Coinbase Launches Layer 2 Despite Stressful Macro Situation. Blur grows with season 2 airdrop.

Will the tense macro situation have an impact on crypto?

Last week, the US Federal Reserve ( Fed ) released the minutes of its monetary policy meeting. Accordingly, most of the opinions agreed to maintain the interest rate increase at 0.25%. This news had a strong impact causing many indexes to drop. The crypto market is also turbulent with the price of BTC dropping 10% in the past week. 

To prepare for the expected prolonged macro-stress situation, many crypto projects have announced the reduction of staff to streamline the apparatus. Following this wave, in the past week, Polygon Labs and Dapper Labs announced about 20% reduction in staff. 

Looking at the positive side, blockchain technology is now in a stronger place. Recently, many large countries such as China, USA, Russia, Japan and many smaller countries have promoted the development of central bank digital currency CBDC which is based on blockchain. 

In which China is the leading country in CBDC development, this billion-people country has begun to distribute and accept payments in CBDC in life. There have also been many comments to the authorities about gradually removing strict decisions related to crypto. This has created momentum for many tokens from China recently. 

Coinbase Launches Layer 2, Blur Airdrop Season Two

Ethereum continues to be the center of attention with a series of breaking news in the past week. 

First of all, it is impossible not to mention that Coinbase launched layer 2 called " Base " as a strategic move to reach a larger number of users in the future.Base is developed based on Optimism's OP Stack technology. The project announced that it will NOT issue tokens and focus on development to increase revenue from the sequencer.

To understand more about the revenue model that Base is aiming for. Readers can refer

Continuing the hot topic between Open Sea and Blur , Blur has announced the conditions to receive the second season airdrop. Accordingly, more than 300 million BLUR tokens will be airdropped to those who qualify, the time of the airdrop has not been determined. 

Blur "reveals" the condition to maximize the amount of tokens received will be in the "loyalty" factor to the project. Conditions for receiving the airdrop include: 

• List NFT on Blur, the more you list, the greater the chance of receiving the airdrop 

• List high value and trending NFTs 

• Try to get a 100% “loyalty” score on Blur by only listing NFT on Blur and not using another NFT marketplace platform.

Blur's above action shows that it does not hesitate to "robber" users from other NFT marketplaces.On the positive side, the above announcement has helped Blur attract a large amount of liquidity in the past time. Blur's translation has gradually grown and has far surpassed Open Sea at the present time.

On the contrary, the abundance of liquidity created an opportunity for whales to release a large amount of NFT, causing the floor price of large NFT collections to continue to fall.

This not only angered the NFT community, but also created negative consequences for the related NFTFi projects. In BendDAO, for example, the steep drop in the price of the Bored Apes collection caused the number of NFTs to be liquidated to skyrocket. 

With the deployment of many bold moves, will Blur continue to attract more liquidity? What plans do other NFT marketplaces, especially Open Sea, not lose their leading position in the near future?

Maker DAO recently proposed the "Endgame plan" , Endgame appears to act as a compass to determine a new direction for the project. In the proposal, Maker proposed using the MKR tokens voted in the governance to collateralize the loan of stablecoin DAI.

Last week, Maker DAO was also involved in a few controversies with Oasis. The Oasis project, a frontend solution, is said to have helped the Jump Crypto investment fund recover $140 million in ETH stolen in the Wormhole bridge attack in February 2022. Accordingly, when Oasis received the order from the court, the project updated the code and exploited the vulnerability in the smart contract to recover the previously hacked money. 

While this benefits Wormhole, it has raised concerns from the community about DeFi's decentralization and whether MakerDAO, a project closely related to Oasis, will be affected.

Accordingly, MakerDAO states that Oasis is just a frontend solution to help interact with the Maker protocol. MakerDAO commits that Maker Protocol smart contracts are not affected by the Oasis vulnerability.

Solana crashes and multi-dimensional views

On February 25, the Solana network experienced a “severe chain split” that caused many transactions to fail to process. The network is now back to normal, but the cause of the problem is still unknown.

This is not the first time Solana has experienced a severe network outage affecting the entire ecosystem. This has a significant impact on trust and user experience. 

However, with really different technological innovations, Solana has received a lot of support from big names. Coinbase recently launched a review of the Solana ecosystem (see here ). Famous names in the Ethereum community such as Vitalik, Bankless, Sassal, ... also have many positive opinions and expectations about Solana.

The tense macro situation has had a big impact on the crypto market. Projects will need to find ways to sustain and thrive amid a prolonged economic downturn. Looking at it on a positive note, crypto is now on a stronger footing. In which, Ethereum is a bright spot with many breakthroughs around the ecosystem.