🦄 Weekly Recap: Uniswap Overtakes Coinbase

This week, Tegan Kline was joined by Jon Hillis, the founder of Cabin, a network city for remote workers actively working to grow a global network of neighborhoods for people interested in community-centric living and working. Cabin is a great example of merging the digital with the physical and using Web 3 tools in real life.

We delve into the purpose behind Cabin, how the COVID lockdowns inspired and allowed room for Cabin to emerge, the different governance structures that exist within the DAO ecosystem, why Cabin chose polycentric governance, the best DAO practices, and how you can get involved in Cabin communities.

We may well be in the depths of a bear market, but social trading app friend.tech has been making waves since launching on Base just two weeks ago.

Youtubers have predictably released a barrage of videos on how to make a fortune overnight, but others are skeptical. So what is the friend tech hype about, and is it here to last?

Four Bills That Will Define The Future Of Digital Assets

Mona El Isa, the founder and CEO of institutional DeFi platform, Avantgarde, discusses the implications of four critical digital asset bills recently advanced by U.S. “Regulatory clarity has been a recurring issue for the crypto and DeFi space, as some regulated entities remain concerned about the legal classification of crypto assets. But this may be changing,” Isa said.

Perps Come First: How to Build a Winning DeFi Ecosystem in 2023

Alexi Atlas, the founder of KinetixFi, presents his thesis for why decentralized perpetual contracts are DeFi’s next major battleground. “Existing DeFi incumbents have nailed down the spot market experience to a tee… But on the perpetuals scene, the door is wide open to win over users,” Atlas said.

• IRS Sets Sights On Decentralized Exchanges and NFTs With Proposed Tax Rules The Treasury Department released a nearly 300-page-long document in response to the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, outlining reporting requirements for various ecosystem participants. However, the proposed rules have drawn widespread criticism from industry observers.
• PEPE Drops 20% After Team Sends 16T Tokens To Exchanges PEPE, the biggest winner of 2023’s memecoin craze, crashed by over 20% on Aug. 24 after a wallet controlled by the token’s creators sent 16T PEPE tokens worth $14.2M to centralized exchanges after routing them through various wallets. The multi-signature wallet was seeded with 6.9% of the supply of PEPE at the token’s conception.
• Lido Set To Complete Final Token Unlock Lido completed the final major unlock for its LDO token, meaning that nearly all 1B LDO will be on the open market, except for a tiny fraction that will vest to early investors until April 2024.

• Uniswap Spot Volume Surpassed Coinbase In 2023 Uniswap has been steadily beating Coinbase by spot trading volume throughout 2023. Data shows that Uniswap processed roughly $110B worth of trades during the second quarter, compared to around $90B by Coinbase.
• Farcaster To Migrate From Ethereum To Optimism Superchain With Ethereum’s Layer 2s now processing five times as many transactions per second as the mainnet, many projects in the Ethereum ecosystem are pivoting the focus of their operations onto L2. Now, Farcaster, an Ethereum-based social media graph, plans to migrate to Optimism.

• DoJ Charges Tornado Cash Founders with Money Laundering and Sanctions Violations The U.S. Department of Justice has charged two of the three founders of Tornado Cash, Roman Storm and Roman Semenov, with money laundering and sanctions violations. Each charge carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.
• dYdX Declares War On MEV Ahead Of Appchain Migration The dYdX Foundation published a list of preferred practices for dYdX Chain validators and stakers, including ensuring a “fair and honest trading experience” for users by shunning MEV activities that could harm or disadvantage ecosystem participants.
• EigenLayer Pulls In $160M Of Deposits Within Two Hours Restaking protocol EigenLayer raised the deposit caps on its liquid staking token restaking pools on Aug.22, saying that the pools for stETH, rETH and cbETH would close once any one of them hit 100,000 tokens deposited.
• Friend Tech Crosses 100,000 Users As Crypto Community Debates Its Longevity The latest hot app is friend.tech, which surpassed 100,000 users less than two weeks after its launch. But the question asked of any new craze in crypto is will it last?

• Yuga Labs To Block OpenSea After NFT Marketplace Abandons Royalty Enforcement Yuga Labs, creators of the popular NFT collection Bored Ape Yacht Club, will remove support for OpenSea's Seaport protocol from February 2024. The move comes after OpenSea's decision to disable mandatory royalties for existing collections.
• Coinbase Invests In USDC Issuer Circle On Aug. 21, Centre Consortium, the entity overseeing USDC governance jointly operated by Circle and Coinbase, the leading U.S. crypto exchange, said it will soon dissolve. Coinbase is purchasing an equity stake in Circle, with Circle set to assume all of Centre’s former responsibilities.
• Balancer Discloses Critical Vulnerability With $33M At Risk Balancer has divulged a critical vulnerability that has the potential to impact some of its liquidity pools. The “at-risk” pools represent 4%, or roughly $33M, of Balancer’s $836M total value locked. The team claims it has mitigated the threat in other pools but still recommends that users withdraw their assets.

• Ethereum Layer 2 Throughput Hits Record High Activity across Layer 2 networks is booming, with combined L2 throughput outpacing the Ethereum mainnet by 400%. The milestone comes as zkSync Era overtook the Ethereum mainnet, with daily activity sitting at 12.2 TPS compared to 10.9 TPS for Ethereum.
• Friend Tech Closes In On Ethereum With $1.7M In Daily Fees Just ten days after launch, the social media upstart only lags Ethereum in terms of fees, with $1.7M collected over the last 24 hours, putting it ahead of DeFi stalwarts like Lido and Uniswap.