US Crypto Regulation | $20M Optimism Stolen | BAYC Hack | NFT Frens Rescue | DAO of the Month
Gm DOers!
Welcome back to yet another Web3 Academy Weekly Rollup, the place where you get all your necessary news from the past week.
This week was the week of scams, exploits and call for regulation!
Therefore, the word of the week we went with is indeed: Regulation.
The reason behind it is that the bipartisan Lumens-Gillibrand bill has been released, suggesting a thorough regulatory framework for digital assets.
The bill focuses on allowing flexibility, innovation, transparency and consumer protection in order to integrate digital assets into existing law and provide certainty to the growing industry.
P.S. Want to mint your Lens Social Handle before it's open to the public? Web3 Academy members who join our Monday Community Call in Discord at 7pm EST will get whitelisted! See you there :)
... not sure what lens protocol is? Check out our latest episode here to learn more
So, without further ado, let's dig into the main takeaways from the bill and go through the most relevant happenings among the Web3 space!
You can also watch the episode below or listen on your favorite platform: Spotify | Apple Podcast
Web3 News & Highlights
The key takeaways from the Lummis-Gillibrand bill:
Perhaps the main takeaway from the proposed bill is that most crypto assets should be viewed as commodities rather then securities, allowing them for lighter regulation.
It has been proposed that people have the right to self custody their digital assets
There will be ZERO crypto taxes for transactions under 200$. The reason behind this number is to encourage the every day spending with crypto.
Right now, miners are required to pay taxes when mining crypto. The bill suggests that miners are required to pay taxes solely when they sell.
The last and most important takeaway (due to recent happenings) is that stablecoins must maintain a 100% reserve which shall be transparent and compliant.
Ultimately, due to the recent scams and exploits that have occurred throughout the Web3 space, regulation is a good thing! We need a healthy environment for this ecosystem in order to keep growing and to allow mass adoption to occur. Without regulation, none of this is possible.
PayPal will begin to allow its users to transfer crypto to external wallets, something that was extremely solicited by PayPal users ever since they enabled the trading of cryptocurrencies on their app.
Decentralized exchanges (such as Uniswap) overtake centralized exchanges (such as Binance) in on-chain transactions volume from April 2021 to April 2022 by $49M. This is extremely surprising because the user experience is way better on a CEX. However, you can find coins on a DEX that you cannot find on CEXs, something that apparently is very important for investors.
Elrond's main decentralized exchange (Maiar Exchange) has been exploited for $113m due to a critical bug. This caused the EGLD price to crash from $75 to $5 for a brief moment of time (only on the Maiar Exchange). The team mobilized extremely quickly and fixed this issue by recovering 95% of the funds (the Elrond foundation contributed the rest) and got everything back online in under 48 hours. Big thumbs up to the Elrond team!
The Optimism team managed to send 20 million OP tokens to the wrong address (apparently misusing the L2 → L1 bridge). The tokens have been stolen and the hacker sent 1m OP tokens to Vitalik Buterin. A really weird story suspected to be an insider job. It'll be interesting to see how the story unfolds.
On the topic of hacks, BAYC's Discord has managed to be hacked, causing 200ETH worth of NFTs to be stolen.
Crypto companies seize to hire while some are even laying off their employees. Some of these examples include Gemini and Coinbase. However, we've talked a lot about the work opportunities in this space and social media managers, web designers, community managers are all jobs that are still required.
P.S: If you're looking for a Web3 Job, do not hesitate to apply for our Web3 Academy Collective, striving to connect you to the best working opportunities in Web3! Apply HERE
NFT Innovation
PoolTogether, an NFT protocol has been sued by Elizabeth Warren’s former colleague, Joseph Kent, for losing 5$ (gas fee) on purchasing a 12$ NFT. The PoolTogether team faced a $1.3m law suit and decided to launch their Pooly NFT collection where you can mint uniqe NFT PFP for 0.1, 1 or 75ETH. They raised over $1.5m, exceeding all expecations.
Lens Protocol is backing Pooly NFT holders by allowing them to mint their Lens profile (currently requires whitelist). By the way, we've secured a bunch of whitelist spots for everyone that joins our Web3 Community Podcast Discussion on Monday at 7PM ET in our Discord.
Looney Tunes and the WWE are both launching their NFT collection. The utility is yet to be clear but it seems like these brands are all in experimentation mode right now.
A bunch of celebrities are filing for NFT trademarks including Billie Eilish, Kanye West, Notorious BIG, and Chuck Norris. In other news, Anthony Hopkins joins the NFT world too. We're seeing huge celebrity adoption of NFTs.
Salesforce announced that it’s launching a pilot of NFT Cloud, a new platform for buying and selling these crypto assets.
GET Protocol launches on Immutable X, allowing for gas free minting of tickets to IRL events.
Epic games launches their first NFT game called GRIT, coming out later this year.
Hop Protocol, a Layer 2 bridge allowing for transfer of value between Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism and so on... is doing an airdrop of their token!
Community
The power of Web3 community will be highlighted in New York City, with two big NFT related conferences taking place! NFT NYC & ApeFest.
The 1s & 2s
The Ropsten network (testnet of Ethereum) has merged from PoW to PoS. The full merge expected to happen during the month of August. If you want to learn more about the importance of the merge, check out our podcast with Sam Andrew.
Illuvium, one of the most anticipated Web3 games, has done a $72m land sale on Immutable X, eliminating the gas wars. A full breakdown of this is yet to be released but we'll keep you updated. The bottom line is that L2s are scaling the Ethereum ecosystem while keeping security intact.
ApeCoin DAO is in debate of where to move. The DAO ongoing a discussion of moving the protocol over to Avalanche or Immutable X in order to eliminate the high gas fees on Ethereum L1. Due to security issues, the Avalanche option seems to have been ruled out for now. We'll see how this unfolds. One thing is almost certain though, BAYC & YugaLabs will not build their own blockchain (something they considered before)
DAO of the Month
And the Web3 Academy DAO of the Month award goes to...
Noun DAO, an NFT project that launches an auction every day, for the rest of life. Right now, the auctions go for everything in between 80 and 150 ETH. Kudos to them for creating such an enormous amount of hype around a simple and basic idea.
Apply to Join the Web3 Academy Community
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Attend our Weekly Community Podcast Discussion
As mentioned before, we're going to give away a whitelist spot to Lens Protocol to everyone that joins our Community Podcast Discussion on Monday inside our Discord.
Monday, June 13th @ 7.00 pm ET inside the Discord!
Come along and learn everything there is to learn about Lens Protocol!