GM! I wasn’t able to post yesterday but there wasn’t a need to at the end of the day following the Solana x Slope exploit. I stayed up all night piecing it together just to make sure I understood everything when people started asking me about it (I kinda like Solana, a lot).

Anyway, yesterday was pretty much full of institutional news, so I’ve done my best to be as succinct as possible. As always let me know if you think I missed something or messed something up, or even if you have some suggestions!

As always, feel free to stop by either of our daily morning spaces to network, ask questions, learn, and be inspired.

8:30 am CT | LinkedIn Space: https://www.linkedin.com/events/gmweb3-12-thursdayaugust5-20226961008926448377856/comments/

9:30 am CT | Twitter Space: https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1djxXPrZeyExZ?s=20

Table of Contents

Coinbase News

• Blackrock partnership

• Product Manager please not guilty of insider trading

• Coinbase asks for Supreme Court Intervention

NFT News

• Meta x NFTs

• Solana NFTs

Crypto News

• Voyager to pay back 270M

• Nomad recovers tokens from Hackers

It was announced yesterday that Coinbase will be entering a partnership with BlackRock. In the partnership, Coinbase will make its technology available to BlackRock for the firm to integrate into their institutional investment service, Aladdin. This partnership will “unlock $20 Trillion worth of capital access.”

This is rubbing a lot of the crypto community the wrong way, as the philosophy of crypto/web3 relies heavily on the desire to depart from institutional investing and corporate-controlled technological experiences.

Earlier this year Coinbase announced they were selling licenses and services to ICE which would allow the agency to access the geolocation data of users.

I’ve got a poll running for a week and I’d love to see what you think about this news.

Ishan Wahi, A former product manager at Coinbase who was arrested and charged with insider trading last month, has pleaded not guilty to insider trading, all while his counsel continues to perpetuate the claim that none of the assets in question were even securities.

Coinbase has asked the supreme court to intervene in two lawsuits held against them, seeking to have the cases dismissed and moved to arbitration.

One case has to do with a promotion of #Dogecoin in which a bunch of people spent $100 to invest thinking they needed to participate, only to find out they didn’t have to invest at all. The other case has to do with a man who was phished, had his account drained, and then had a horrendous interaction with Coinbase’s client services.

@Meta is rolling out #NFT support to 100s of countries and regions across the world, allowing users to connect their wallets, share their “digital collectibles,” and automatically tag creators/collectors.

Support wallets so far are Coinbase, Dapper Wallet, Rainbow, MetaMask, and Trust Wallet.

This is cool, but Coinbase & @Dapper Labs each have their issues (see above for coinbase). Dapper Labs is the team behind NBA Topshot. Their technology makes it to where you can’t transfer off the platform and you don’t have IP rights.

I’ve got a poll running where I’m trying to gauge the general sentiment regarding Meta’s Metaverse. I would appreciate your input!

A Solana Hackathon team developed an experimental compression method that reduces the network transaction fees down to a ridiculously negligible amount (10000x reduction) when bulk minting NFTs using a concurrent Merkle tree. This essentially allows the minting process to handle less data than normal while being able to reference off-chain data in a way that ensures the integrity of the data being referenced.

The judge overseeing Voyager’s Bankruptcy proceedings gave the firm the OK to return $270 Million to customers by way of their custodial account (the FDIC Insured one) at Metropolitan Commercial Bank.

If you remember, just last week Voyager was forced to remove strangely worded terms from their website which made it seem as if ALL of the money was managed by the firm, when in fact, it was only money held at the Metropolitan Commercial Bank that was FDIC-insured.

Gray/white-hat hackers rushed to exploit the Nomad hack faster than the actual hackers who perpetuated the exploit which drained nearly 200 Million from the protocol, just days after they had raised another strategic round of funding.

All in all, the attackers have so far returned around $22 Million to the protocol via the newly created recovery wallet address at the time of writing. The funds are distributed between 14 different ERC-20 tokens.

Shurooq is a champion of NFTs, but not for the reasons you might think.

Shurooq lives in Kuwait and she’s been making art for years, long before NFTs were a thing.

Shurooq likes to make art that reflects her feminine spirit, but this is frowned upon due to the local customs. Her art has caused so many issues with the local authorities that she’s been raided twice since 2012 and has had her art seized. It’s for this reason that she got into NFTs.

NFTs can’t be removed or augmented (in most cases) after being committed to their blockchain. Shurooq can mint her work onto the blockchain of her choice and as long as that chain continues to operate, her work will continue to exist and be available to whoever requests it. She can’t be censored, at least not in traditional ways.

N.B. Due to the nature of private, centralized companies running a lot of what we consider to be web3 marketplaces, there will always loom the threat that the government can outlaw the platform or force the platform to act on behalf of the authorities, similar to how Facebook operates outside of the US.

"There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure."

