I joined CoinDesk as an intern in the summer of 2018.

Since then I’ve gone on to do a lot of things at the company, including kick-starting this Ethereum-focused newsletter. It’s been my pride and joy building Valid Points from the ground up, ideating its structure, writing its weekly columns and editing its guest contributions.

For the past two months, CoinDesk Research’s Teddy Oosterbaan has been contributing weekly hot takes on the top headline news of Ethereum. Starting from next week, he will take over the reins for Valid Points and become the main writer of this newsletter.

It’s about time a new voice leads the conversation on Ethereum news, and I have full confidence there’s no better person at CoinDesk to do it than Teddy.

I want to sincerely thank all the readers of Valid Points who have supported me and my writing since December 2020. For the last time, I’m your host, Christine Kim. Reply to this email any time with your thoughts, comments or queries. And between reads, chat with me on Twitter.

Welcome to another edition of Valid Points.

– Christine

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One of the first articles I wrote about Ethereum for CoinDesk was headlined “Unstoppable Scams? Ethereum’s Gambling Problem Is Only Getting Worse.”

At the time, in the late summer of 2018, Ethereum’s most popular decentralized applications (dapps), outpacing even the incumbent CryptoKitties gaming dapp, were gambling dapps that closely resembled Ponzi schemes. LastWinner, a clone copy of another infamous gambling dapp called FOMO 3D, had raised over $7 million in ETH from users within the span of a week and was eating up one-third of Ethereum’s total computational power, also called hashrate.

Meanwhile, the biggest headline news about Bitcoin were the pending decisions by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on two bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) applications put forth by ProShares.

As Ethereum attracted retail users and scammers looking to make a quick buck, it seemed the majority of investors and traders serious about adopting cryptocurrencies for a mass audience were focused on Bitcoin.

In many respects, market infrastructure for and regulatory awareness about bitcoin (BTC) has paved the way for cryptocurrencies like ether (ETH) to follow.

For example, the classification of being a commodity rather than security in the eyes of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was first granted to bitcoin in 2018 and then for ether in 2019. Exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in Canada were first approved for bitcoin then for ether. Crypto custody bank Anchorage Digital started its lending service with bank-grade, bitcoin-backed loans and only recently expanded its offerings to include ether-backed loans through an FDIC-insured bank this summer.

However, trends are changing, and evidence is mounting to suggest that Ethereum has finally either caught up to or surpassed Bitcoin across a number of key metrics, even as other smart contract blockchains such as Cardano and Solana show promising signs of real adoption and value.

Key Metrics

For starters, Ethereum is surpassing Bitcoin in total value transferred on-chain. Using Coin Metrics’ adjusted transaction volume estimates, so far in August $185 billion worth of ETH has been moved on Ethereum while only $180 billion of BTC has exchanged hands on Bitcoin. The last time Ethereum passed Bitcoin in monthly transfer volume was in May 2021.

Every month since June 2020, users have been paying more in fees to send transactions on Ethereum than Bitcoin. In 2021 alone, total fees in dollar terms on Ethereum were four times higher than Bitcoin, suggesting demand for block space on Ethereum is outpacing demand for block space on Bitcoin.

Continue reading the full column here.

Ethereum’s most popular software client, Geth, has issued a hotfix to a high severity security issue in its code. BACKGROUND: All users were encouraged to upgrade immediately to the latest version of Geth, v.1.10.8. The last time a fix for a bug in Geth code was released to users, it caused a temporary chain split on Ethereum due to a lack of communication between Geth developers and users about the urgency of the upgrade.

Crypto investment firm Paradigm helped mitigate a potential $350 million bug in decentralized exchange SushiSwap’s launchpad code. BACKGROUND: Paradigm is a well-known investor in Uniswap, the original exchange that inspired the creation of SushiSwap. Paradigm Research Partner Sam Sun identified a vulnerability in SushiSwap code that could have allowed hackers to drain users’ funds from the exchange. Sun disclosed his findings with the SushiSwap team, pulling off one of the biggest whitehat rescues ever in the crypto industry.

Visa announced that it bought a CryptoPunk NFT on Monday, spending roughly $150,000 on the digital art piece. BACKGROUND: Visa’s head of crypto, Cuy Sheffield, said in a blog post that the main purpose behind the purchase was to learn more about the growing non-fungible token market. "We think NFTs will play an important role in the future of retail, social media, entertainment and commerce," Sheffield wrote.

$1.5 million has been awarded to Ethereum software client teams such as Besu, Erigon, Geth, Nethermind and Nimbus. BACKGROUND: These client teams build the software that enable users and businesses to connect to the Ethereum network. The grant money was donated by Compound Grants, Kraken, Lido, Synthetix, The Graph and Uniswap Grants.

Decentralized exchange (DEX) volume is projected to hit around $80 billion for the month of August. BACKGROUND: June and July showed slowing trading volume, but August is on pace to be the second-best month in DEX history. EIP 1559, a revival in governance tokens and an emerging cross-chain ecosystem have helped bring positive sentiment back into the decentralized finance market this month.

Ether (ETH) price and active sending addresses have started to diverge over the past week in a way that suggests bearish price trends to follow. BACKGROUND: The number of active addresses on Ethereum is usually a leading indicator on ETH price. While prices have increased 4.87% over the last seven days, the number of active addresses has dropped 5.50% over the same time period.

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Valid Points incorporates information and data about CoinDesk’s own Eth 2.0 validator. All profits made from this staking venture will be donated to a charity of our choosing once transfers are enabled on the network. For a full overview of the project, check out our announcement post.

You can verify the activity of the CoinDesk Eth 2.0 validator in real time through our public validator key, which is:

0xad7fef3b2350d220de3ae360c70d7f488926b6117e5f785a8995487c46d323ddad0f574fdcc50eeefec34ed9d2039ecb.

Search for it on any Eth 2.0 block explorer site!

I'll be extending today's conversation on Ethereum 2.0 with Consensys’ Ben Edgington in a CoinDesk podcast series called “Mapping Out Eth 2.0.” New episodes air every Thursday. Listen and subscribe through the CoinDesk podcast feed on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocketcasts, Google Podcasts, Castbox, Stitcher, RadioPublica, IHeartRadio or RSS.