Top shelf

Coinbase will offer non-aligned employees a severance package, incoming rewards for XRP and XLM owners, EOS wallets get bigger thanks to SEC

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong sent his employees a letter telling them to get in line with a new company “culture shift,” offering those unwilling to do so a “generous separation package." CoinDesk has obtained a copy of the letter. The package includes four months’ severance for employees who have been at the exchange less than three years or six months for longer-term employees. Employees will have until Oct. 10 to submit a form to begin the process of severance if they are unhappy with Armstrong’s public commitments to remaining uncommitted and apolitical. The letter says that "life is too short to work at a company that you are not excited about."

While the SEC is scrutinizing Block.one for wash trading at present, the company looks in no mood to take up the legal responsibility this time. Earlier when the company was accused of raising funds through its unregistered ICO, the company settled the penalty charges without dismissing or accepting any accusations. However, this time, the company has retaliated by forfeiting its digital assets, which has come in the favor of the current bagholders. EOS holders can claim the redistribution package from the designated portal. As per the reports, most cases are being approved.

Since the beginning of 2020, the coronavirus outbreak has caused global health and economic pressure which has affected virtually every industry. This series of unfortunate events has caused holders of top cryptocurrencies to move towards rising altcoins that are trending in the DeFi 'boom'. Ripple is famous for its customer-first philosophy, and recently, there have been numerous requests for a palliative of some kind to ease the burden on XRP price. Considering this, Ripple has launched a reward program to stabilize XRP's value and also compensate loyal HODLers for their support during turmoil. Interested owners can read all about the incentive program (including how to qualify).

The economic contraction fueled by the global pandemic has proven, again, that investment assets are not "safe havens". But, initiatives like the latest Stellar program, with their different approach, are a sigh of relief for investors looking out for sustainable gains. While both new and old users can leverage this opportunity, the account holders are reported to gain up to 25% of the additional Lumens. With the launch of its highly ambitious staking initiative, the Stellar Foundation Board is eyeing aggressive growth and expansion of its user-base. Find out more with the help of their blog post.

Hybrid blockchain platform Kadena plans to launch a new multi-chain decentralized exchange (DEX) in hopes of wooing business from congestion-plagued Ethereum-based rivals. Called Kadenaswap, the new DEX, unveiled Tuesday and set to debut late this year, will process 480,000 transactions per second, its founder Kadena President Stuart Popejoy claims. Further, Popejoy said Kadena's existing bridge infrastructure, which currently facilitates cross-chain KDA token transfers via the Pact smart contract language, can easily port over to the coming DEX. CoinDesk’s Danny Nelson reports.

Universities are often key to getting new industries off the ground, providing the infrastructure to take paradigm-shifting ideas to the next level. But in blockchain and digital finance technology, how do they measure up?

Introducing CoinDesk U, a ranking of the top 20 schools identified in our research in collaboration with Mousebelt.

During a special CoinDesk Live episode on Oct. 6, we will release the results of the first CoinDesk U ranking. We are inviting students from around the U.S. as well as representatives from student club networks, the crypto industry and leading institutions to discuss traditional academia’s relevance and support for the financial technology poised to fuel Web 3.0.

Watch CoinDesk Live: Can Old Schools Teach New Tech on CoinDesk.com, Twitter and YouTube. Learn more.

Quick bites

• French Authorities Arrest 29 Suspected of Using Crypto to Fund Extremists in Syria (Sebastian Sinclair/CoinDesk)
• Energy Web Is Starting With Ripple in Its Bid to Make Crypto Provably Green (Ian Allison/CoinDesk)
• Hypeman of the Century (Chris Harland-Dunaway/The Verge)
• How MIT’s 'Pool Detective' could help prevent attacks on blockchains (Saniya More/The Block)
• Crypto Community Reacts to US Presidential Debate (Scott Chipolina/Decrypt)

At stake

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“If Bitcoin is decentralized, who funds its development?” This longstanding question, historically answered by the quiet work of volunteer Bitcoin developers, now has a new response: a website that allows Bitcoin users to pledge payment for protocol upgrades.

The brainchild of Pierre Rochard, BitcoinACKs aggregates pull requests for protocol improvements from the Bitcoin Core GitHub (in coder vernacular, “ACK” means that a proposal or change passes muster), CoinDesk tech reporter Colin Harper writes.

BitcoinACKs’ crowdfunding mechanism is a first in Bitcoin’s open-source landscape. Before, you could sponsor individual developers, but you couldn’t directly fund individual upgrades.

Usually, open-source funding has been the realm of cryptocurrency exchanges or other Bitcoin-related companies. These actors will often offer six-figure lump-sum grants to independent developers to fund their work.

“BitcoinACKs is for funding targeted, specific outcomes. For example, perhaps your business needs a specific API feature, rather than asking for favors or hiring full-time contributors, it’s more convenient to put a bounty on it,” Rochard said.

The website has been around for a couple of years, but Rochard just rolled out a new feature: a pledge option that allows users to commit funding to a specific protocol improvement and pay developers once that improvement is merged into Bitcoin Core.

These pledges can be paid out via Lightning or on-chain payments processed through BTCPay Server.

Market intel

SushiSwap, a DeFi lending protocol modeled on Uniswap, saw $50 million in liquidity exit the system 1 week ago, the biggest single day drop since September 21. SushiSwap has been on a near-uninterrupted decline since mid-September when its creator made off with, and then returned, the dev fund. After hitting an all-time high of $1.4 billion total value locked (TVL) on September 12, Sushi's TVL fell by two-thirds to nearly $490 million just a week later. It has declined a further $130 million to $354 million in the past twelve days.

Internet 2030

Amy Webb, a quantitative futurist and founder of the strategic foresight firm Future Today Institute, thinks the world can, indeed, get worse. In an interview with CoinDesk, as part of the Internet 2030 series, she lays out her vision for the world where big tech only gets bigger. The conversation has been excerpted below.

Do you see a genuine way out through distributed technologies that may give people control over their own data?

I worry about people who never update their passwords – should we entrust them to manage sensitive data? There are complex questions about data hygiene, data governance, compliance, risk. Distributed tech solutions solve some of our problems, but not all.

Few people have an understanding of how data are collected, by whom, for what purpose. There are lots of organizations proposing some kind of “ownership” model, where we individually would “own” our data. What does that mean?

I want consumers to be much better aware of what data they are generating – that includes the digital emissions they’re releasing without realizing it. Think of all the metadata being generated by our connected devices, the ambient sounds in our homes and offices, our movements and gestures. All of those digital emissions, plus the PIIs collected now by contract tracing apps and biometric scanning systems – I mean, we’re swimming in data.

What might the cultural or political effects be of an ever-greater consolidated and extractive web?

We talk about privacy a lot, and journalists certainly write a lot of stories about data sharing, privacy and consolidation within the tech sector. But when it comes to everyday consumers and business leaders, it just doesn’t seem like these are priority issues. We’ll feel the effects when there is litigation, new policy or sweeping policy enacted.

Have an idea for what the future of the internet will look like, reach out to daniel@coindesk.com.

Op-ed

Matt Luongo, founder of Thesis, writes that Bitcoiners who stack sats and people who use decentralized finance share common cause. “Bitcoiners who stack sats should take a hard look at the decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms seeing explosive growth on Ethereum. While the optics may call to mind the wild speculation of 2017, the truth is that much of the growth in DeFi is driven by the same sound money principles as stacking,” he writes.

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