Andreessen Horowitz (A16z) lost around 40% of its market value in the first half of 2022. The decline is much larger than the drops recorded by other venture funds, which have largely avoided cryptocurrencies. A16z's total crypto and web3 holdings in May amounted to around $7.6 billion. The firm has significantly slowed the pace of its crypto investments this year.
FTX recorded a liquidation of about $936.24 million in short trades over the last 24 hours. It was the single largest liquidation event ever recorded on the exchange. The general crypto market recorded liquidations of about $1.1 billion during the same period. The liquidations contributed to a short squeeze and many tokens saw a rise in price. Liquidations occur when exchanges force traders to close positions due to partial or total loss of the trader's initial margin.
Sushi DAO has approved a legal restructuring of SushiSwap. 100% of the votes were in favor of the proposition. A Cayman Island-registered foundation will be formed to look over the DAO. It will be responsible for maintaining treasury reserves, approving grants, and other administrative tasks. A Panama-based foundation will be created to develop the Sushi protocol and a Panama-based firm will be created to develop the front end of the platform.
Binance has launched an oracle service that enables smart contracts to run on real-world inputs and outputs. Oracles are used to ensure that accurate data is being used on blockchain applications. Binance will deploy its oracle service on the BNB Chain first. The service is chain-agnostic and will eventually support more blockchains.
This article discusses frontrunning in the context of MEV, how the Flashbots API prevents frontrunning, and how to send and cancel a private transaction over Ethereum. Frontrunning is when an entity sends a competing transaction with a higher gas fee to ensure its transaction is included ahead of a target transaction. Flashbots aims to reduce the impact of MEV on users. Private transactions are transactions sent directly to miners or validators/block proposers instead of public mempools to avoid exposing transactions to frontrunning attacks.
Ethereum-based layer 2 rollups have grown in popularity, but many are riskier and more centralized than most users realize. They aim to eventually be as safe as transacting on Ethereum's main network, but today most of the trust lies with the developer teams and the quality of their code. This article discusses the current state of layer 2 rollups, the flaws they have, what development teams plan to do to correct these flaws, and the future of layer 2s.
FTX is in the market for more acquisitions and Coinbase could be a target. Sam Bankman-Fried has confirmed previous reports of funding talks for FTX, but did not specify how much the company was looking to raise. Coinbase has 20 times the number of users that FTX has. Acquiring Coinbase will help FTX become more engaged with retail traders.
There are many problems with web2 social networks that companies aren't likely to fix. The only path forward is to build better alternatives. This article discusses the problems with web2 social media and how web3 building blocks might solve them and provides examples of web3 social media platforms. web3 will present new products and building blocks previously not possible with web2, along with other benefits like community ownership, decentralization, composability, and permissionlessness.
This article takes an in-depth look at the Crypto Winter of 2022 and discusses how better regulation could have protected consumers from irresponsible actors.