Ukraine's airdrop 🇺🇦, evaluating crypto projects 🤔, unbundling OpenSea 🌊

Bastion is a decentralized lending and borrowing protocol built on Aurora, an EVM-compatible layer on NEAR. NEAR is a layer 1 protocol with high growth potential. It is a fast, sharded Proof-of-Stake chain with a superb developer experience and infrastructure. NEAR allows Bastion to have ultra-low transaction fees, greater capital efficiency, fast transactions, and precise liquidations. More information about Bastion, its token distribution, upcoming airdrop, and road map is available in the article.

Dialect is a smart messaging platform on Solana that enables notifications and wallet-to-wallet chat. The service monitors on-chain activity and sends alerts to mobile devices associated with registered wallets. Users will be able to view and respond to on-chain activity associated with their wallets from their mobile devices. Dialect's wallet-to-wallet chat tool allows developers to integrate chat into their web3 apps.

Evmos is a project that merges the best features of the Ethereum Virtual Machine with the Cosmos-based Inter-Blockchain Communication protocol. It allows for EVM compatibility, bridging, and cross-blockchain transactions. Evmos will host several DeFi mainstays and forks at launch. It launched with an airdrop that targeted Cosmos and Ethereum users. More information about its launch and tokenomics is available in the article.

This article looks at what the Arbitrum bridge is and how it works. Arbitrum is one of the solutions for the congestion and high fees on the Ethereum network. The project plans to lower network congestion and transaction costs by offloading work and data storage from Ethereum's mainnet.

web3 early-stage investing demands new mental models and criteria compared to web2. This Twitter thread lists 10 steps to go through before deciding on whether to invest in a project. While it is best to do due diligence, sometimes decisions need to be made quickly. It is okay to be flexible with the diligence process.

This article discusses the idea of adding native tokens to Ethereum's layer 2s. Tokenization allows networks to generate hype, build community, and establish grants used for innovation and security. Tokenizing layer 2 protocols could encourage growth and innovation, but doing so may cause liquidity to become fragmented while users chase incentives. It can also lead to short-term thinking among the community.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating NFT creators and marketplaces for regulatory violations. The probe will look into whether NFTs are being used to raise money like traditional securities. Several subpoenas related to the investigation have already been issued. Experts have been warning the community about the possibility of this investigation for years. The SEC has come after ICOs for similar violations in the past. It is concerned that cryptocurrency projects are merely finding new variations of unregistered securities.

OpenSea is set to become the dominant generalist marketplace for digital assets, just like eBay was for physical goods during the early 2000s. Just like eBay, the market will likely start unbundling into vertical marketplaces. The NFT market is still very young, and it is debatable how much consumer crypto adoption will be necessary for verticalized NFT marketplaces to scale. The unbundling of OpenSea will likely happen much faster than it did for eBay as digital asset marketplaces have fewer infrastructure challenges to deal with.

Ukraine's Twitter account announced an airdrop early Wednesday morning. Ethereum users have made thousands of donations ranging from 0.0001 ETH to 0.01 ETH to participate in the drop. The number of unique wallets that have donated since the airdrop tweet has already surpassed the number of unique wallets that donated prior to the tweet. It is unknown what Ukraine will actually airdrop or the criteria it will use to evaluate eligible recipients. A snapshot of the wallet addresses that have donated will be taken at 6 pm Kiev time on March 3.