ETH Merge date Ξ, Bored Ape metaverse 🐒, SBF on crypto use cases 🪙

Vladimir Putin signed a law banning digital payments in Russia on July 8. The use of digital and utility tokens as a means of payment for goods, services, and products is now banned. Russia's Ministry of Finance introduced a bill to parliament in February to regulate cryptocurrencies, but the Bank of Russia has been pushing for crypto activity to be banned. Russia has allegedly been using cryptocurrencies to evade sanctions this year following its invasion of Ukraine.

Ethereum's Merge may take place on the week of September 19. The Merge will see Ethereum move from the energy-intensive Proof-of-Work consensus mechanism to a more efficient Proof-of-Stake system. It is not expected to reduce Ethereum's fees and slow transaction speeds, but it will have a significant impact on the network's energy use. While the announcement gave a rare hard date for the Merge, the timeline is still very likely to change.

Yuga Labs invited 4,300 players to take a tour of its Otherside metaverse gaming platform on Saturday. Only Otherdeed owners and selected third-party developers are allowed to participate in the game during its first phase. Otherdeed owners will be able to contribute to the platform's construction and core capabilities using the Otherside Development Kit. Otherside aims to be interoperable with other platforms and contribute to an open metaverse in the future.

Auth0, the biggest name in authentication, is enabling all its applications to onboard their users to web3 with just a couple of lines of code. Users will be able to access any web3 app on any chain while using familiar login methods. This Twitter thread explains how the integration works and it links to a full guide for developers to learn how to use Web3Auth with Auth0 in React applications.

Rocket Pool is a decentralized, permissionless, non-rent seeking, fully-Ethereum liquid staking protocol. It is introducing less ETH bonded minipools, Staking as a Service, and integrated solo staker migration to help the pool grow significantly and easily compete at scale with Lido. This Twitter thread explores the three scaling solutions in detail and explains how they work.

A social graph is a representation of the interconnection of relationships in an online social network. Current social graphs do not allow users to port their followers to other platforms. web3 social graphs allow developers to share data, APIs, and backends, making web3 social graphs portable. This will create a paradigm shift in how social media apps work, bringing more value to both content creators and users.

In this Twitter thread, Sam Bankman-Fried presents several use-cases for crypto. He covers payments, market structure, and social media. Crypto makes sending money cheaper, faster, and less risky. It can make trading stocks almost instant with fewer fees, creating a simpler, more equitable, and less risky market structure. Crypto can make social media more censorship-resistant and make different networks compatible.

Coinbase is well capitalized, trusted, easy-to-use, and it features an integrated product suite. Users can trade, stake, pay, borrow, create, and more on the platform without having to understand the technical details of the technology. Coinbase will stay focused on shipping trusted, easy-to-use, and fully integrated crypto products during the crypto market downturn.

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Coinbase will temporarily shut down its US affiliate-marketing program on July 19 as it is unable to continue supporting incentivized traffic to its platform.

This article explores Solana JavaScript development and how to use Moralis' Solana API in vanilla JavaScript.