ETH unlocked

Good morning! Welcome to The Daily Moon. Sam Bankman-Fried and his Bahamas’ coterie lived life king size. Bankruptcy documents show that FTX spent $40 million on luxury hotels, flights, and food just weeks before the exchange collapsed. Even Amazon orders were privately flown to the Bahamas. No prizes for guessing who got  the lion’s share of the sops.  

The markets recovered. Bitcoin was at ~$17,240 and Ethereum moved to $1,320 levels.  Nasdaq rose in early trade. Back home, Sensex and Nifty ended higher on positive global cues. 

ETH’s Off To Shanghai

Ethereum’s finally caught up with the bulls. The token’s up ~9% over the past week. It’s in preparation for the Shanghai upgrade under The Surge where withdrawals will be enabled. 

FYI The Surge is the next phase of development for Ethereum after The Merge. It will increase the network capacity by allowing rollups. 

What’s Shanghai?Think of it as a software update. The Shanghai upgrade, scheduled for March, will allow ETH stakers to withdraw their tokens. Under this, datasets will be broken into smaller chunks called shards to increase the storage space of the blockchain.

Why is it a big deal?There’s been a constant complaint that ETH staked in the blockchain is locked forever. 

Shanghai will change that. It will:

• Allow validators to un-stake Ethereum 

• Reduce gas fees on the network 

• Facilitate more activity via dApps

What’s it good for?About ~16 million ETH valued at ~$20 billion has been staked. When the staked ETH is released, it can be redeployed into DeFi protocols that can bring more crypto to the network and indirectly benefit governance tokens. The news helped Lido’s LDO rise ~70% in a week. 

Sharding will cut down the network congestion and increase the transactions per second. Eventually, users can run an Ethereum node even on personal devices such as computers and smartphones. 

Mastercard’s With Creators 

Mastercard has stepped into the metaverse. Not literally, but through creators. The payments company has tied-up with Polygon to back five web3 creators. It’ll be a learning programme for web3, NFTs, and the metaverse.  

What’s different?The artist accelerator programme by Mastercard will build a study curriculum on the Polygon network. Artists can learn how to mint NFTs to engage fans and get ready for metaverse concerts. Five artists will be shortlisted for the maiden programme. It will be an incubator for creators to make the switch to the blockchain. 

What’s in it for them?The TradFi payments company has been among the first crypto movers. In 2022, it hosted a Grammy week on Roblox where it offered in-game branding, and artists meet-and-greet in the metaverse. It also launched its first-ever music album with 10 artists. Transactions are the name of the game. 

Logan Likes Coffee

Logan Paul won’t sue Coffeezilla. He deleted a video where he had said he would. This is significant if you've been following the tiff between the two. Paul has also apologised. 

Wait, what happened?So Coffeezilla, who is a YouTuber exposing bad actors in the crypto world, put up a series exposing Paul’s crypto project called Cryptozoo. Coffeezilla said people lost money to the tune of $6 million in the project. Paul denied the allegations. Then said he’d see Coffeezilla in court. Now, it seems he won’t. 

So was there a scam or not?From the looks of it. Cryptozoo was supposed to be a game that let players “breed” NFTs like pets. Then you could earn money from different kinds of cross breeding and creating your own NFTs and selling them. Within a month of launch, the developer team split from Paul. And as Coffeezilla explained, the game was pretty much abandoned. And Paul’s fanboys lost money. A lot of money.

Touch Me, Smell Me!

Remember the Consumer Electronics Show (CES)? It is the biggest in-person conclave of all things new and exciting in consumer tech. And this year, centrestage is the metaverse advance version, if you will. Companies have showcased the ability to include touch and smell in virtual reality this year. 

So is it buzzing?Not really. There is scepticism among attendees but these are early days, so who knows? A report on the metaverse expects it to be a big opportunity. As big as $5 trillion by 2030 but an important component for this to happen is to make the metaverse experience more IRL. 

What experiences are we talking?A device that lets you create scents based on eight different aromas. Headsets making touch a part of the package. Dating apps want to incorporate such tech and there could be potential medical and underwater use cases. Interesting, but maybe not path breaking. Yet. 

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