Bitfinity Weekly: Scaling Bitcoin

Welcome to Issue #111 of Bitfinity Weekly for our #BITFINIANS community. If this newsletter was forwarded to you, sign up here.

What's in Today's Email?

• Global Crypto News
• This Week in our Blog
• NFT Market Bytes
• Tweet of the Week
• Meme Time
• A Matter of Opinion

Global Crypto News

Golden Bonds: Tether Limited, the company behind the world's largest stablecoin $USDT (Tether), announced the launch of Alloy on the Ethereum network this week. Alloy is a new token minting platform that allows users to create "collateralized synthetic digital assets", potentially offering yield-bearing products in the future. The first Tethered asset to be launched is aUSDt, a synthetic dollar "over-collateralised by XAUt (Tether Gold).

Black and/or White Hats: Crypto exchange platform Kraken and blockchain auditing firm CertiK have had an interesting week. On Tuesday Kraken's CSO alleged on X that a security researcher maliciously exploited a bug on the platform to the tune of $3 million. CertiK publicly identified itself that day, claiming that Kraken's security operation team was handling a 'bug bounty' situation unreasonably. The funds were returned on Wednesday, with CertiK explaining that the multimillion dollar exploit was necessary to "test the limit" of Kraken's risk controls. However, CertiK did not offer any explanations as to why some of the bug-exploited funds were sent to Tornado Cash, a privacy mixer sanctioned in the U.S.

Hero to ZRO: Layer Zero, an omnichain interoperability protocol, released its airdrop eligibility checker this week, ahead of its $ZRO token airdrop on Thursday. The airdrop has been a major topic of controversy, first for the relatively small size of airdrop allocation to community supporters, then for the mandatory donation fee involved in the claiming process. Those eligible for the airdrop are required to donate 10¢ per allocated token in order to receive their claim. The so-termed 'proof-of-donation' mechanism is the first of its kind.

Unusual Friendships: Martin Shkreli, best known to the public as "PharmaBro", claims to have launched a memecoin in partnership with Barron Trump, the youngest child of former President Donald Trump. In a bizarre series of events, Shkreli sent evidence of his involvement in the $DJT token to on-chain investigator ZachXBT after Arkham Intelligence posted a $150k bounty to identify the persons behind the memecoin. He then entered into an escrowed $100m bet with GCR, an enigmatic crypto trader whale. Shkreli, aged 41, said in an X space that he had been friends with the freshly-turned 18 year old Trump for years, leading some people in the community to raise their eyebrows.

This Week in our Blog

Confused about scaling and interoperability solutions on Bitcoin? Never fear. In this week's article, we cover all you need to know about Bitcoin's emerging Layer 2 landscape. Come explore Bitcoin sidechains and what Bitfinity brings to the table:

Bitcoin’s Layer 2 Landscape: What are Bitcoin Sidechains

In this article, you will understand what sidechains and their role in scaling the Bitcoin blockchain. We will examine different examples of Bitcoin L2 solutions that use sidechains, their unique advantages, and their drawbacks compared to other Layer Two scaling methods.

Bitfinity BlogFred

NFT Market Bytes

Turning the Page: Pixels, one of the largest NFT-linked games in web3, unveiled 'Chapter 2' this week. The highly anticipated update changed some key mechanics of the game, including resource generation, crafting mechanics, as well modifying elements such as the in-game economy. Pixels has enjoyed increasing popularity since its launch on the Ronin network in September 2021, breaking past 1 million unique wallets in early May of this year.

Soulbound NFTs: The Vatican Library announced on Monday that NFTs will be distributed to supporters of the Library's manuscript collection. The NFTs are being released in partnership with multinational infotech service provider NTT DATA Italia, and aims to expand the "online community of the Vatican Apostolic Library" through Web3 technology.

Collaborella: Japanese game studio Konami Digital Entertainment is collaborating with L1 blockchain Avalanche to launch a new NFT platform named 'Resella'. The platform aims to provide streamlined solutions for companies interested in integrating blockchain technology into their operations, namely, simplifying the creation, issuance and trading of NFTs.

Tweet of the Week

Meme Time

A Matter of Opinion

Airdrop farming, once a lucrative endeavor for many web3 participants, may be changing dramatically in the near future. As demonstrated by recent community backlash, it seems that neither projects nor airdrop recipients are getting what they want out of airdrop campaigns, a often-used onboarding and user retention strategy.

ZKSync, Ethena, LayerZero, Omni Network, and many other projects have have distributed sizable airdrops this year, all with different strategies to curb Sybil attacks (Sybil attacks in airdrop farming is when a party creates multiple identities to claim a large share of tokens). However, these methods of deterring falsified user activity has left some users feeling cheated, especially after months or sometimes years of qualifying on-chain activity.

CT (Crypto Twitter) figure and Echo.xyz founder Cobie recently contributed his two cents on the airdrop narrative:

How the industry will change is up in the air for now. Certainly there are already a smattering of web3 businesses attempting novel strategies to acquire "real" users and retain them. One thing is clear however; the practice of giving away tokens to largely transient users has to change.

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