Sam Bankman-Fried is taking a 7.6% stake in Robinhood. He made the investment through a firm called Emergent Fidelity Technologies, of which he is the sole director and majority owner. Bankman-Fried intends to hold the shares as an investment and will not take any action towards changing or influencing the control of Robinhood. He is now the third-largest Robinhood shareholder. Robinhood shares jumped 29% following the news.
Extremely high interest rates and relentless inflation has made it difficult for Latin Americans to borrow money from traditional banks. People in the region are turning to crypto to gain access to credit. Local banks can offer loans with annual interest rates of over 200%, while some crypto lenders offer rates of 7.9%. Up to 50% of Latin America's workforce work in informal conditions and lack the credit score necessary to apply for loans.
Binance has launched a mining pool for ETHW, the Proof-of-Work Ethereum fork. Participants in the ETHW pool will not be charged fees until after October 29. The PoW Ethereum fork was created in response to the Ethereum Merge, which successfully switched Ethereum to a Proof-of-Stake system two weeks ago.
Facebook and Instagram users in the US can now connect their wallets and share their NFTs. Instagram has NFT support for all users in 100 countries. Users are able to cross-post the NFTs they own across the two platforms. The platforms support NFTs minted on Ethereum, Polygon, and Flow. There are no fees for posting or sharing NFTs on Instagram or Facebook.
Crypto's infrastructure is still at a stage where one wrong click can delete an entire portfolio. It can be scary to interact with smart contracts not knowing whether they will steal from you. The best way to protect from theft is to store assets in cold wallets, but this can make it hard to participate in airdrops or other activities. delegate.cash is a fully immutable onchain registry contract that lets users specify hotwallet delegates to act on behalf of coldwallet vaults. This allows users to store valuables in cold wallets while still being able to authenticate ownership with smart contracts.
App specific chains, or appchains, are independent blockchains with their own validators and sequencers focused around a specific protocol or application. This article discusses why appchains are likely to be the future of the crypto ecosystem. It uses Uniswap as an example of why applications will want to move to their own chains. Moving to an appchain will help Uniswap lower fees and capture more value.
Sam Bankman-Fried's advisor told Elon Musk that Bankman-Fried was potentially interested in buying Twitter in March. The crypto billionaire was worth around $24 billion at the time and was willing to contribute up to $15 billion towards a joint effort to buy the social media giant. Bankman-Fried's advisor attempted to set up a meeting but the deal did not pan out. Musk's last text to Bankman-Fried said 'Sorry, who is sending this message?'
Many early proponents of the internet advocated for it to remain free and open. While governments have regulated much of the internet, communication protocols remain as free and open as ever. The internet depends on open-source, decentralized, autonomous, and standardized protocols. Rather than regulating protocols, they have regulated apps. These guidelines should extend to web3.