😳 Binance to Delist Three Stablecoins and Fold Balances into BUSD

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Stablecoins

😳 Binance to Delist Three Stablecoins and Fold Balances into BUSD

CZ Says Move Will Stoke Liquidity But Critics Cry Foul

By Samuel Haig

Binance to Delist Three Stablecoins and Fold Balances into BUSD

BALANCES Binance, the top centralized exchange by trade volume, announced it will delist three popular stablecoins and convert users’ balances into its own BUSD stablecoin.

DEPOSITS Beginning Sept. 29, Binance will automatically convert users’ accounts and new deposits of USD Coin (USDC), Pax Dollar (USDP), and TrueUSD (TUSD) into Binance USD on a one-to-one basis.

CONVERSION Users will still be able to withdraw the unsupported stablecoins, with Binance converting them into fiat currency for clients from BUSD on a one-to-one basis.

LIQUIDITY CZ, the founder and CEO of Binance, tweeted that the move is intended to consolidate stablecoin liquidity on the exchange. He also asserted that, technically speaking, the stablecoins will not be delisted from the platform, emphasizing that users can still deposit and withdraw the tokens.

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Crypto Pay

💵 Web3 Workers Outside the U.S. Prefer Payment In Crypto, Study Shows

Median Pay For a U.S. Crypto Engineer Is $150,000

By Aleksandar Gilbert

Web3 Workers Outside The U.S. Prefer Payment In Crypto, Study Shows

SURVEY Most crypto employees outside the United States are paid in stablecoins, according to a recent survey of one major venture capital firm’s portfolio companies.

COMPENSATION Framework Ventures manages $1.4B in assets and conducts a bi-annual survey of compensation at its 18 portfolio companies. While the sample size is small, the survey gives an insight into the labor market for Web3 talent.

OPTION Among companies with headquarters in the US, four out of five offer USD as the “primary payment option,” according to Framework, “often due to the convenience of using best-in-class payroll and employee benefits providers that are less likely to support stablecoins.”

PEG Elsewhere, however, 56% of the companies surveyed offer stablecoins as the primary payment option, with nearly all offering payment in the dollar-pegged USD Coin (USDC).

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

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Airdrops

💸 Terra Launches Second LUNA Airdrop to Repay Holders

Failed DeFi Project Issues Second Batch of Tokens

By Samuel Haig

Terra Launches Second LUNA Airdrop to Repay Holders

SECOND AIRDROP LUNA is back from the dead. Sort of.Claims are now live for Terra’s second airdrop for its new LUNA token four months after the DeFi ecosystem failed and vaporized more than $60B in market capitalization.

WALLETS The move is intended to provide a partial reimbursement to wallets holding its native LUNA token or UST stablecoin, both of which became virtually worthless in May.

TOKENS Terra Luna Classic holders who didn’t receive the correct number of LUNA tokens during the project’s first “Phoenix” airdrop on May 28 can claim the secondary drop. Claims went live on Sep. 4 and will expire on Oct. 4. About 19.5M LUNA have been allocated to the airdrop.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

Airdrops

📈 XMON Rallies Ahead Of SudoSwap Airdrop

Token Holders Will Receive 41.9% Of The SUDO Supply

By Owen Fernau

TOKEN LAUNCH SudoAMM, an automated market maker for NFT trading, will be launching a token. Sudoswap outlined its plans to distribute a governance token for sudoAMM in a Sept. 1 post. SUDO will launch with an initial supply of 60M tokens.

FUNGIBLE TOKEN While not yet live, a Dune Analytics dashboard shows a price of $3.64 for the token, which will trade under the ticker SUDO. That price is an estimate based on the distribution plan for SUDO, where 42%, of the initial supply will be distributed to XMON holders — XMON is another fungible token and is part of the broader 0xmons ecosystem, which also includes an NFT collection with a floor price of 22 ETH, as well as an over-the-counter (OTC) NFT marketplace.

AIRDROP Almost 75% of the 10,000 XMON supply is held by the 0xmons treasury and is ineligible for the airdrop. That leaves 2512 XMON to receive 41.9% of the initial SUDO supply, which amounts to 25.12M, or 10,000 SUDO per XMON.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

NFTs

🖼 LG Launches NFT Marketplace For Smart TV Owners In The U.S.

Consumer Electronics Giant Bets Big on NFTs During Bear Market

By Samuel Haig

LG Launches NFT Marketplace For Smart TV Owners In The U.S.

NEWS Despite the NFT markets being in the doldrums, LG, the consumer electronics giant, is launching an NFT marketplace for its premium smart TVs.

