TLDR Crypto 2022-02-07

Sky Mavis has announced a series of economic changes for Axie Infinity's upcoming 20th in-game season. The game will hand out far fewer reward tokens and put more focus on rewarding online arena battles. Axie Infinity is a monster-battle game based around NFT assets. Users need to buy three Axie NFTs to play the game, but they earn token rewards while playing. NFT holders can rent their Axies to other players for a split in the profits. The game token has fallen in value recently, likely due to the inflation of its token.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin recently shared a tweet indicating that blob-carrying transactions may be added in a near-future hard fork. Rollups are currently the only trustless scaling solution for Ethereum and they are significantly reducing fees for many users, but these fees are still too expensive. The solution to fix this would be to implement data sharding, but this will take a considerable amount of time to deploy. Blob-carrying transactions use the transaction format that would be used in sharding without actually sharding those transactions. This provides temporary scaling relief for rollups and lower fees.

Punk 6529 is an anonymous CryptoPunk NFT owner with over 240,000 followers on Twitter. They own several notable NFTs and operate a number of virtual galleries for viewing NFTs and digital photographs. Punk 6529 has launched a fund that invests in NFTs on behalf of institutional investors. Investors putting money into the fund will have to accept Punk 6529's anonymous identity. It is unclear how long of a lock up on investor capital the fund will impose.

This article introduces a framework for understanding capture-resistant governance. Blockchains and smart contracts have introduced a new trust model for governance over shared resources that relies on cryptography and a wide distribution of power. This makes it possible for capture-resistant governance, which is a method of managing shared resources in a way that prevents the capture of those resources by bad actors. Capture-resistant governance unlocks many new possibilities, as is exhibited by the early web3 communities.

In the real world, communities form around shared interests or life situations and people work together to enrich the community and grow its value. When people are part of a community, they are bound together by economic commitments, for example, homeowners in a neighborhood benefit together as the value of the neighborhood rises. Just like many empty 'McMansion' homes were created in hopes of creating communities back in the 1990s, many web3 projects are trying to create communities where there are none. Reversing the formula and building communities from interests could be harder at first, but will result in stronger groups in the long run.

Ethereum block times are set at around once every 12 seconds in proof of stake for the safety of the network. The time delay helps avoid scenarios where nodes with more resources have an advantage, which could lead to centralization. Making block times every 12 seconds is conservative and provides a good buffer against these risks. It is unlikely that block times will be reduced much in the future. A more detailed explanation by Vitalik Buterin is available in the thread.

Justin Sun, founder of the Tron platform, was recently accused of attempting a governance attack on Compound, a DeFi lending platform. Sun's wallet was observed borrowing over $13 million COMP tokens and then sending them to Binance. Later, a wallet that received $9 million worth of COMP tokens from Binance proposed adding TUSD as a collateral asset on Compound. The community voted against the proposal. While it can't be proved that Sun was behind the proposal, he had performed similar actions earlier in the year on another chain.

A community-led group recently recovered the original CryptoPunks smart contract, making thousands of V1 CryptoPunks available for sale. The original smart contract was scrapped due to a glitch, leading to the creation of V2 CryptoPunks, which became crypto-famous. Larva Labs, the creators of the NFTs, has hinted that it will pursue some kind of legal action around the revived V1 CryptoPunks, despite generating about $622,000 from selling them. The company used some of the proceeds to buy V2 CryptoPunks, but its actions have been heavily criticized by the community.

A recent Buzzfeed article revealed the identity of two of the four Bored Ape Yacht Club founders. While the report did not contain anything scandalous about the co-founders, many in the crypto community reacted negatively to the article, accusing it of doxxing the men. Others have pointed out the information was public already and that people should know the identities behind a company worth billions of dollars. The two men have taken the controversy in stride, pointing out that the decentralized technology of web3 will make it easier to remain anonymous.