Tether will not freeze addresses related to Tornado Cash. The OFAC has yet to indicate that stablecoin issuers are expected to freeze sanctioned addresses. Tether has almost daily contact with key law enforcement officers and it has not received any requests to freeze privately held wallets associated with Tornado Cash. The company intends to fully comply with any request it receives. Freezing addresses without instruction from authorities could interfere with investigations.
Mastercard is working with Binance to enable purchases in more than 90 million stores. The project will start in Argentina, a country where the national currency inflation is at 71%. VISA is launching a prepaid card with cashback in BTC in Brazil. The Ripio Card will store cryptocurrencies which Ripio will convert to fiat at the time of payment. Card users will initially receive a 5% cashback in BTC.
Ethereum's Proof-of-Stake upgrade is finally here. The Merge will be activated with the Bellatrix upgrade, which is scheduled for epoch 144896 on the Beacon Chain. Ethereum will transition to Proof-of-Stake between September 10 to 20 after a specific Total Difficulty value is reached. The Kiln testnet is being sunset and its operators will shut down on September 6.
Coinbase is adding support for Coinbase Wrapped Staked ETH on the Ethereum network. cbETH is a token that represents ETH staked through Coinbase. It can be sold or sent off-platform. The token price represents staked ETH plus all of its accrued staking interest and it is not meant to track the price of ETH. Users must only send cbETH through the Ethereum network otherwise they will lose their funds.
The risks of centralized stablecoins have recently become more apparent, leading to the rise of protocol native stablecoins. Protocol native stablecoins are tokens created by DeFi protocols where the token is not their primary application. Examples include sUSD, DPXUSD, and GHO. They can create stronger liquidity and better tokenomics for their protocols. Stablecoins currently occupy 15% of the total cryptocurrency market cap and their share will likely continue to grow.
It may take up to three more years before we see a zkEVM rollup that is Type 2 EVM equivalent and production ready, with reasonable proving costs and times, that people feel comfortable using. Optimistic rollups can amass big network effects during this time. Users may stick to optimistic rollups due to their large and liquid ecosystems of apps and users. Optimistic rollups are already planning to transition to ZK once the technology is ready.
John Hopkins crypto researcher Matthew Green has republished Tornado Cash's source code on GitHub. He intends to preserve the code for research purposes, rather than for deployment. Green is confident that GitHub won't remove the fork if hosted for non-deployment purposes. He has multiple offline copies of all related repositories for safety. Green believes that the sanctions on Tornado Cash have crucial implications for the state of free speech.
Uniswap is in contact with several NFT lending protocols to build NFT financialization. The company is interested in tackling both liquidity issues and information asymmetry surrounding NFTs. Uniswap has made big steps towards including NFT activity in its service offerings over the last few months. It acquired Genie in June and the platform plans to introduce NFTs with full Sudoswap support.