⚖️SEC Suffers Blow In Ripple Lawsuit: DeFi Week of July 9

Happy weekend Defiers!

It was another bullish week for web3, with digital assets rallying after a U.S. judge ruled that Ripple’s XRP token is not a security. While Ripple still faces alleged securities law violations, the court said the XRP digital asset does not comprise an investment security contract, even if the token was sold via as a securities contract.

While XRP and other assets facing SEC lawsuits rocketed, most assets posted significant gains in response to the news, driving ETH to briefly trade above $2,000 for the first time since May. Ripple has been fighting the U.S Securities and Exchange Commission since 2020, with the regulator recently ramping up enforcement actions against cryptocurrencies it alleges are securities.

Competition continues to heat up in Ethereum’s ultra-competitive Layer 2 sector. Base, the highly-anticipated L2 from Coinbase, opened its doors to developers this past week ahead of a public launch scheduled for August. Consensys similarly began onboarding builders onto its Layer 2, Linea, which will open to the public during next week’s Ethereum Community Conference in Paris.

StarkWare also shipped the “Quantum Leap” upgrade for its L2, StarkNet. The upgrade consistently demonstrated a throughput of 37 transactions per second on testnet, with StarkWare claiming Quantum Leap will facilitate decentralized social, web3 gaming, and other transaction-intensive applications.

In other web3 news, Aave launched its long-awaited stablecoin, GHO, on Saturday, joining Curve’s crvUSD in the emerging category of DeFi-native stablecoins. Both assets are minted by protocol users against collateral assets deposited to the protocol for yield generation and seek to upend the dominance of centralized stablecoins within DeFi.

Google is also pivoting to embrace NFTs on its Play Store with the rollout of a new content policy for digital assets. “We’re pleased to share that we’re updating our policy to open new ways to transact blockchain-based digital content within apps and games on Google Play,” said Joseph Mills, group product manager at Google Play.

And in this week’s podcast, ether.fi founder and CEO, Mike Silagadze, discusses the centralization of staked ETH and explores what differentiates his protocol from rival liquid staking providers.

Enjoy!