Issue #53

REGULATION

1. SEC files letter of intent to appeal summary judgment in its lawsuit against Ripple

-- Citing a need for an appellate review

2. Worldcoin's regulatory woes grow

-- Kenyan police raided Worldcoin's warehouse in Nairobi: confiscated documents and machines under the supervision of the Data Protection Commissioner

-- Argentina launches investigation into Worldcoin's data collection practices

3. Rumors circulate about Huobi regarding Chinese investigations and insolvency

-- Reports of the arrest of Huobi execs

4. Blockchain.com granted a payments license in Singapore

-- Allows it to provide digital payment token services to institutional and accredited investors

5. Binance receives licenses to offer crypto services in El Salvador

6. Federal Reserve Board establishes Novel Activities Supervision Program

-- Attempt at regulating crypto banking activities and providing a fair playing field for banks involved in the digital asset industry

7. Maple Finance secures SEC exemption to offer tokenized one-month US treasury yields to accredited investors

8. Honk Kong issues in-principle approval to HKVAX to operate a digital asset trading platform

9. Crypto exchange Bittrex agrees to pay $24M fine to the SEC for offering unregistered securities

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RESEARCH

1. a16z releases a zk lookup argument (Lasso) and a zkVM (Jolt)

-- Lasso improves prover costs and demonstrates speedups in excess of 10x over the lookup argument in the popular SNARK toolchain halo2

-- Jolt uses Lasso to offer a new framework for designing SNARKs for zkVMs

2. Supporting a heterogenous TEE for critical infrastructure protection (source)

-- Currently difficult for prominent TEE solutions (e.g. Intel SGX, AMD SEC, etc.) to interact with each other

-- The paper proposes the use of blockchain technology as the communication backbone for systems that integrate multiple TEE solutions

3. Definition and detection of defects in NFT smart contracts (source)

-- Identifies 5 popular vulnerabilities: risky mutable proxy, ERC-721 reentrancy, unlimited minting, missing requirements, and public burn

4. Towards intelligent detection of smart contract logic vulnerabilities in GPTScan (source)

-- Use of LLMs to detect smart contract vulnerabilities

-- Achieves over 90% precision for token contracts and 57% precision for more complex contracts

-- Takes an average of 14.39 seconds and $0.01 to scan per thousand lines of Solidity code

5. Chiplet-based scalable hardware accelerator for fully homomorphic encryption (source)

-- Speedup of up to 5982x compared to a CPU, 2x better energy efficiency, and 50% lower development costs than an ASIC accelerator

6. Cross-domain MEV (source)

-- Categorizes MEV based on (i) how the MEV is extracted and (ii) where the extractable value is originating

-- Identifies shared sequencers, multiple single-domain sequencers, off-chain RFQs, and batch settlement protocols as viable solutions to cross-domain MEV

7. Enabling data confidentiality with public blockchains (source)

-- A decentralized approach to secure data sharing for cross-business collaboration

-- Use of Multi-Authority Attribute-Based Encryption

8. The vulnerable nature of decentralized governance in DeFi (source)

-- Risks identified: consolidation in the ownership distribution of governance tokens, users who only purchase and hold on to a large portion of governance tokens for the duration of a single proposition of their own making, low participation, difficulty for non-technical DAO members to pass judgment on technical proposals, cross-protocol governance dependencies

9. Privacy-preserving in-memory computing engine (source)

-- Accelerates workloads associated with homomorphic encryption and garbled circuits

10. A secure and efficient auditing framework for cloud infrastructures (source)

-- Proposes a Merkle Hash Tree-based architecture to support version control and dynamic auditing of data in centralized cloud environments

-- Proposed scheme outperforms blockchain-based counterparts with respect to time and storage efficiencies

11. Optimal flexible consensus and its applications to Ethereum (source)

-- A consensus protocol that provides configurable safety and liveness guarantees

