FTX's revenue went from $89 million to $1.02 billion in 2021. The exchange was founded three years ago at a time when Coinbase and Binance were solidified as the world's largest trading venues. It has been building out a fleet of global subsidiaries. While the exchange has been ramping up its retail efforts, it is still mainly a place for more sophisticated traders using derivatives. More details about FTX's financials are available in the article.
CryptoPunks was the top NFT collection for a brief moment on Sunday morning. The Bored Ape Yacht Club collection has held the top spot all year. Yuga Labs bought the rights to CryptoPunks in March so it owns both collections. The flip happened due to Bored Apes losing value faster than CryptoPunks.
Ripple has introduced a crypto on-demand liquidity service in Brazil in partnership with Travelex Bank. The service uses XRP to accelerate the transfer and exchange of fiat currencies between countries. Travelex will use the service for payments between Brazil and Mexico. It is working to extend the service to the US and Asia. Many Brazilian companies already use Ripple's cross-border payments system, RippleNet.
The UNIC Open Metaverse Initiative is launching a university course that will be 100% on-chain. It will be free to join and attend. Students who want a certificate of completion will be able to mint a certificate NFT for 0.25 ETH. The course will start on October 3. Links to the course and more information about the course instructors and content are available.
The best zkEVM in terms of market success will be the most Ethereum-compatible implementation that reaches the market fastest. Ethereum compatibility is important as most active users are on EVM-compatible blockchains. It allows ecosystems to develop much faster. zkEVMs with close-to-Ethereum compatibility will likely end up with the majority of the ZK Rollup market share.
The bring-your-own-application paradigm of decentralization packages IPFS applications so that users can lock down specific versions of decentralized apps. It involves minting an NFT that pins its metadata on IPFS immutably and that metadata is pinned immutably to a specific version of the app which the user trusts. The paradigm allows users to get around potential censorship. More details about BYOA are available in the thread.
An Ethereum User Activated Soft Fork could potentially sidestep censorship. The Merge may make a UASF feasible due to slashing, which is a method of punishing validators that misbehave. Validators that get slashed will have to either reverse their behavior or leave the network. It would be difficult for most users to create a UASF and large corporations may activate their own soft forks.
Stablecoin issuers now hold $80 billion worth of short-term US government debt. They account for 2% of the market for Treasury bills, more than the proportion owned by Berkshire Hathaway. Treasury bills are considered to be ultra-low risk assets. Regulators have called for reserve disclosure requirements for stablecoin issuers, so operators have promised to improve transparency.
FTX received a cease-and-desist order from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation after it made false and misleading statements that suggest that its assets are FDIC-insured.