— Colin Powell

DYOR | Acronym - Do Your (own) Research

A term used as a cover-all by content creators to shield themselves from legal liability for discussing their financial opinions. Seriously though, DYOR.

gg

GM! I wasn’t able to post yesterday but there wasn’t a need to at the end of the day following the Solana x Slope exploit. I stayed up all night piecing it together just to make sure I understood everything when people started asking me about it (I kinda like Solana, a lot).

Anyway, yesterday was pretty much full of institutional news, so I’ve done my best to be as succinct as possible. As always let me know if you think I missed something or messed something up, or even if you have some suggestions!

As always, feel free to stop by either of our daily morning spaces to network, ask questions, learn, and be inspired.

8:30 am CT | LinkedIn Space: https://www.linkedin.com/events/gmweb3-12-thursdayaugust5-20226961008926448377856/comments/

9:30 am CT | Twitter Space: https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1djxXPrZeyExZ?s=20

Table of Contents

Coinbase News

• Blackrock partnership

• Product Manager please not guilty of insider trading

• Coinbase asks for Supreme Court Intervention

NFT News

• Meta x NFTs

• Solana NFTs

Crypto News

• Voyager to pay back 270M

• Nomad recovers tokens from Hackers

It was announced yesterday that Coinbase will be entering a partnership with BlackRock. In the partnership, Coinbase will make its technology available to BlackRock for the firm to integrate into their institutional investment service, Aladdin. This partnership will “unlock $20 Trillion worth of capital access.”

This is rubbing a lot of the crypto community the wrong way, as the philosophy of crypto/web3 relies heavily on the desire to depart from institutional investing and corporate-controlled technological experiences.

Earlier this year Coinbase announced they were selling licenses and services to ICE which would allow the agency to access the geolocation data of users.

I’ve got a poll running for a week and I’d love to see what you think about this news.

Ishan Wahi, A former product manager at Coinbase who was arrested and charged with insider trading last month, has pleaded not guilty to insider trading, all while his counsel continues to perpetuate the claim that none of the assets in question were even securities.

Coinbase has asked the supreme court to intervene in two lawsuits held against them, seeking to have the cases dismissed and moved to arbitration.

One case has to do with a promotion of #Dogecoin in which a bunch of people spent $100 to invest thinking they needed to participate, only to find out they didn’t have to invest at all. The other case has to do with a man who was phished, had his account drained, and then had a horrendous interaction with Coinbase’s client services.

@Meta is rolling out #NFT support to 100s of countries and regions across the world, allowing users to connect their wallets, share their “digital collectibles,” and automatically tag creators/collectors.

Support wallets so far are Coinbase, Dapper Wallet, Rainbow, MetaMask, and Trust Wallet.

This is cool, but Coinbase & @Dapper Labs each have their issues (see above for coinbase). Dapper Labs is the team behind NBA Topshot. Their technology makes it to where you can’t transfer off the platform and you don’t have IP rights.

I’ve got a poll running where I’m trying to gauge the general sentiment regarding Meta’s Metaverse. I would appreciate your input!

A Solana Hackathon team developed an experimental compression method that reduces the network transaction fees down to a ridiculously negligible amount (10000x reduction) when bulk minting NFTs using a concurrent Merkle tree. This essentially allows the minting process to handle less data than normal while being able to reference off-chain data in a way that ensures the integrity of the data being referenced.

The judge overseeing Voyager’s Bankruptcy proceedings gave the firm the OK to return $270 Million to customers by way of their custodial account (the FDIC Insured one) at Metropolitan Commercial Bank.

If you remember, just last week Voyager was forced to remove strangely worded terms from their website which made it seem as if ALL of the money was managed by the firm, when in fact, it was only money held at the Metropolitan Commercial Bank that was FDIC-insured.

Gray/white-hat hackers rushed to exploit the Nomad hack faster than the actual hackers who perpetuated the exploit which drained nearly 200 Million from the protocol, just days after they had raised another strategic round of funding.

All in all, the attackers have so far returned around $22 Million to the protocol via the newly created recovery wallet address at the time of writing. The funds are distributed between 14 different ERC-20 tokens.

Shurooq is a champion of NFTs, but not for the reasons you might think.

Shurooq lives in Kuwait and she’s been making art for years, long before NFTs were a thing.

Shurooq likes to make art that reflects her feminine spirit, but this is frowned upon due to the local customs. Her art has caused so many issues with the local authorities that she’s been raided twice since 2012 and has had her art seized. It’s for this reason that she got into NFTs.

NFTs can’t be removed or augmented (in most cases) after being committed to their blockchain. Shurooq can mint her work onto the blockchain of her choice and as long as that chain continues to operate, her work will continue to exist and be available to whoever requests it. She can’t be censored, at least not in traditional ways.

N.B. Due to the nature of private, centralized companies running a lot of what we consider to be web3 marketplaces, there will always loom the threat that the government can outlaw the platform or force the platform to act on behalf of the authorities, similar to how Facebook operates outside of the US.

"There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure."

— Colin Powell

DYOR | Acronym - Do Your (own) Research

A term used as a cover-all by content creators to shield themselves from legal liability for discussing their financial opinions. Seriously though, DYOR.

gg