TLDR Crypto 2023-02-06

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There are more NFT holders borrowing against their digital assets than ever. The number of loans disbursed through NFT-lending protocol FTfi reached a record high of 4,399 in January, almost double the previous peak of 2,481 loans seen in March. NFT lending markets peaked in April last year, but the space is showing new signs of life. While trading volumes appear to be down 95% from all-time highs, there are several factors that mean that the drop in volume is much less dramatic.

In 2017, John Griffin and Amin Shams observed that when new batches of a token that was supposed to be backed one-to-one with the dollar were released, the price of Bitcoin would increase. The discovery led them to believe that someone or a group was using the newly created token to artificially inflate the price of Bitcoin. Griffin noticed another unusual trend in the Bitcoin market in 2022. Despite the crypto crash and other negative influences, every time Bitcoin fell below $16,000, it quickly bounced back. The same mechanism from 2017 may still be in play in the market.

Huobi Global has listed FTX's user debt as a token. The FUD token provides creditors with improved liquidity, the capability to trade their debt in the open market, and increased control over their assets. Huobi will offer the token at a discounted rate during the early bird issuance phase at a rate of $1 for 1 FUD. After FTX recovers the database and confirms the exact debt of creditors, DebtDAO will launch a secondary public offering. Those who held 1 FUD prior to the secondary public offering will be rewarded with an extra 2 FUDs.

Starkware has announced plans to open source its core cryptographic software tool. The company's software tackles scalability issues for Ethereum. StarkWare plans to open source the STARK Prover technology that drives its StarkEx scaling engine and StarkNet projects. The open sourcing process will take some time to complete, but StarkWare is committed to making its entire tech stack transparent for developers.

Halmos is a symbolic bounded model checker for Ethereum smart contracts bytecode. It can execute given contract bytecode with symbolic function arguments and symbolic storage states, unroll loops up to a specified bound and set the size of variable-length arrays, and prove assertions are never violated by any inputs. Halmos can be used for bug detection as well as formal verification of a contract. It offers flexibility in choosing quality assurance options and can help boost confidence in code correctness across all inputs.

Nostr is a protocol for creating censorship-resistant global social networks. It is simple, extensible, and resilient. Nostr accounts are easily verifiable as they are based on public keys. This site guides readers on how to create an account on Nostr and learn more about how the Nostr protocol works.

Ric Burton, the CEO of Balance, believes that he was taken advantage of by Hayden Adams, the creator of Uniswap, who he had considered a close friend. Burton contributed his time, friendship, and an unknown amount of money to help Adams bring Uniswap to market, but was never paid for his efforts. Adams offered to reimburse Burton for his expenses on the condition that they not discuss the happenings and conditions of their relationship in public, a term Burton considered obnoxious. Burton indicated that he would take legal action to retrieve the due money.

GTX is an exchange for trading claims on bankrupt crypto companies, such as FTX. The validity of claims made against the FTX estate is still uncertain. GTX would be unable to determine which FTX claims are valid. Buying FTX claims from GTX involves taking counterparty risk from both GTX and the assignee of the claim.

Ordinals is a protocol that lets users convert Bitcoin into NFTs stored fully on-chain on the Bitcoin network.

Andre Cronje is rebuilding Fantom's native stablecoin, fUSD.

Little Shapes' founder released a document that alleges a large number of low-level NFT projects deployed bot networks to artificially build hype and legitimacy in an attempt to rug-pull investors.