BDO Italia is taking over Tether's regular attestation reports. Attestations and assurance reports help assure the market that Tether's coins are backed by real assets. Tether will now publish reports every month rather than once a quarter. The move is the next step towards the company issuing its promised audit.
Gemini now supports MATIC staking on the Polygon network and will roll out support for ETH, AUDIO, SOL, and DOT over the next few months. Investor interest driven by the Merge played a large part in the firm's decision to introduce staking services. Users will be able to stake and unstake any amount of crypto without fees. The service will be available in the US (except New York), Singapore, and Hong Kong.
CME Group is planning to roll out options on ETH futures just before the Merge on September 12, pending regulatory approval. Options give holders the right to buy or sell a futures contract at a specified strike price for a particular time. CME Group also offers bitcoin options and micro-futures as well as micro-bitcoin and micro-ether options. It plans to launch bitcoin euro and ether euro futures on August 29 pending regulatory review.
Ora is a search engine for blockchain data. It aims to make querying blockchains as easy as a Google search. Ora lets users query on-chain data with natural language and it features a human-readable transaction viewer. The viewer can be used to filter, sort, and see summary descriptions of transactions. A short video demo is available.
Daily volume has dipped to a new all-time low on OpenSea. The top ten projects are bleeding and many factors indicate that it will get worse. There is little interest in NFTs and the overall sentiment feels very bearish. Inflation and interest rate hikes are dampening people's willingness to spend. However, bear markets present opportunities to pick up valuable assets at cheaper prices.
This Twitter thread contains links to four web3 projects that can be completed in less than a week. The projects take between 3 hours and 6 days to complete. They include a basic dApp, a DAO, an NFT marketplace, and a nameservice.
Crypto analytics platform Messari says that the majority of Ethereum's nodes are in the hands of centralized web providers. 69% of nodes on the Ethereum Mainnet are hosted by just three cloud providers. Over 50% are hosted on Amazon Web Services. The nodes are most geographically concentrated in the US and Germany. This could expose Ethereum to central points of failure.
Rarible has proposed a Bored Ape-centric NFT marketplace for the ApeCoin community. ApeCoin DAO has now received three proposals for custom Bored Ape NFT marketplaces. Rarible's marketplace will charge no marketplace fees for NFTs that are listed natively by holders and it will aggregate listings from other marketplaces to boost liquidity. It will feature fiat payments, dedicated support, and the ability to place collection-wide offers. Rarible says it can launch the marketplace within four weeks of DAO approval at zero cost.
The exact reason for the depeg is not yet known, but HUSD was recently pulled from FTX and its founder is in talks to sell his majority stake in the exchange.