TLDR Crypto 2022-02-02

The first cross-chain governance proposal on borrowing and lending platform Aave was passed on Monday. Aave is built on the Ethereum network and has a total value locked of around $12 billion. The Aave cross-chain governance bridge can easily adapt to operate with any chain that supports the Ethereum Virtual Machine and cross-chain messaging. Many blockchain enthusiasts celebrated the passing of the proposal, despite experts like Vitalik Buterin warning the community about the dangers of cross-chain applications.

Kuiper is a permissionless protocol for creating indices to track financial assets. Indices allow investors to gain exposure to several assets at once. ETFs, indices used in traditional finance, have grown into a $9 trillion industry. Anyone can use Kuiper to create an index and generate a token that represents the assets in that index. While there are already established indices for cryptocurrencies, Kuiper stands out as it is permissionless and uncensorable. Kuiper is now live on the Ethereum mainnet in a soft launch to test the protocol in a real environment.

Solana Labs has released Solana Pay, a feature that lets merchants receive crypto payments in crypto. Almost all merchant payment systems settle payments in cash, but Solana Pay will allow merchants to receive stablecoins like Solana-native USDC. Anyone can implement Solana Pay without any fees, although customers will still have to pay network fees. Solana Pay has been integrated with crypto exchange FTX and the Phantom and Slope ecosystem wallets.

This article discusses automated rebase farming on OHM forks, a strategy that was yielding profits during the most recent market peak. The OHM protocol has a feature that grows, or rebases, staked coins by a certain percentage around every 8 hours. As OHM became popular, many OHM forks started popping up, with some offering a rebase of up to 6% every 8 hours. The automated rebase farming strategy involved holding stablecoins and using scripts that swap and stake tokens immediately before a rebase and then unstake and swap back to a stablecoin immediately after. Using it could yield profits within seconds. Unfortunately, the strategy hasn't been possible since the recent drop in the crypto market.

A proposal put forward by Solana Labs CEO Anatoly Yakovenko at the end of January suggests introducing a fee market on Solana to combat spam and to help users prioritize transactions. If approved, multiple transactions from the same address will become increasingly expensive without increasing the transaction costs for other users. Nodes will be required to process all transactions before accepting more high-priority transactions from the same address. Users will be able to add a tip to get their transactions processed faster. Solana developers have reacted positively to the proposal and are finalizing the details on how to implement it.

There are many benefits to blockchain-based decentralized messengers in terms of privacy and data security. Blockchain-based messaging gives users anonymity and a high degree of privacy and can prevent companies and government agencies from monitoring private messages. However, blockchain technology itself could be a barrier to adoption. Network upgrades could create issues that could kill a messaging platform and transaction fees can make it prohibitively expensive, considering how much people message each other. With existing privacy message solutions like Signal, users have no reason to move to blockchain-based messaging.

India has announced a 30% tax on any income from the transfer of virtual digital assets. It will issue a digital rupee sometime in the next two years. The phrase 'virtual digital asset' likely refers to NFTs as well as cryptocurrencies. While the new tax does not mean crypto is legal in the country, it is a step towards giving cryptocurrencies legitimacy. Experts are concerned that the tax is too high and could deter retail investors, making them move to the equity market. A 30% income tax is standard for Indian citizens who earn more than 12 lakh (around $20,000) per annum.

The Wonderland community recently voted on whether to dissolve the project. Community confidence in the project dropped after the revelation last week that the project's treasurer was Michael Patryn, the co-founder of the fraudulent cryptocurrency exchange QuadrigaCX. The vote to dissolve the project failed to pass, with 55% of voters in favor of the project carrying on. It was the most active governance proposal in history with over 22,000 addresses voting. There are now several proposals to keep the project running, but so far none have gained much traction.

94,643.29 bitcoin from the 2016 Bitfinex hack were recently moved and consolidated into a single wallet. The wallet received 23 transactions on February 1 with a total value of $3.6 billion. Bitfinex is still working with law enforcement on the case. The last time the hackers moved the stolen coins was in April 2021. At the time, it was theorized that the hackers moved the coins to intentionally drop the price of bitcoin.