Cloud-computing platform Amazon Web Services will work with Ava Labs to make it easier for developers to launch and manage nodes on the Avalanche blockchain, according to a joint blog post. AWS will support Avalanche’s infrastructure and decentralized applications (dapps), and Ava will deploy “subnets” to the AWS Marketplace. Meanwhile, the amount of staked ETH has passed 16 million. Last, Yuga Labs, the creative studio behind Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), announced a free NFT mint and a skill-based game, Dookey Dash, will launch on Jan. 18. Token holders will compete to win prizes that may be useful for future announcements.
Bad News
Crypto brokerage Blockchain.com is cutting 28% of its workforce, or about 110 employees. The firm laid off about 150 staff in July, as it grappled with a $270 million hit on loans it made to failed hedge fund Three Arrows Capital. Meanwhile, following a CoinDesk probe, the U.S. Department of Justice will investigate the two brothers behind Solana stablecoin exchange Saber Labs, Ian and Dylan Macalinao, accused of faking almost all of “Solana DeFi’s” liquidity. Lastly, BlockFi executives who remained after the lender declared bankruptcy received pay raises of up to $500,000 each, according to a court filing. Some $800 million in executive-owned equity was wiped out after the firm’s backstop, FTX, collapsed.
Not Bitcoin
The Legislative Assembly of El Salvador passed a law Wednesday that includes a legal framework for the issuance of the bitcoin-backed “Volcano Bond.” Initially planned for March 2022, the bond issuance – which seeks to raise $1 billion for bitcoin-related infrastructure projects in the Central American country – was postponed several times. Meanwhile, trading app Robinhood said it will end support for BSV, the native token of the Bitcoin SV blockchain, on Jan. 25. The Bitcoin Cash fork promoted by Craig “Faketoshi” Wright dropped 15% on the news.
Sound Bites
“This Congress is going to move forward with stablecoin regulation that we almost got done in the last Congress.”
– U.S. Rep. Jim Himes, on CoinDesk TV’s “First Mover”
The Takeaway: Bitcoin First
It’s been 14 years since the first bitcoin transaction was sent. On Jan. 11, 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of the Bitcoin system, sent Hal Finney, a well-regarded cryptographer and computer scientist, 10 bitcoin (BTC). This test transaction, sent before BTC had a quotable price, was a harbinger of the many peer-to-peer transfers to come enabled by the world’s first cryptocurrency network.
Finney, who died in August 2014, was also the first person besides Satoshi to download and run Bitcoin’s software. He detailed his story in a 2013 BitcoinTalk forum post, where he said he was the first person Phil Zimmerman, another legendary cypherpunk, hired for the PGP Corporation to build the Pretty Good Privacy encryption solution.
“When Satoshi announced the first release of the software, I grabbed it right away,” Finney wrote. He was primed to find interest in a project that separates money from politics and enables user-sovereignty over their wealth, having experimented with earlier instantiations of “digital cash.” Others, Finney claimed, were initially more skeptical.
“Cryptographers have seen too many grand schemes by clueless noobs. They tend to have a knee-jerk reaction,” Finney wrote. So he mined a few coins, found a few bugs and let the software run for a few days before determining the protocol was stable but draining on his computer’s CPU, and so switched it off.
In August 2009, a few months after he was the first to download, receive and walk away from bitcoin, Finney was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease (or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) – a debilitating illness that attacks a person’s nervous system. ALS left him paralyzed within the span of a few years.
He eventually found his way back to Bitcoin, to which he contributed after his illness forced him into an early retirement. At the time he was writing out his recollections, Finney was building a new type of wallet. “It’s very slow, probably 50 times slower than I was before. But I still love programming and it gives me goals,” he said.
Bitcoin was a project he could see growing very quickly. In a received email to Nakamoto, Finney was one of the first to put a price on the cryptocurrency. Estimating a fraction of total global household wealth would spill into the project, each of the 21 million coins could one day be worth $10 million.
Finney is commonly suspected to have invented Bitcoin. Beyond the fact that coders are often their own first users and business-founders their own first customers, Finney certainly had the chops to design something like Bitcoin, which combined several pre-existing cryptographic and computational ideas in a novel way.
For instance, Finney created the first reusable proof-of-work system in 2004, building on the original proof-of-work algorithm designed by Adam Back (another Satoshi contender), allowing people to redirect computational energy towards a useful purpose. Finney’s use case for RPoW was a digital token system.
If Satoshi’s “true” identity didn’t matter then, it hardly matters now. Finney wrote that in his correspondence with Satoshi he thought he was dealing with a “very smart and sincere” person – a quality he learned to recognize over the years. But what mattered most was that the code ran, and the idea was sound.
As winter inevitably yields to spring, crypto winters eventually end as the prices of widely traded coins come back. The same goes for such in-game currencies as nine chronicles gold, or NCG.
When the price of the NCG token fell during crypto winter, Planetarium Labs, the publisher of the online game it represents, came up with a multipronged strategy to support the token’s price and reinforce a sense of confidence among investors. The best way to buttress its value, Planetarium Labs concluded, is to increase demand for the token by giving players more things to do with it and by burning revenue earned from players’ activities, denominated in NCG or its wrapped WNCG version. Continue reading.
*This is sponsored content from Planetarium
Off-Chain Signals
SBF has a SubStack! He wrote an FTX “pre-mortem” where he claimed no wrongdoing (Substack).
A journalist spent a weekend with SBF under house arrest (Puck)
Ooki DAO ghosting CFTC lawsuit could see it lose the case (Protos)
People ask Bill Gates about Web3 in a Reddit AMA (Reddit)
Coinbase is closing most of its Japanese unit (Bloomberg Law). Meanwhile, the S&P downgraded $COIN stock to “speculative” (Decrypt)
Nexo is being investigated in its native Bulgaria for alleged tax and money laundering crimes (Decrypt)
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