🇺🇦 Crypto donations continue to pour into Ukraine
This is Shashank’s Newsletter, a newsletter with bite sized content on everything that happened in web3 over the past week.
First up, wanted to thank all the subscribers and take a moment to celebrate this in typical web3 fashion with an NFT drop to my first 100 subscribers. It’s simply a token of appreciation and has no serious roadmap :)
You should have an email from me (0xshash.eth@gmail.com) titled “Claim your 0xshash NFT”. Your email should have a POAP claim link where you can input your Ethereum address to claim it. The cool part is that it’s free to claim—no gas fees! (NFT lives on xDAI which is an Ethereum side chain)
In today’s email,
🇺🇦 Crypto donations continue to pour into Ukraine
🤐 Metamask blocks users in certain countries
🎶 NFTs restructuring music industry
💪 ETH staking gets bigger
🌐 Internet vs Crypto adoption
Weekly gainers
Lido finance gaining some serious marketcap with ETH merge approaching. More on that below…
🇺🇦 Crypto donations continue to pour into Ukraine
3M$ was the amount donated when I wrote last week’s edition and a week later…. more than 36M$ has been donated in ETH. 🙏🏻 People even sent NFTs worth millions to the Ukraine donation account including blue chip NFTs like Crypto Punks.
How are these funds being used? The government is working with a Ukranian crypto exchange called Kuna to disburse these funds for military aid, petrol and food. Interestingly Kuna is paying for a lot of these goods in crypto ~90%, unless someone needs to be paid in their native currency, Ukrainian hryvnia.
People are getting really creative with donations by booking Airbnbs in Ukraine without visiting them. Great to see technology easing lives in these tough times.
💪 ETH staking gets bigger
Lido, a decentralized Ethereum staking service crossed 2M ETH…. a whopping ~5B$ 💰 in staked value. This accounts for more than 85% of currently staked Ethereum. RocketPool, the next largest staking service hit 100K ETH deposits recently. One of the top tier crypto venture firms, a16z invested 70M$ into Lido and also said they are staking their institution’s ETH on Lido.
So what is staking? Staking is a mechanism of securing the block chain. It’s an agreement between validators and the blockchain. Validators, well simply put… help validate blockchain transactions. With ETH2, validators are required to stake 32 ETH as collateral to register their node on the network and in return obtain a ‘license’ to validate blockchain transactions. By obtaining this license, the validator agrees to adhere to the network’s rules. In return, they receive periodic rewards and are even penalized if they behave maliciously.
Where do these rewards come from? The rewards are derived from the transaction fee aka gas fee paid by users. In conclusion, staking is a very novel digital agreement between network participants and their protocols.
So what does Lido do? This is where staking services come in… to provide validator nodes as a service and help ETH holders earn staking rewards by pooling their ETH. You can earn up to ~5% rewards by staking your ETH on Lido for providing a service to secure the network.
🤐 Metamask blocks users in certain countries
Users based in Venezuela and Iran were not able to make any transactions on their Metamask wallets suddenly on March 3. So how did this happen? Metamask which is a client side wallet uses Infura as their default API provider to connect and interact with blockchain nodes. Metamask and Infura which are owned by the same parent company, Consensys said that these services will not be available to users in certain juridictions for compliance reasons. To make matters worse, Infura later released a statement saying the configuration was applied more widely than necessary impacting a lot more users.
This triggered a very hot debate on the whole decentralization aspect of blockchains. While the restrictions placed from the US and the ongoing sanctions is a centralization issue with Infura and OpenSea, this is not a centralization issue with Ethereum. To achieve full transaction freedom, you have the choice to run your own blockchain node and configure that in your metamask wallet.
🎶 NFTs restructuring music industry
Sound.xyz is a budding web3 startup attempting to disrupt the music industry by paying artists the money that they deserve. How are they doing this? Artists “launch” songs as NFTs and their true fans mint those NFTs to support the artist and create a tight community between artists and their true fans, completely eliminating record labels and distributors. This is a really powerful concept to enable the creator economy. Up until now, we’ve mostly seen digital art as NFTs gain mainstream adoption but music can make NFTs even more mainstream as most of the world listens and relates to music. Really excited to see this next wave of verticalized NFT marketplaces.
🌐 Internet vs Crypto adoption
Probably nothing….
How did you enjoy this week’s edition?
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