#19 Tornado's collapse
Taiwan's defensive, Merge's date,
By Aditya Humnabadkar and Jayesh Singh
gm guys!
Despite the ongoing cypto bear market, many top cryptocurrencies posted double-digit percentage gains over the week. There’s a lot of excitement around ETH about the upcoming merge, when Ethereum will transition to a more energy-efficient proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain.
Let’s walk through the stories of this week.
This week in the cryptic land🤔
Tornado faces the Eagle’s wrath🌪️
What’s poppin’ — The US government dented the crypto aspirations of the world by putting a blanket ban on Tornado Cash, an open-source crypto mixing service which worked as a smart contract with crypto. Following that, Circle immediately banned 38 addresses connected to Tornado, with other companies following suit. Things took a problematic turn further when the Dutch police arrested a 29-year-old developer who was in connection with tornado cash. The police stated that the accused was involved in mixing cryptocurrencies through Tornado Cash, facilitating money laundering and concealing financial flows. The Tornado DAO's discord server has also been disabled following the ban.
There are divided opinions in the market, with some calling an outright ban unnecessary as many people use this tool to protect their privacy in online transactions as it is the only component in the 'Ethereum stack’ that anonymizes transactions in the blockchain. While Tornado has been declared a criminal organization, the community has managed to approve themselves as signatories in the tornado's $22 million treasury so that the community fund is managed.
Bottomline — Honestly, this outright ban seems unnecessary given the current evolving state of the crypto economy. Governments worldwide need to focus on cultivating a safe transactional environment for crypto rather than a complete ban on it.
Taiwan secures its financial defences against China🛡️
The Taiwanese government has adopted the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), in a move to protect itself from Chinese cybersecurity attacks. The IPFS is a peer-to-peer network allowing users to store their data and backup in a set of different connected nodes. This prevents centralized attacks on the system and prevents censorship efforts. The project was launched the same day when china started its military drills near Taiwan, following Nancy Pelosi's visit.
Binance blocks the hack🛡️
Curve Finance, one of the most popular DEXs, suffered a frontend attack on Monday that resulted in a loss of $570,000 loss of ETH from the platform.
However, Binance CEO Changoeng Zhao recently took to Twitter saying they had managed to freeze $450K of stolen funds, representing 83% of the hack.
How’s India holdin’ up?
India’s own decentraland?🌆
India Blockchain Alliance has announced their collaboration with Metafluence in Metafluence City to launch ‘Metahut’ to become the first industry entity to establish a presence in metaverse in India.
Metafluence City is a platform that connects influences, audiences and brands in the metaverse. Users can now step into their lounge to get information about funding opportunities, advice, job opportunities, and courses.
CoinSwitch bullish on Indian web3 landscape💰
India's leading crypto exchange CoinSwitch has announced to launch Web3 Discovery Fund, the company’s corporate venture capital initiative. The fund with a corpus of $10 Million will invest in and incubate early-stage startups building blockchain solutions for the rapidly evolving Web3 landscape.
What else are we nibbling on?
Magic Eden Wants to Build an ApeCoin NFT Marketplace Just for Bored Apes.
Arbitrum Nova, a Layer 2 blockchain that aims to improve the gaming and social media experience on Ethereum, debuted alongside Reddit’s Community Points program.
Tweet of the week
The date for the Merge has been revealed. The ambitious switch from a proof-of-work blockchain to proof-of-stake will take place on Sept. 15.
That’s it for this week folks. We’ll see you next week with more interesting content. We’ve also been revamping our structure, so, you can expect to enjoy richer content in the forthcoming weeks.👋
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