TLDR Crypto 2022-07-22

Three people, including a former Coinbase product manager, have been arrested on allegations of wire fraud and insider trading. The manager allegedly shared information about at least 14 different Coinbase listings. The defendants bought at least 25 different cryptocurrencies using anonymous wallets and accounts in other people's names. Coinbase will not be charged.

Blockchain.com is closing its Argentina-based offices and canceling team expansion plans in several countries. It will cut 25% of its workforce, around 150 staff. Blockchain.com will offer job replacement assistance through a third party to UK and US employees and severance benefits depending on the country. Executive salaries and CEO compensation will also be reduced. The company is dealing with a $270 million shortfall from lending to Three Arrows Capital.

SushiXSwap is a crosschain automatic market maker based on Stargate. It allows users to bridge and trade tokens across all major chains and rollups. SushiXSwap features an easy-to-use dApp interface that helps users find the best price for any pair, regardless of the chain they're using. SushiXSwap has the same features as Sushi, but across multiple chains.

Curve Finance is working on a stablecoin and its release may be imminent. The Curve stablecoin will be overcollateralized and will likely be minted against liquidity provider positions. It will likely be first revealed on Curve's GitHub. Curve has been the battleground for stablecoins as its bonding curve made it well-suited for like-priced assets.

Layer 2 rollups batch user transactions together for cheaper gas costs while keeping most security guarantees of the Ethereum mainnet. Optimistic rollups publish periodic state roots to mainnet and rely on fraud proofs to ensure honesty. ZK rollups publish state roots to mainnet but also include cryptographic proofs of validity. They have stronger guarantees, but they are technically challenging. zkEVMs can run Solidity code on top of a ZK rollup.

ZK proofs are time-intensive and expensive to generate. It can be difficult to build on top of most ZK rollups as they usually require a new coding language or dev environment. Polygon's zkEVM improves on proof-generation times, reducing costs. It can also run any Ethereum smart contract.

According to Vitalik Buterin, there are five stages ahead for the evolution of Ethereum. The Merge will be when Ethereum moves to Proof-of-Stake. The Surge will implement sharding, bringing Ethereum up to 100,000 transactions per second. The Verge brings in verkle trees, reducing the amount of data validator nodes are required to store. The Purge will reduce the hard drive space needed for validators. The Splurge involves implementing 'all of the other fun stuff'.

This report discusses Coinbase Ventures' market outlook and key trends in crypto. It covers gaming, web3 apps, implements to crypto, DeFi lending, and more. While it is easy to get discouraged by the current price action, a look at the developments in crypto shows how much the industry has grown. Crypto Kitties was the most popular user application when the last bear market hit, but now we have DeFi, NFTs, DAOs, and more.

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn co-founder, is releasing a series of Solana-based NFTs of images created with OpenAI's DALL-E 2.

Border Wallets use patterns to make memorizing seed phrases easier.

Vladimir Fomene will be the founding member of ₿trust's Africa Open Source Cohort, a program designed for long-term contribution to open-source Bitcoin projects.

The Cumberland Lab incubator, based in Singapore, will incubate and launch its own projects.

This Twitter thread outlines the principles that Scroll, a zkEVM-based zkRollup, is based on.

Keagate is a high-performance cryptocurrency payment gateway.