Crypto Flipsider News – July 14th – Jed McCaleb, Uniswap, Grayscale, DeFi, Damien Hirst NFT

Crypto Flipsider News – July 14th – Jed McCaleb, Uniswap, Grayscale, DeFi, Damien Hirst NFT

Congrats crypto fellows,

The latest crypto space news is in front of you.

Take a look at what’s on the list:

• Jed McCaleb, the co-founder of Ripple Labs, sold over $150M of his XRP.
• Uniswap deploys Layer-2 alpha version on Optimistic Ethereum.
• Grayscale partners with BNY Mellon (NYSE:BK).
• Q2 of DeFi: peaks and drops, Binance Smart Chain loses the most.
• Legendary artist Damien Hirst brings art-based experiment to NFT space.

Jed McCaleb, the co-founder of Ripple Labs, sold over $150M of his XRP

Crypto billionaire, co-founder and ex CTO of Ripple Labs, Jed McCaleb has sold $150,7 million worth of his XRP coins within the past month.

The entrepreneur and current founder of Stellar left Ripple back in 2014 due to tensions with other co-founders. McCaleb wrote then that 9 billion of XRP coins belong to him. He donated part of his coins to charities and committed to sell the remaining XRPs transparently and before announcing his moves.

McCaleb still has more than 580 million of XRP in his crypto wallet. XRP price fell 32% within the past month, floating around $0.6 at the time of writing.

Flipsider:

• When ex breaks any type of liaison with you, what does it usually mean? First, that someone still hurts. Second, the project’s future perspectives are too vague to arouse the ex’s motivation to stay longer. We’ll wait and see which option is correct.

Uniswap deploys Layer-2 alpha version on Optimistic Ethereum

Layer 2 scaling solution was launched on Uniswap via Optimistic Ethereum mainnet. The long-awaited upgrade on Uniswap decentralized exchange came in alpha version and aims to solve the issues of pending swaps, due to an initial throughput of 0.6 transactions per second. It also offers to lower transaction costs by up to 10 times.

Flipsider:

• Congrats, but no need to fall head over heels with the news. It still is an early version of a complex scaling solution that needs meticulous testing. Let our inner realists be equally audible as the optimists.

Grayscale partners with BNY Mellon

Grayscale Investments, the biggest digital asset manager, partnered with the U.S. oldest bank BNY Mellon. The bank will provide asset servicing and ETF services for Grayscale Bitcoin Trust.

Grayscale Bitcoin Trust will get fund accounting and administration services from BNY Mellon from the first day of October 2021. The partnership will help Grayscale to become automated, improve scalability and resilience.

The bank will also operate as a transfer agency after Grayscale Bitcoin Trust will be converted to an ETF. The exact date of when this will happen is undisclosed.

Flipsider:

• The approval for Bitcoin ETFs, however, is still pending from the United States regulators. The SEC keeps denying applications to list securities that track crypto performance. Nobody knows why they are more stubborn than the U.S oldest bank. But let’s hope modernization will come to the SEC at some point in this century.

Q2 of DeFi: peaks and drops, Binance Smart Chain loses the most

The second quarter of the year marked the new all-time highs of DeFi, but also the biggest dumps. The Q2 2021 Report from Messari reveals, the monthly DEX volumes peaked at historic $203.5B highs in May and fell to $95B in June. The total value locked on various DeFi protocols also significantly dropped.

Binance Smart Chain (BSC) has suffered the biggest losses in DEX volumes. It lost significant market share to Polygon and Ethereum. Messari says this happened because “most of the value locked in its (BSC) applications was mercenary capital and consisted of assets that had little use outside of incentivizing user speculation.”

Flipsider:

• Liquidity wars are painful for blockchains. The success of DeFi protocols (especially those of yield farming) depend on liquidity. Thus platforms will need to find more sustained ways than token incentives to keep their users returning.

Legendary artist Damien Hirst brings art-based experiment to NFT space

British contemporary art legend Damien Hirst started a social art experiment named “The Currency”. He tokenized 10,000 of his unique paper artworks into NFTs, put the project on auction and gave 12 months for buyers to decide whether they’ll keep a physical art or its tokenized version.

Flipsider:

• And here we are. Face to face with the first NFT Hamlet question. Damien Hirst once broke the records by selling the most expensive artwork by a living artist (that was a Lullaby Spring sold for $19.2 million in 2007). Having in mind that history likes to repeat itself, NFTs might be in a serious existential crisis this time.

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