MAINSTREAM The company launched its LG Art Lab marketplace for U.S.based television owners on Sep. 5, showing that the firm believes non-fungible tokens still hold mainstream appeal. The marketplace can be accessed from the home screen of TVs running webOS 5.0 or later, with users able to buy, sell, and display NFTs.

NFTs Christian Hasker, the CMO of Sworlds Labs, the team behind Hedera, said the marketplace is helping to transition NFTs “beyond being computer-based collectibles and toward becoming a piece of art displayed as any other artwork would be within the home of its owner.”

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

Market Action

📈 Markets Rise As U.S. Unemployment Rate Ticks Up To 3.7%

Ether Is Up 3% on Jobs Report

By Aleksandar Gilbert

Markets Rise As U.S. Unemployment Rate Ticks Up To 3.7%

SURGE Markets surged after the release of economic data Friday morning that suggests inflationary pressures may be easing in the United States.

RATE The unemployment rate in the U.S. rose from 3.5% to 3.7% in August, according to the Labor Department, while employers added 315,000 jobs – fewer than the 526,000 they had added in July.

PICTURE “Overall, the release paints a less rosy picture of the jobs market than previously illustrated, which could result in the Fed slowing or reversing its rate hiking trajectory should unemployment continue to rise,” crypto market maker GSR said in its daily market report.

WINNERS Cryptocurrencies rose across the board, with Ether and Polkadot the biggest winners among the 10 largest digital assets. Ether (ETH) is up 3% after the 8:30 ET release, while Polkadot has rallied 2.7%.

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Defiant Video

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📺 Quick Take: MAJOR CARDANO UPDATE + SAYLOR BUSTED?!

DeFi Explainers

🧐 What Is NEAR Protocol?

A Step-by-Step Guide to A Key Challenger Blockchain to Ethereum

By Rahul Nambiampurath

DAPP NETWORK Many developers have earned valuable blockchain experience by working on Ethereum. Some moved on to Cardano and others to NEAR Protocol. What does it look like to create a competitive dApp network from scratch without being first?

MASSES NEAR Protocol is a public Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain that aims to bring DeFi to the masses with low transfer fees and fast transactions. NEAR competes with Avalanche, Solana, Cardano, Algorand, the new version of Ethereum, and other PoS networks.

OPEN-SOURCE NEAR’s founders are Alexander Skidanov and Illia Polosukhin, who hail from Ukraine and were educated in computer science and mathematics. They have been working on NEAR Protocol since 2017 after contributing to Ethereum’s open-source code. NEAR mainnet came online in August 2020.

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💦 What Is Cryptocurrency Circulating Supply?

A Step-by-Step Guide to a Key Metric in DeFi

By Rahul Nambiampurath

What Is Cryptocurrency Circulating Supply?

COINS Cryptocurrency circulating supply is equivalent to outstanding shares of a publicly traded company. This metric counts the number of coins available for trade, as opposed to the number of maximum coin supply.

SCARCITY The circulating supply helps us calculate the market capitalization of every coin. Additionally, regulating scarcity mitigates demand and impacts the coin’s price. Cryptocurrencies diverge in their circulating supply approaches, which is why it is important to understand these concepts.

SUPPLY Let’s say you want to buy ADA coins for Cardano staking. Across all centralized and decentralized exchanges, there are 33.75B ADA available. This is ADA’s circulating supply, as 75% of its maximum supply of 45B ADA. In turn, we can calculate ADA’s market cap by multiplying that circulating supply with the price of each ADA coin.

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Elsewhere

🔗 From tinkering with video games to building the new Ethereum: How Preston Van Loon became key to The Merge

Preston Van Loon grew up with computer games. It wasn’t playing them that made him tick, though.

🔗 Coinbase Cloud launches Solana Archival Nodes to empower the Solana developer community: Coinbase

Tl;dr: Coinbase Cloud is expanding our dedicated Solana infrastructure offering to include Solana Archival Nodes.

🔗 UK forces crypto exchanges to report suspected sanction breaches: The Guardian

Crypto exchanges must report suspected sanctions breaches to UK authorities under new rules brought in amid concerns that bitcoin and other cryptoassets are being used to dodge restrictions imposed in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Spherium Finance | HyperBridge Live Now @SpheriumFinanceIn the wake of the #ArbitrumNitro upgrade, we look forward to further enhancing our #HyperBridge ecosystem by integrating @arbitrum by @OffchainLabs into our platform. 5:00 PM ∙ Sep 2, 2022178Likes62Retweets

