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MERGE ON HOLD: Following weeks of speculation, months of technological progress and years of bated anticipation, Ethereum core developer Tim Beiko confirmed in a tweet Tuesday the Ethereum network’s transition to proof-of-stake (PoS) will not be in June but “likely in the few months after.” The proof-of-work, app-friendly network’s shift to a PoS model will give users the ability to secure the network by “staking” ether (ETH). The shift is also expected to cut Ethereum’s energy costs by 99% as well as make it easier for the network to scale. Ethereum is the most-used blockchain, and the shift to a novel consensus mechanism will likely be the most technologically significant work of engineering in the industry so far. But it has taken years to formalize a plan, which has been routinely pushed back. Ethereum co-creator Vitalik Buterin reflected recently on the long road to this point. Elsewhere in ETH-world, MetaMask’s institutional arm, which is working to bring “all organizations on planet Earth into Web 3,” has recently signed deals with Gnosis Safe, Hex Trust, GK8 and Parfin to accommodate the crypto custody requirements of organizations looking to form DAOs on the so-called world computer. GUILTY PLEA: Former Ethereum developer Virgil Griffith has been sentenced to more than five years in prison and will need to pay a $100,000 fine after pleading guilty to one count of conspiracy to violate international sanctions, following an April 2019 talk he gave at a crypto conference in North Korea’s capital Pyongyang. He was arrested in November 2019. Griffith has already spent about two years in custody, although he was released on bail for 14 of those months. Griffith’s crime carried a maximum penalty of 20 years – for giving a presentation on publicly available information about how Ethereum works – but accepted a plea deal from federal prosecutors.RONIN HACKER: The Ronin hacker has moved 21,000 ether, worth over $65 million, to privacy exchange Tornado Cash. Sleuths set up tracking alerts for the “Ronin Bridge Exploiter” on Etherscan to follow a complicated series of 100 or so transactions, as the thief looks to wash money from the $625 million exploit targeting the bespoke layer 2 blockchain Axie Infinity uses. Currently, the hacker’s main wallet holds more than 151,055 ether, roughly worth $461 million at the time of writing. LUNA’S WALLET: The Luna Foundation Guard (LFG) has added $100 million in BTC to its UST Reserves, valuing the entity’s wallet balance at more than $2 billion. The non-profit’s wallet now contains $1.7 billion in bitcoin, over $549 million in other U.S. dollar-denominated stablecoins and more than $14 million in TerraUSD, the organization’s flagship stablecoin. LFG plans to stack $10 billion in BTC, making it the second-largest bitcoin wallet behind Binance’s cold wallet. Elsewhere in the payments space, Tether’s USDT stablecoin entered the Polkadot ecosystem following the Kusama launch. CHINA TARGETS NFTS: China’s Internet Financial Association, as well as the country’s banking and securities associations, want to “resolutely curb” the tendencies of non-fungible tokens (NFT) to be financialized and securitized, as well as limiting the risk of illicit activities related to the tokens. The governing bodies have said the NFTs have the potential to promote “the digitalization of industries and digital industrialization,” but are warning against the financial risks related to hyping assets, money laundering and other illegal financial activities. Amid a crackdown on crypto, the statement calls on consumers to protect themselves by having the “correct consumption concept.” The news comes as NFTs continue to be issued by major firms and even government bodies within the country. CELEBRITY FUNDING: Startup crypto payments infrastructure firm MoonPay raised $87 million in funding, from more than 60 celebrities across the world of sports, music and entertainment. The Miami-based firm acquired the hefty chunk of change as part of its updated $555 million Series A round. In November, the startup received a $3.4 billion valuation after closing its Series A funding round, which was led by Coatue and Tiger Global. Celebrities including Ashton Kutcher, Justin Beiber, The Weeknd, Drake and more prominent crypto industry supporters including Snoop Dog and Paris Hilton joined the round. Separately, Pantera Capital plans to close the Pantera Blockchain Fund, its first blockchain fund, in the next three to four weeks with about $1.3 billion in committed capital – more than double the $600 million target set last November. Meanwhile, crypto exchange Luno forged a multimillion-dollar partnership with London entertainment venue KOKO. (Luno, like CoinDesk, is owned by Digital Currency Group.) –Fran Velasquez |
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What others are writing... |
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AMC and Orange Comet Launch Daryl Dixon Motorcycle NFTs Dropping on April 14 (NFT Plazas) Stablecoins are the perfect Trojan horse for Bitcoin, says Tether CTO (Cointelegraph) Binance poaches French financial regulator's deputy general counsel (The Block) What will turn Robinhood around? (Protocol) Chainalysis Adds 'Internet of Blockchains' Cronos to Its Compliance Software (Decrypt) Former Trump Official Mick Mulvaney Joins Crypto Firm as Adviser (Bloomberg) |
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Putting the news into perspective |
