Weekly Newsletter – 14 Apr 2023

A New Era of ETH Staking Withdrawals

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Weekly Summary

  • Ethereum Completes Shanghai Upgrade, Unlocking $34 Billion in Staked ETH
  • Bitcoin Climbs to $30K, Reaching Highest Price Since Last June
  • Solana Sets Launch Date for Crypto-Focused “Saga” Smartphone
  • Yearn Finance Impacted in Nearly $11M Exploit on An Outdated Contract
  • Canon to Introduce Ethereum Photo NFT Marketplace Cadabra

Industry Stories

Ethereum Completes Shanghai Upgrade: Ethereum has completed its long transition to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) with the successful implementation of the Shanghai upgrade. The upgrade enables the withdrawal of staked ETH, making $34.56 billion worth of ETH available for withdrawal, for the first time since ETH staking debuted in 2020. The upgrade was initially intended to include numerous other improvements, but were scrapped to hasten the release of ETH withdrawals. Stakers who directly deposited at least 32 ETH with Ethereum can now withdraw their profits, a process expected to take several days. 

Bitcoin Rally Continues, Reaching Highest Price Since Last June: Bitcoin has broken above $30,000 for the first time since June 2022, gaining more than 80% in value in the 2023 rally. The largest cryptocurrency by market capitalisation was recently trading at $30,756, up 9.74% since Easter Monday. Investors grew more optimistic about US central bank monetary policy as March’s banking turbulence faded into the distance. De-dollarisation is also increasingly becoming part of the narrative, which is further accelerating crypto adoption. During this week of Shanghai upgrade, other cryptocurrencies such as Ether have also seen gains, while crypto stocks and XRP, driven primarily by retail investors, have rallied as well.

Solana Sets Launch Date for Crypto-Focused “Saga” Smartphone: Solana Labs’ Saga smartphone, which doubles as a dedicated crypto hardware wallet, will go on public sale on May 8, according to the company. The Android smartphone features a “Solana Mobile Stack” (SMS) that integrates crypto functionalities into the device, along with a customised “seed vault” that stores a crypto user’s private keys separately from the rest of the phone’s data. Saga also has a custom dapp store that lists crypto applications without imposing “extractive fees” on app developers. 

Yearn Finance Impacted in Nearly $11M Exploit: Yearn Finance has been hit by an exploit, resulting in losses of almost $11 million, according to PeckShield. The attack occurred on Aave version 1, but Aave developers said the protocol was not directly impacted and was only used to swap tokens to carry out the exploit. The exploit primarily involved Yearn Finance’s yUSD stablecoin, which was misconfigured. The impact on Aave version 1 was limited, as the version had been frozen since December 2022, and versions 2 and 3 were not impacted. The losses were spread across various US dollar-pegged stablecoins.

Canon to Introduce Ethereum Photo NFT Marketplace Cadabra: Canon USA is set to launch a photography-focused Ethereum NFT marketplace, Cadabra, later this year. The platform, previewed at this week’s NFT NYC conference, will offer tokenised photographs across various categories including sports, wildlife, and landscapes. Cadabra will feature initial drops of photo collections, as well as a secondary marketplace for reselling NFTs.This move marks the camera giant’s further push into the Web3 world after an NFT drop in 2022. Other dedicated photo NFT platforms include Quantum Art and Sloika.

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Matrixport News

Matrixport’s Daniel Egloff, Head of Prime Brokerage, shared insights alongside Takatoshi Shibayama of Copper.co and Tina Huang from SignalPlus on Day 1 (Apr 12) of Web3 Festival hosted by HashKey Group and Wanxiang Blockchain. In the panel session “Digital Finance Frontiers and Cross-border Trade” we discussed capital efficiency in digital asset management. 

Learn more here.

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