Blast’s $3B Airdrop and Bitcoin’s Mt. Gox Moment

Airdrops are supposed to be free money; That’s why there were so many complaints about LayerZero’s “pay on demand” distribution of ZRO tokens last week. A fee of 10 cents per token might not seem like much to complain about, but it was.

MOREOVER:

The Winklevoss twins donated (a lot) to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

Top picks from last week’s Protocol Village column: BNB, Algorand, Solana Foundation, Matter Labs, ZKsync, Aleph Zero, Polkadot, Parity Technologies.

Blockchain project fundraising over $100 million: Ora, Allora Labs, Conduit, ZKX, Enso, Farworld Labs.

Blast, the layer 2 blockchain on top of Ethereum, has moved forward with the long-awaited airdrop of BLAST tokens.

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FREE, FOR A PAYMENT: Token airdrops are, after all, free money; This may be one reason why project teams are less sympathetic to users who complain that they’re not getting the money they think they’re owed. Now, blockchain interoperability project LayerZero has introduced a new twist to the process; some observers call this “pay for demand.” When the LayerZero Foundation came out with its ZRO airdrop last week, it forced users to provide a “proof of donation” before claiming the new tokens. As detailed by CoinDesk’s Shaurya Malwa, users had to donate 10 cents in USDC to the Protocol Guild, a collective funding mechanism for Ethereum’s layer 1 research and development providers, for every ZRO token they hoped to claim. LayerZero Labs co-founder Bryan Pellegrino stated in a video address posted on X that “users have to do something to get something,” adding that the amount is “extremely small” and the “easy way” is to do it. “optimize for the least amount of criticism.” The LayerZero Foundation said it will match all donations up to $10 million. The apparent logic? “By donating to the Protocol Guild, eligible recipients are demonstrating long-term alignment with the LayerZero protocol and commitment to the future of crypto,” LayerZero said in an X post. It goes without saying that approval of the move isn’t universal: “If I’m at McDonald’s and they’re forcing me to donate money to buy my cheeseburger, do I really care about the kids or am I just hungry?” One disappointed poster wrote to X.

The story continues

TOP MOUNT? Once-prominent bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox announced that it would begin distributing assets to customers, causing the BTC price to drop. The leading cryptocurrency took a bigger hit than smaller tokens, dropping its share of the overall crypto market by 1.8 percentage points to 54%. The fear is that Mt. Gox investors and creditors are buying Bitcoin, with some rushing to cash out, resulting in a selloff that will cause the price to fall, at least in the short term. Technical market indicators suggest that the price may be close to falling to $50,000, but as of press time, Bitcoin appears to have stabilized just below $62,000. Some traders argued that the risk of a mass sell-off might be exaggerated.

The Winklevoss Twins, founders of the Gemini crypto exchange, wrote on

According to the U.S. Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), Mexican cartels are using bitcoin, ether, monero and tether cryptocurrencies to purchase the raw materials needed to make the drug fentanyl.

According to blockchain detective Lookonchain, the German government, which owns more than 45,000 BTC, including Bitcoins seized from a privacy website, transferred 750 BTC worth over $46 million and transferred 250 BTC to Bitstamp and Kraken has been sent to crypto exchanges. The transfers fueled speculation that the country may be preparing to sell some of its Bitcoin holdings, adding to bearish pressure on crypto markets.

Protocol Village

Last week’s top picks from our Protocol Village column highlighting major blockchain technology upgrades and news.

Schematic showing the new allocation of priority block production rights under BEP-341 (BNB Forum)

1. BNB Chain announced a new BEP-341 offering called “Governance-Enabled Continuous Block Production.” According to the team: “This proposed enhancement aims to significantly improve the transaction processing capacity of the BSC by enabling validators to generate consecutive blocks. To address any risks, BEP-341 introduces adjustable governance parameters that aim to balance performance improvements with critical security measures.”

2. The Algorand Foundation announced at the annual Decipher conference in Barcelona that it has created a new “decentralized authentication and communications application” called LiquidAuth. According to the team: “LiquidAuth, a decentralized, free-to-use, open-source, and chain-neutral authentication tool, provides users with greater security and privacy than centralized solutions like WalletConnect.”

3. Solana Foundation announced the launch of Solana Actions and blockchain connections (“Blinks”) to its suite of developer tools. According to the team: “These tools provide a way to integrate blockchain transactions into any platform, creating a seamless and intuitive Web3 experience for users. Multiple Solana ecosystem projects, including Cubic, Sanctum, Tensor, will use Solana Actions and Blinks at launch . Realms, Access, Jupiter, Helium, Truffle, Ghost and Backpack.”