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Elden Ring Has Outlasted Its Critics, and So Will Bitcoin The video game industry has been upended this year by the massive success of an open-world role playing game called Elden Ring. The game sold 12 million copies in its first two weeks, numbers Mark Serrels at CNET described as “ludicrous.” The sales are on pace with the bestselling games of all time, titles like Grand Theft Auto 5, Breath of the Wild or Red Dead Redemption 2. Elden Ring is not just hugely successful, but a huge creative departure from current game-industry norms. It’s the seventh game in a string of titles by developer From Software, all marked by their thoroughly unconventional gameplay and, especially, their experimental approach to storytelling. They’re obscure, challenging and extremely weird. Serrels puts it succinctly: Elden Ring’s success is “like a David Lynch movie somehow pulling in a billion dollars at the box office.” These earlier games, including the Dark Souls series, were often bashed by the broader gaming public for being “too hard.” The sometimes “toxic” community of Souls players met these critiques with disdain, insisting that players alienated by Soulsgames just needed to “git gud.” Previous Souls games sold respectable but niche numbers, with lifetime totals ranging from 2-6 million copies. But over the years, From Software refined the experience, making it slightly more accessible in ways that didn’t compromise the core vision. Now, the entire world is hailing them as geniuses. The success of Elden Ring seems poised to transform not just what kind of video games get made, but the entire philosophy of the video game industry. Ringing any bells? Yes, welcome to the most cringey of all op-eds: a labored comparison between the infinite complexity of reality and a piece of pop culture. In this case, between cryptocurrency and Elden Ring. I can’t say I’m not ashamed to find myself mining such hoary tropes. But the parallels between crypto and the Souls games are hard to turn away from. The two epic projects even launched almost simultaneously, with Bitcoin’s genesis block mined in January of 2009, and the first Souls games, Demon’s Souls, released in Japan in February of 2009. My main points, though, have to do with creativity, purity of vision, “accessibility” and community. The Souls games, like crypto, arrived and thrived over a period when the creative and ideological bankruptcy of the competition was becoming too obvious to ignore. Bitcoin had the 2008 financial crisis, and later rising anxiety about data harvesting by Web 2 operations, as useful examples of its enemies’ malicious intentions and failed ideas. The Souls games quietly stood athwart the trend towards hyper-slick and user-friendly but lifeless AAA games like Call of Duty and, particularly, mind-numbing and cookie-cutter “open world” games like Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed series. And Elden Ring’shyper success came only after a long and sometimes lonely process of building and experimenting, made possible with the support of a small, dedicated core, in the face of a horde of uncomprehending (dare I say maidenless)critics. And these weren’t people who simply disliked the games and weren’t interested in playing them. They were people who regarded the existence of these games as a threat. They seemed to believe that the very existence of these games was a personal affront, an attack on their entire worldview. Again – sound familiar? In gaming as in crypto, of course, these critics were lashing out from a sense of vulnerability and fear. They sought to expunge what they couldn’t grasp. The clearest example of this is the endless whining from those who wanted the Souls games to add different difficulty modes. But as people have finally figured out with Elden Ring, the Souls games just handle that problem in a fundamentally different way – one that most critics think is a vast improvement over the norm. This surfeit of fearful ignorance became most painfully obvious after Elden Ring’s success, when a few developers from competing studios took potshots at the game’s design. This included developers who had worked on some of the most creatively bankrupt games of all time – the equivalent of JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon calling crypto “worthless” last year. That sort of pressure could have led a less self-assured creator than Soulsmastermind Hidetaka Miyazaki to compromise their vision, perhaps giving us an Elden Ring with the same pointless collectibles and brain-dead tasks that riddle series like Fallout and The Division. Many, many crypto entities and companies are in fact bending to parallel pressures, compromising the core innovations of crypto in an effort to make products “easier to use” and attract huge user bases. In the process, many have made compromises that will ensure their fate as forgettable afterthoughts to the arc of history, rather than its authors. But other projects, including but not limited to Bitcoin, have instead pursued their own clear vision. They’ve succeeded long-term not by giving the masses what they think they want, but by creating something nobody knew they needed until it appeared. They’ve stubbornly refused to listen to the sane, reasonable objections of people who don’t see the big picture. That’s not how you create a gigantic hit right out of the gate. But it is how you build a legacy that outlasts your critics. –David Z. Morris |
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