Trending in The Defiant

What is The Merge?In 2020, Ethereum launched Beacon Chain, a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) network that differed from the original. Up until that time, Ethereum has used the same type of consensus mechanism to maintain its blockchain as Bitcoin — Proof-of-Work. Beacon introduced a new way to add blocks of data to the chain — staking.
Bitcoin Dominance Drops Under 40% For The First Time Since JanuaryBitcoin dominance (BTC.D), which is the market capitalization of BTC relative to that of all digital assets, has fallen below 40% for just the second time since 2018 and stands at an eight-month low, according to data from CoinMarketCap.
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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🧙🏼‍♀️Bellatrix Fork Goes Live and Clears Way for Merge

Beacon Chain Now Ready to Merge with Ethereum Mainnet

By Samuel Haig

The Bellatrix hard fork executed on the Eth2 Beacon Chain on Tuesday and completed the first half of Ethereum’s long-awaited chain-merge and transition to Proof of Stake consensus.

The Beacon Chain, Ethereum’s Proof of Stake consensus layer, is now ready to merge with Ethereum’s execution layer, the Proof of Work mainnet. Bellatrix enables stakers to produce blocks containing the codebase supporting the unification of Ethereum’s two layers.

To read the full story subscribe to The Defiant newsletter.

The upgrade went live at 11:36 am UTC time. The hard fork successfully took place at epoch 144,896. “Welcome to world, Bellatrix,” tweeted Trent Van Epps of the Ethereum Foundation.

Ether has surged 7% in the last three days, to $1,665, according to data from The Defiant Terminal. In contrast, Bitcoin has eked out a 0.51% gain in that period.

Secondary Upgrade

A secondary upgrade called Paris will complete The Merge after Ethereum’s Terminal Total Difficulty (TTD) is reached at block-height 58,750,000,000,000,000,000,000.

TTD, also known as the difficulty bomb, requires the next block after the terminal block height is reached to be produced by a Beacon Chain validator, forcing The Merge to happen.

Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s co-founder and chief scientist, tweeted on Sep. 6 that the difficulty bomb will go off between Sep. 13 and Sep. 15.

Kiln, a closed testnet used to host early tests of The Merge, will shut down today.

Reduce Barriers

The Merge will sideline energy-intensive miners from the Ethereum network in favor of stakers. The shift to Proof of Stake will bolster the decentralization of the network by dramatically reducing the barriers to participating as a validator, with many users able to run a node from home.

It will reduce the Ethereum network’s energy consumption almost 100%, the Ethereum Foundation says, and reduce new Ether issuance by about 88%.

According to Ethernodes, 73% of nodes are running up-to-date clients that support The Merge. On Aug. 24, the Ethereum Foundation published a blog post urging node operators to update their clients before TTD is reached.

Latest Version

“If you are using an Ethereum client that is not updated to the latest version… your client will sync to the pre-fork blockchain once the upgrade occurs,” the Ethereum Foundation said.
“You will be stuck on an incompatible chain following the old rules and will be unable to send Ether or operate on the post-merge Ethereum network.”

Percentage of Ethereum nodes running merge-compatible clients. Source: Ethernodes.

The Merge has been referred to as Ethereum’s “triple halvening” due to the massive reduction in new Ether issuance the upgrade will precipitate.

In a recent appearance on The Defiant Podcast, Justin Drake, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, estimated that The Merge will reduce ETH issuance by eight times.

12 Years

“Three Bitcoin halvenings is roughly a reduction of 8x in issuance, which is what Ethereum will enjoy in a single moment, as opposed to having to wait 12 years in the case of Bitcoin,” Drake said.

The Merge is expected to render ETH a deflationary asset, meaning more Ether is destroyed through Ethereum’s base network fees being burned than is newly issued as rewards to validators. Yet the recent slump in on-chain activity has called Ethereum’s deflationary hypothesis into question.

Ether’s post-merge issuance will equate to 166 times the square root of the number of staked ETH. The tricky equation is designed to increase new Ether issuance at a steadily decreasing rate as more stakers participate in validating the network.

Circulation

For example, if 1M ETH is staked, 166,000 new Ether will enter into circulation each year, but if 100M ETH is staked, issuance will only increase to 1.66M Ether.

According to data from Beaconcha.in, nearly 13.5M ETH are currently staked, meaning that 1,670.3 new ETH will enter supply daily under Proof of Stake consensus — an 87.6% drop from the current 13,500 ETH entering circulation each day.

But according to Ultra Sound Money, a website tracking Ethereum’s burn rate, just 1,246.5 ETH were burned each day on average over the past week and 1,239 were destroyed daily over the past 30 days.

The data indicates that Ethereum’s network activity must increase by about a third in order for the burn rate to keep pace with new Ether issuance after The Merge.