Over 40% of Ethereum's blocks were added by Coinbase and Lido in the hours following the Merge. Seven entities own more than two-thirds of the stake on Ethereum's Proof-of-Stake network. Validators will have trouble writing transactions to Ethereum's ledger if a single entity ends up controlling more than 66% of staked ether. The high capital requirement for staking makes it difficult for people to become validators on their own. Centralization opens up the Ethereum blockchain to risks such as transaction censorship.
The Ethereum Merge is now complete. Ethereum should now consume 99.9% less energy. The upgrade will make the blockchain more secure and scalable. ETH's token price remained largely flat after the Merge. Ethereum developers will now focus on implementing sharding, a method that will lower transaction times and fees on the network.
Ribbon Lend allows depositors to lend unsecured to institutional market makers of their choosing with high liquidity. With Ribbon Lend, users are able to receive high yields from unsecured lending with no lockups and built-in insurance. Only borrowers with the best credit rating can create pools on the platform. Ribbon Lend will be launched at the end of the month.
Nitro is a layer 2 for Solana that combines Solana's execution environment with Cosmos and the IBC ecosystem. It features Sealevel VM support, which allows Solana dApps to access the broader Cosmos and IBC ecosystem. Nitro has sub-second finality and can handle 20,000 transactions per second. Existing Solana smart contracts can be deployed on Nitro with no changes.
Stablecoins have the greatest product-market fit of any crypto. Many protocols have started creating protocol-specific stablecoins to increase revenue, value accrual, and the utility of their governance tokens. Protocols that issue their own stablecoins increase barriers to competition and decrease their susceptibility to forks or vampire attacks. There are risks to creating protocol-specific stablecoins that could result in large losses.
This Twitter thread discusses the Ethereum Merge and makes a case for why Ethereum will overperform as an asset in the long term. The energy-saving narrative that comes with the Merge will be profound in mainstream media. Lower issuance and the removal of miners dumping their ETH into the market will massively reduce the supply of the token. Stakers are less likely to dump their rewards as they gain more by continuing to stake. Over time, demand for ETH will overpower supply.
The Ethereum Merge lowered the world's energy consumption by 0.2%. It may be one of the single biggest decarbonization efforts in history. The Merge cut Ethereum's energy use by 99.988% and carbon-dioxide emissions by 99.992%. Miners that were mining ETH prior to the Merge have switched to other Proof-of-Work-based digital assets.
An arrest warrant has been issued by South Korea for Terraform Labs founder Do Kwon. Kwon is currently in Singapore and will likely not hand himself over to South Korean authorities. There is no extradition treaty between Singapore and South Korea. The two countries will have to mutually come to an agreement for Kwon to be extradited. Kwon will likely face serious difficulties if he attempts to travel outside of Singapore.
Fraxswap is a live implementation of a time-weighted automated market maker and Fraxlend allows users to create a borrowing market between any pair of ERC-20 tokens that have a Chainlink data feed.