Colombia is considering a central bank digital currency. The country's new president has shown an interest in digital assets and has said that the country should mine Bitcoin using renewable energy instead of producing cocaine. Columbia is becoming increasingly crypto friendly. It released draft rules for crypto companies that want to operate in the country last month.
Celsius CEO Alex Mashinsky reportedly took control of trading strategy at the firm in January due to rumors that the US Federal Reserve planned to hike interest rates. He personally directed individual trades and overruled financial experts in an attempt to protect the company from anticipated declines in the market. His decisions resulted in huge losses for the company. Celsius has a debt of around $2.8 billion and is on track to run out of money by October.
Unstoppable Domains is releasing an iPhone app that will allow users to connect their profiles to crypto wallets and log into more than 180 decentralized applications. It will make blockchain-based applications accessible and transferable across a handful of protocols. An Android app will be launched at the end of the year. Unstoppable recently raised $65 million in a Series A funding round led by Pantera capital.
Jump Crypto is seeking to boost Solana's throughput and reliability by building a new validator client. A validator client is software that helps secure a blockchain. Jump plans to propose significant upgrades to Solana's core software. Its contributions to the network will be an important step in Solana's continued decentralization and help it scale to billions of users.
Ethereum is currently a primitive blockchain that aims to evolve into the backbone of the internet. This Twitter thread discusses how Ethereum plans to scale to 100,000 transactions per second. It covers the Merge, proto-danksharding, enshrined Protocol-Builder Separation, and danksharding. The endgame for Ethereum is to have execution and user interaction pushed out to layer 2s and beyond, with the mainnet providing economic security and neutrality.
Being overconfident can ruin a portfolio. This Twitter thread talks about common traps to watch out for when doing due diligence on potential investments. While it is preferable for investments to have attributes such as being backed by venture capital, having doxxed founders, and being audited, these factors only increase the chances of a good investment and do not guarantee one.
DeFi lending protocol Compound Labs has announced the first smart contract deployments for Compound III, its multichain strategy for deploying on all EVM-compatible networks. The contract will create a USDC market on Ethereum. It will allow users to supply WETH, WBTC, LINK, UNI, and COMP as collateral for borrowing USDC. There will be a minimum borrowing size of 100 USDC and a target reserve pool of 5 million USDC.
Coinbase will temporarily suspend Ethereum-based deposits and withdrawals during the Merge upgrade. The suspension will impact all on-chain ETH and ERC-20 token movements. It will help the exchange ensure that the upgrade is properly reflected within its internal systems. Trading of assets already at the exchange is not expected to be impacted. Users should be wary of Merge-related scams. More details about Coinbase's Merge plans are available in the article.
Celsius has received several cash-injection offers and a judge has approved the company's plans to sell the bitcoin that it mines to help fund operations.