Yesterday in Crypto - Issue #2

Here’s what you missed yesterday, 7/17/23:

A scene that could be straight out of a political thriller - Brian Armstrong, the fearless CEO of Coinbase, is gearing up for a closed-door meeting with the Democrats from the House of Representatives. With Coinbase currently embroiled in a legal tussle with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), this meeting promises to have more tension than a family dinner after a political argument.

Armstrong will be squaring off with members of the New Democrat Coalition, a group of lawmakers who have leaned away from crypto in the past. The agenda? The future of digital-asset legislation and a host of other issues that are sure to make for a fun conversation. If Coinbase and Brian can help align the Left and the Right on this issue, we can finally get meaningful legislation passed to help keep crypto innovation right here in the USA.

In the wild rollercoaster ride that is the cryptocurrency industry, where companies can implode faster than a poorly constructed sandcastle, a surprising twist has appeared.

Despite some spectacular faceplants, the number of brave souls working in the crypto industry has shot up by an impressive 160% since 2019. This is important to note - while the media says crypto is dead, the data says otherwise. Industries go through cycles and pretending that crypto is dead during each bear market is becoming just as sad as it is predictable.

Regardless of the fact that some big names like Coinbase and Binance have shed some staff, the crypto world continues to draw in more hopefuls.

Chainlink has launched its Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) on several top blockchains, including Ethereum, Avalanche, Polygon, Arbitrum, and Optimism.

Let’s step back. CCIP? What? Think of each blockchain as an island. The assets, users, and projects on that blockchain are normally cut off from the rest of the cryptoverse. You can move from island to island, but you have to take a risky bridge. these bridges are patrolled by pirates (hackers) looking for bridge weaknesses.

Imagine a teleportation system that links islands. No more risky bridges, just instant, trustless asset transfer. That is what Chainlink is trying to build.

The protocol aims to provide interoperability between traditional financial firms and both public and private blockchains. CCIP allows enterprises to transfer data and value between blockchain environments directly from their backend systems. The protocol uses Swift’s messaging infrastructure, which is used by over 11,000 banks worldwide to facilitate international payments and settlement.

Interoperability is a huge narrative in the crypto world, with large players like Polkadot (DOT) and Cosmos (ATOM) currently leading the space. However, this chainlink protocol aim to be the first to link these crypto islands with the main-land of TradFi. If they can pull this off… you’d best keep an eye on LINK.

In an exciting new episode in the Cosmos Ecosystem saga, Osmosis, the largest decentralized exchange (DEX) protocol on the Cosmos network, has unveiled a game-changing feature called “supercharged liquidity.”

A DEX, for those not familiar, is a trading platform for digital assets, where the middlemen are not large corporations, but individuals and companies that loan their assets so others can use them to trade back and forth. This is called “providing liquidity.”

Supercharged liquidity is like a superpower for liquidity providers (LPs), allowing them to focus their capital on specific price ranges. Until now, LPs had to loan their resources across an infinite price range, often resulting in capital being stranded at price points as deserted as a ghost town.

With this new feature, capital efficiency could be supercharged by 100 to 300 times, making it a potential game-changer in the thrilling world of decentralized finance.

This is a win for traders, as they will receive better rates when swapping. It’s also a win for LPs - they have more control over how their assets are used, and will theoretically be able to rake in more fees from the traders if they manage their liquidity properly.That’s what I call a win-win situation. We’ll be watching Osmosis Zone (OSMO) closely. That’s all for this today. We’ll see you tomorrow

“Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value: 0” - Voltaire