TLDR Crypto 2022-05-03

rLoop is a collective of technologists, engineers, and designers from around the world who gathered through Reddit to participate in the Hyperloop competition that SpaceX held in 2016. The group has launched a decentralized autonomous organization with a governance token. Token holders will be able to submit proposals, vote on agendas, and indicate their choice on prototypes. They will also receive royalties from the project. A proportion of the revenue that rLoop generates will be committed to token buyback.

The difficulty bomb is a part of Ethereum's code that will make it harder to mine new blocks on the proof-of-work chain. It was designed to incentivize miners to switch to proof-of-stake when the Ethereum Merge happens. The difficulty bomb has already been delayed several times as developers needed more time before the Merge was ready. The Ethereum core developers recently decided to not delay the difficulty bomb anymore to fully focus on developing proof-of-stake. If the team fails to implement proof-of-stake before the difficulty bomb goes off, the network will become sluggish until the update is complete.

OpenSea set a new daily Ethereum NFT trading record on Sunday with $476 million in sales. Most of the trading volume was due to the launch of Yuga Labs' Otherside project. Yuga Labs sold 55,000 NFT land plots on Saturday. 30,000 NFTs were offered to Bored Ape and Mutant Ape NFT owners for free, and 15,000 plots will be held for use by developers, partners, and ecosystem contributors. Yuga Labs plans to release another 100,000 plots in the future.

The Ethereum Merge will affect ETH prices and staking rewards. At the moment, staked ETH earns a 4-5% yield and this could increase post-merge. There are many staking options that each have their own tradeoffs, which can be complex. This Twitter thread discusses staking strategies and the best way to stake in preparation for the Merge. The thread links to many other resources for understanding staking, synthetics, and yield pools.

Both Ethereum and Solana recently became unusable due to blockspace issues. Ethereum handles limited blockspace by scaling fees according to demand, while Solana increases blockspace supply. When blockspace is limited in Ethereum, fees skyrocket. With Solana, the network can crash. ApeCoin will not be able to avoid these issues by moving onto its own blockchain. Gas fees can be reduced with better smart contract design and sale mechanics.

This article discusses stateful precompiles and the potential functionality that they offer for customizing the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Precompiled contracts are used to implement cryptographic operations and other functions that would be difficult and inefficient to implement with Solidity. They are stateless and typically leverage existing libraries. Stateful precompiles add state access, which unlocks a wide range of potential use cases for customizing EVM instances.

The Ethereum Merge will affect ETH prices and staking rewards. At the moment, staked ETH earns a 4-5% yield and this could increase post-merge. There are many staking options that each have their own tradeoffs, which can be complex. This Twitter thread discusses staking strategies and the best way to stake in preparation for the Merge. The thread links to many other resources for understanding staking, synthetics, and yield pools.

This Twitter thread discusses how to get prices securely in web3. Decentralized oracle networks like Chainlink are used by the biggest DeFi protocols for a reason. Tokens with low volume can be easily manipulated. Time-weighted average price oracles are subject to easy manipulation. Decentralized exchanges are not decentralized price oracles.

The MEV (Miner Extractable Value) Supply Chain is the chain of activity that helps users transform intentions into finalized state transitions in the presence of MEV. In the MEV Dystopia, the MEV generated by users is captured in the center of the supply chain. In the MEV Utopia, all the MEV generated by users is returned to users. The future of the MEV supply chain will likely end up at some point between the two, but understanding the difference can help users and developers use and build products that help the industry trend towards a decentralized utopian future.

This Twitter thread discusses how to get prices securely in web3. Decentralized oracle networks like Chainlink are used by the biggest DeFi protocols for a reason. Tokens with low volume can be easily manipulated. Time-weighted average price oracles are subject to easy manipulation. Decentralized exchanges are not decentralized price oracles.

The MEV (Miner Extractable Value) Supply Chain is the chain of activity that helps users transform intentions into finalized state transitions in the presence of MEV. In the MEV Dystopia, the MEV generated by users is captured in the center of the supply chain. In the MEV Utopia, all the MEV generated by users is returned to users. The future of the MEV supply chain will likely end up at some point between the two, but understanding the difference can help users and developers use and build products that help the industry trend towards a decentralized utopian future.

Yuga Labs' launch of NFT virtual land deeds for its upcoming metaverse project has so far yielded over $900 million in total sales volume. Buyers spent a total of around $180 million worth of ETH in minting fees during the sale. Many have criticized Yuga Labs due to the sale format and the way the smart contract was written. Yuga Labs responded to the criticism by suggesting that ApeCoin could benefit by migrating to its own chain.