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INFRASTRUCTURE

1. Base network has officially launched

-- Achieved 136k daily users 2 days after launch

-- Ranks 4th in daily transactions per second among L2 networks

-- Popular protocols including Uniswap and Chainlink are already live on Base

2. Tether unveils Bitcoin mining software to boost efficiency

-- Released Javascript libraries that facilitate communication between Bitcoin mining hardware and Moria, an orchestration instrument for mining farms

-- Enables encrypted data streaming, reduces firewall configuration complexity, and increases resilience to failures

3. Venom Foundation lands deal with UAE for a blockchain-based carbon credit system

-- UAE plans to reduce emissions by 40% by 2050

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FINANCE

1. PayPal launches PYUSD stablecoin on Ethereum

-- Fully backed by US dollar deposits, short-term treasuries, and similar cash equivalents

-- Will soon be available to US customers as a mode of payment

2. Singapore commits $112M to support fintech innovation

-- The Innovation Acceleration track supports the adoption of web3

3. USDC's market share has shrunk by double digits in the past year

-- Potential reason according to Brian Armstrong: Binance converting its USDC holdings to other stablecoins, such as FDUSD

-- Separately, Circle CEO says 70% of USDC adoption comes from outside the US

4. Binance releases its proof of reserves report

-- More than enough crypto and cash to cover user funds

-- Sold USDC for BTC and ETH after Silvergate Bank collapse

5. Visa explores gas fees payments via cards

-- Use of ERC-4337 and the Paymaster smart contract to allow users to pay for gas fees with their Visa card

-- Eliminates the need to hold ETH for gas fee payments

6. OPNX exchange offers to take over 75% of Hodlnaut, a crypto interest account platform

7. Crypto exchange Bitstamp raising funds for global expansion

-- Based in the UK

-- Was acquired by NXMH in 2018

8. Global X submits application for a spot Bitcoin ETF

-- Names Coinbase as its surveillance-sharing partner

9. L1 Digital raises $152M for its second VC fund

-- 70% direct investing, 30% fund-of-fund investing

-- Interested in digital infra, DeFi, and DeSci

10. Liquid staking protocol Lido reports 'remarkable' protocol adoption in July '23

-- TVL has surpassed $15B

-- More than 10k new stakers joined

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CONSUMER

1. Telegram crypto bots gain momentum in the market

-- Daily trading volumes reached a record high of $10M in July'23 and total revenue of over $28M

2. USPTO accepts CBS Studios' application to use the Star Trek name for NFTs and digital collectibles

3. 'The Next Crypto Gem' TV show aims to be 'The Apprentice' for crypto

-- Will begin airing on September 7 on Insight TV, Amazon Prime, and Pluto TV

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SECURITY

1. White hat hackers and attackers have returned over 73% of all funds stolen from Curve Finance

-- Attackers returned all stolen funds from Alchemix and JPEGd pools after accepting a bug bounty offer

2. Fireblocks discloses "zero day" vulnerabilities impacting leading MPC wallets

-- Major companies including Coinbase, ZenGo, and Binance have already worked with Fireblocks to remediate their exposure to potential exploits

3. Crypto payments firm CoinsPaid hacked for more than $37M

-- Hacker gained access to internal systems using a fake job offer

4. Futures DEX Cypher Protocol hacked for $1M

5. Steadefi exploited for at least $334k

-- Trying to negotiate with the attacker through Twitter

6. Blockchain Capital's hacked Twitter account promoted token claim scam

7. Chainalysis' forensics methodologies in question

-- CipherTrace expert says Chainalysis data contributed to wrongful arrest of alleged Bitcoin Fog founder

8. CER: only 6 out of 45 wallet brands have undergone penetration testing

-- Of the wallets tested, MetaMask, ZenGo, Trust Wallet, Rabby, and Bifrost were found to be the most secure

9. Aave's Earning Farm protocol targeted by reentrancy attack

-- Theft of 287k ETH

10. Multichain contagion causes SpiritSwap DEX to shut down