odyssey will be resumed in the future now that Nitro is live.

Arbitrum offers low fees compared to Ethereum’s mainnet by processing transactions using optimistic rollups. Rollups bundle together transactions executed on Layer 2 and then submits them in batches for validation on Ethereum’s base layer.

Block Producers

Optimistic rollups assume the transactions submitted by block producers are accurate and honest, but provide a seven-day window for network participants to identify fraudulent transactions. Block producers must post significant collateral which will be slashed should they post inaccurate transactions.

In a recent appearance on The Defiant Podcast, Justin Drake, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, described the system as keeping block producers honest through game theory.

Game Theory

“The fact that there is this dispute mechanism is where the value lies, not in the actual usage of that dispute resolution process, which shouldn't, in theory, be used,” he said. “The game theory would suggest that we would never see these invalid claims, it makes no rational sense for people to go do that.”

On Sep. 7, Arbitrum announced it's first ever hackathon will take place over two days at the Devcon conference in Colombia from Oct. 15.