TLDR Crypto 2022-05-19

The proposal for Terra's blockchain to hard fork has so far received approval from 89% of voters. Only those with staked LUNA are allowed to participate in voting. The proposal only needs 40% of the votes to pass. The wider crypto community voted against the proposal on a forum poll. The new network is scheduled to launch on May 27 if the hard fork proposal passes.

Ethereum's Ropsten public testnet will undergo an upgrade to proof-of-stake consensus on June 8. The Ethereum Foundation has increased the rewards in its bug bounty program in preparation for the Merge. The Merge will mean the end of proof-of-work mining on the Ethereum network and a switch to proof-of-stake, replacing miners with validators who stake ETH to secure the network. The maximum bounty for reporting vulnerabilities in the upgrades already live on public testnets has doubled to $500,000.

Aave has launched Lens Protocol, a decentralized social graph that uses NFTs to power social media platforms. The protocol lets users own their content by storing data in NFTs. User data can be accessed by any app or service. Lens Protocol is built on Polygon, which enables faster, cheaper, and less energy-intensive transactions than Ethereum. Blockchain technology could enable censorship-resistant social media platforms that let users own, control, and profit from their content.

Coinbase has launched a web3 browser in its mobile app and eliminated the need for users to manage their own keys. The wallet uses a semi-custodial system that splits users' keys between their devices and Coinbase so that funds remain safe even if one party is hacked. It uses multi-party computation (MPC) to enable multiple parties to sign things without anyone having the full key at any time. MPC wallets can support everything that a normal self-custody wallet can. Coinbase plans to enhance all of its products with MPC technology.

Assets that back a stablecoin need to have uncorrelated demand. There were limited use cases for LUNA other than backing UST, resulting in its crash as there was no other demand to protect its price. Terra's rate of growth far outstripped the pace of actual network effect growth. Stablecoins should work on getting adopted in as many use cases unrelated to DeFi as possible. Many smaller stablecoins backed by different reserves and pegging designs would be more resilient than a few large ones. Regulatory standards may be a nuisance, but they protect society in the long run.

When USN is minted, NEAR is deposited into the protocol's Reserve Fund, which partially guarantees USN. Its staking interest is determined by a self-adjusting mechanism to avoid a collapse caused by trying to keep high interest rates. USN is still new and the NEAR ecosystem is stable. Decentralized apps with many different areas of service have been deployed in the NEAR ecosystem. There is still time for NEAR to further develop its mechanisms and improve its network.

Coinbase has launched the Coinbase Institute to provide expert analysis and insights about the global crypto community. The key priority for the institute will be the dissemination of empirical and peer-reviewed research. It will be modeled after the research arms of companies like Microsoft and JPMorgan Chase. Coinbase has broken off from the Blockchain Association, the crypto industry's main lobbying body, to back a new group called the Crypto Council for Innovation.