TLDR Crypto 2024-03-29

FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried has been sentenced to 25 years in prison on seven fraud and conspiracy charges related to the collapse of the FTX exchange. He was also fined $11 billion, around the same amount that was lost by the exchange and the Alameda trading firm. The judge recommended he serve his sentence in a medium or low-security federal prison near the Bay Area to facilitate family visitation.

The market for tokenized U.S. government securities has surged since January 2023, surpassing $1 billion. The data reflects a significant uptick in demand and adoption of blockchain technology for traditional financial assets, with tokenized Treasuries offering a modern, blockchain-based approach to trading government bonds.

Blobstream is now live on the Base Mainnet, marking an evolution in onchain development. Developers can now create high-throughput blockspaces, comparable to smart contracts, using Celestia's modular data availability (DA) layer. This innovation removes the need for alternative Layer 1s or centralized DA solutions, allowing for seamless deployment within the same ecosystem. Developed by Succinct Labs, Blobstream acts as a data attestation bridge, ensuring rollup data integrity on Celestia through DA attestations and Merkle proofs and facilitating the scaling of Ethereum's rollup frameworks.

Degen Chain is a pioneering Layer 3 (L3) platform designed for the /degen community. It is built upon Arbitrum Orbit with Base for settlement and AnyTrust for data availability. Degen Chain uses $DEGEN as its native gas token, making it one of the first community tokens to operate with its own L3 infrastructure. This innovation, offering ultra-low-cost transactions and new scalable solutions for the EVM ecosystem, represents a significant step in onchain internet evolution.

This thread explores the current state of decentralization, emphasizing the contrast between permissionless blockchains like Ethereum and websites like OpenSea. Any website can choose whether or not to display an NFT, but they cannot modify the NFT itself. Most Layer 2s are still fairly centralized and controlled by a few parties. Decentralization will likely improve in the coming years.

Blobs, the new storage type for Ethereum L2s introduced in the March 13 Dencun upgrade, have been overrun by the inscriptions mania that previously congested several other chains earlier this year. BlobScriptions caused blob gas fees to spike to around $18, though it has since fallen to around $1.20. The fees should return to normal levels as the true value of blobs becomes evident after this price discovery phase.

Memecoins blend internet culture with digital currency. Tracing back to the early days of cryptocurrency, with each cycle introducing new iterations, they gained momentum through early Bitcoin alternatives, ICO crazes, DeFi summer, and meme stocks, evolving to include NFTs which brought visual representation to these tokens. Memecoins, such as Dogecoin and Shiba Inu, have often been regarded as cultural tokens, gaining value from their associated memes and community engagement. Despite their potential for high returns, they carry risks of volatility and regulatory uncertainty.

This thread covers how privacy protocols require native account abstraction (AA) to function effectively, using UTXOs and decryption keys to maintain privacy.

The PRISMA token crashed 30% after the exploit - $110 million was withdrawn from the protocol following the news.

Portugal's data protection authority has ordered Worldcoin to stop collecting biometric data, citing serious risks to citizens' rights.

This thread explains why the Scroll Layer 2 is worth farming and provides an overview of the activities to do and dApps to interact with to potentially become eligible for its eventual airdrop.