Warning: this may contain traces of sarcasm and cynicism.
Story One
Penguins
There’s a clear hierarchy in NFTs. The squiggles are for edgy art appreciators, while Bored Ape holders are the same crop of people who will buy a Ferrari and a Rolex believing that’ll increase their social sign value – while, at best, a bad Andrew Tate copy. And then there are Pudgy Penguins, adorable and the prime example of a project that has managed to gain visibility with a large non-crypto crowd. After selling 1 million penguin plush toys in 12 months and collecting millions of insta followers, the penguins are now onto bigger things: building their own L2.
Called Abstract, it’ll use ZKSync’s zkStack Virtual Machine and combine it with Eigenlayers’ Data Availability underneath, clearly an attempt at winning modular blockchain bingo.
How will it be different from other L2s? Surely, there are at least penguins enshrined at protocol level… You’d hope so in vain. Instead, the team says its consumer-centric approach, focus on distribution by helping apps build real communities, and an incubator taking projects from 0 to 1 will be the driving forces.
That was enough to collect 11 million from VCs in a round led by Founders Fund, the same fund whose creator has written the aspiring entrepreneurs’ bible: “From zero to one.” More recently, Peter Thiel is better known for fuelling JD Vance’s ascension or for wanting to inject young people’s blood.
Takeaway: Let’s just hope Thiel is too busy campaigning to mess with the Penguins’ crypto alignment. The bigger takeaway though is, the market really needs another Layer-2.
Story Two
Politics
Sorry if you came here to escape politics. On the bright side, this isn’t about how Trump said fun things like trying to model the Putin model of open elections. This is about the political side of crypto.
There are a slew of DeFi apps that, during DeFi Summer 1.0, distributed their tokens and the responsibility to vote wisely to power users. One of them is Compound Finance, a place to borrow and lend tokens. On July 28th, Proposal 289 was passed, with 51.84% of holders voting for it, mirroring the Brexit referendum results. Yet, instead of a deep divide in the community, this was a governance attack.
The proposal suggested sending roughly $24 million worth of COMP tokens to a DeFi vault managed by the “Golden boys” who’d distribute semi-liquid goldCOMP tokens in return. Basically liquid farming, except that the Golden Boys will have full control over the funds in the vault. And you don’t need a genius to figure out it’s a great way to get away with $24 million without joining Lazarus DAO.
Making matters worse, the leader of them is a whale called Humpy with a track record of being accused of buying governance tokens to vote in his personal interest. A repeat offender. The latest seems to be a slight modification of the proposal to prevent him and his crew from taking over the complete DAO.
Takeaway: Making power directly purchasable with money once again did not have the best outcome.
Story Three
Pickups
When they don’t purchase Ferraris with the gains from their highly profitable trading strategy, the Golden Boys might opt for a large Pickup truck to virtue signal instead. In the US, Toyota is currently the leading seller of mid-sized Pickup trucks, but I reckon in terms of making an impression, they’re not the brand of choice.
Still, at least, Toyota’s Blockchain Labs is actively reading Ethereum Improvement Proposals. In a recently released report, the company explores how blockchain accounts could turn boring cars into boring cars with a wallet. The idea of their “Mobility-Oriented-Accounts” is that driving will be much better when there is onchain execution of hardware operations.
Such operations include unlocking the car, starting the engine, licensing, and other things that people could accomplish via clicks on their phones—provided they hold the right NFT.
How this operates under the usual “no texting while driving” premise isn’t elaborated, but the type of token they’d want to leverage is: ERC 4337, a standard better known as account abstraction that allows paying in any ERC-20 token for fees, and promises a better UX. If set up as a multi-sig, multiple parties might control a car, which would facilitate car sharing.
Takeaway: At least someone is thinking of something new that isn’t yet another L2 or treasury-draining activity. The only question is, when will they try this concept irl?
Fact of the week: Penguins aren’t all that different from humans. Male penguins will often gift females with rocks to win them over.🪨
Naomi for CoinJar
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