Tiffany & Co. recently announced an exclusive offer for CryptoPunks NFT holders to transform their NFTs into bespoke pendants. NFTiff is a collection of 250 digital passes that CryptoPunk holders can mint for a custom pendant and an NFT. The pendants will be in 18k rose or yellow gold. NFTiff NFTs will launch on August 5 with a floor price of 30 ETH each.
ETH has overtaken Bitcoin in the options market for the first time on record. The value of ETH options contracts open on Deribit, the world's largest crypto options exchange, was 32% higher than in open Bitcoin options trades. Traders are piling into ETH calls in the hope that the Merge will cause a 90% reduction in ETH issuance and bring a store of value appeal to the cryptocurrency. ETH also recently passed Bitcoin as the most traded coin on Coinbase.
Chandler Guo, a well-known crypto miner, has launched a campaign to fork Ethereum to create a Proof-of-Work version. Guo was a major proponent of creating Ethereum Classic in 2016. The transition to Proof-of-Stake will leave miners with costly and now potentially useless specialized hardware. Guo's plan will require an immense amount of economic and technical support. The forked coin would be an entirely distinct network with no assumed value, infrastructure, or utility.
FTX is interested in entering the equity market, but no specific timeline has been released. The launch of options is subjected to regulatory review. Options have been a very lucrative business for exchanges such as Robinhood. FTX US recently launched zero-commission stock trading in all 50 states. The company is expecting to incur some losses in the initial stages of its stock trading program but it plans to recover the losses through its other services.
Aptos is a new blockchain that focuses on scalability developed by people with ties to Diem/Novi, Facebook's dead crypto project. It has its own programming language and it can handle up to 160,000 transactions per second. Aptos launched its developer testnet in March and it recently moved into its incentivized testnet phase. This Twitter thread contains several strategies for receiving airdrops on the Aptos network.
Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), the multibillionaire entrepreneur who founded Alameda Research and FTX, has been swooping in to save struggling crypto startups during the latest crypto winter. This article features an interview with SBF where he talks about his investments, the future of crypto, and his endgame for FTX. It includes a list of the businesses that SBF or his companies have bailed out or invested in recently.
Coinbase Prime has added Ethereum to its list of staking options for US domestic institutional clients. The service will give institutions another way to gain exposure to the crypto market. Coinbase Prime also offers staking for Solana, Polkadot, Cosmos, Tezos, and Celo. Users' keys will be held in Coinbase's cold storage custody vault. Staking transactions will have to complete consensus before they are executed.
Very few applications in crypto actually have product-market fit. They aren't really solving problems and most users are just using tokens to speculate and gamble. This article looks at the different aspects of the crypto world and the problems they are facing in attracting retail users. People will onboard to blockchains when there are applications that actually solve problems for them.
Users with funds in Nomad, Evmos, Moonbeam, or Milkomeda are advised to swap out of nomad assets and use a different bridge to bridge back to Ethereum or another chain ASAP.