4. Matter Labs, the main development firm behind Layer 2 network ZKsync, has unveiled a new roadmap called ZKsync 3.0, which aims to make the ecosystem more interconnected, including a new “Elastic Chain” that looks a bit like competitor Polygon’s AggLayer. The foundation of ZKsync “3.0” is the v24 upgrade that was released on June 7, which “transforms ZKsync from a single ZK chain to an Elastic Chain,” the Matter Labs team wrote in a blog post shared with CoinDesk.

5. Aleph Zero, a privacy-enhanced public blockchain running on the Substrate stack developed by Polkadot developer Parity Technologies, introduced zkOS, an EVM-compatible privacy layer that produces zero-knowledge proofs on consumer devices in less than a second, according to the team. : “This allows private transactions and dApp interactions without exposing underlying data. ZkOS uses Halo2 with KZG commits for faster proof generation and provides a zkToolkit to simplify integration for developers. According to benchmarks, zkOS runs 600-800 ms on MacBooks Can run proof in .

Money Center

fundraising

Ora co-founder Kartin Wong (Ora)

Ora, a blockchain project that aims to incorporate artificial intelligence into decentralized applications (dapps), said it has raised $20 million in funding from investors such as Polychain, HF0 and Hashkey Capital. According to a press release, the new funds will allow the project to “continue developing its technology and infrastructure to tokenize AI models and bring decentralized artificial intelligence to the Ethereum ecosystem.”

Allora Labs, a contributor to the Allora Network – described as “a decentralized, self-improving machine intelligence network that powers applications with an evolving system of machine learning models” – has closed a strategic funding round, bringing total company funding to $35 million. Investors included Polychain, Framework Ventures, CoinFund, Blockchain Capital, Mechanism Capital and Delphi Digital.”

Conduit, a crypto-native platform that allows developers to launch blockchain applications with one-click infrastructure (including a layer 2 network on top of Ethereum in under 15 minutes), announced a $35 million Series A led by Paradigm and Haun Ventures. Additional investments from Robot Ventures, Credively Neutral, Coinbase Ventures and Bankless Ventures.

ZKX, which describes itself as “the first social criminal to DEX trade on Starknet and Ethereum,” raised $6.3 million in a seed round with notable investors including Flowdesk, GCR, and DeWhales, according to the team.

Enso, an intent engine for chain abstraction, closed a $4.2 million funding round with Ideo Ventures, Hypersphere, and more than 60 angel investors to support the launch of a layer 1 Cosmos-based blockchain this year, according to the team.

Farcaster has completed a $1.75 million pre-seed funding round co-led by domestic gaming company Farworld Labs, Lemniscap and Variant.

Agreements and grants

Data and Tokens

NEAR Sees TVL Growth Intensified at Lending Platform Burrow

NEAR Protocol transaction dump (Flipside)

NEAR Protocol, a layer 1 blockchain, has seen its total value locked (TVL), a key measure of user deposits, triple to nearly $325 million in the first half of 2024, according to a new report by Flipside.

“Recent increases in transaction volume and new user growth have further strengthened NEAR’s position as a strong challenger to the EVM-centric narrative that continues to dominate much of the DeFi conversation,” the report states. EVM essentially stands for “Ethereum Virtual Machine,” which is the blockchain operating system on which Ethereum-based and Ethereum-compatible smart contracts are based.

But a closer look shows that just three apps on NEAR account for about 72% of TVL, according to Flipside: Burrow, a lending and borrowing platform that doesn’t offer custodial services; Meta Pool, a multi-chain liquid staking platform, and LiNEAR, a protocol that allows users to create and trade synthetic assets.

“To maintain and expand its current growth trajectory, NEAR will need to attract and develop a more diverse on-chain ecosystem and take more concrete steps towards achieving a more multi-chain future,” according to Flipside. “This includes supporting a broader range of applications and services beyond current flagships and successfully supporting more cross-chain bridging activities.”

Calendar

8-11 July: EthCC, Brussels.

July 11: TezDev 2024, Brussels.

July 25-27: Bitcoin 2024, Nashville.

19-21 August: Web3 Summit, Berlin.

19-21 September: Solana Breakpoint, Singapore.

September 1-7: Korea Blockchain Week, Seoul.

September 12-13: Global Blockchain Congress, Southeast Asia Edition, Singapore

30 September-October. 2: Messari Mainnet, New York.

October 9-11: Unauthorized, Salt Lake City.

21-22 October: Cosmoverse, Dubai.

October 23-24: Cardano Summit, Dubai.

30-31 October: Chainlink SmartCon, Hong Kong.

12-14 November: Devcon 7, Bangkok.

November 20-21: North American Blockchain Summit, Dallas.

19-20 February 2025: ConsensusHK, Hong Kong.

May 14-16: Consensus, Toronto.