Everyone loves Solana

Good morning! Welcome to The Daily Moon. Elon Musk hasn’t figured out Twitter yet. But Cardano’s Charles Hoskinson apparently knows the route to profitability. He’s pitched a decentralised Twitter powered by Cardano and Dogecoin. A Musk-worthy idea, indeed.  

The markets were shaky. Bitcoin was at $20,700 levels while Ethereum fell below $1,600. Nasdaq rose in early trade. Back home, Sensex and Nifty gained on a rise in IT and auto stocks.   

Solana’s The Showstopper 

Suddenly, the world wants to be on Solana. Helium has planned a mobile network for Solana users, Google’s planned a Solana validator, and Beeple will bring 3D NFTs to the blockchain. Circle’s Euro stablecoin will also launch on Solana in 2025.  

What’s buzzing at SOL? Solana wants to go mainstream. That means more smartphones, decentralised application (dApp) stores, and technology partnerships. The idea is to allow anyone, anywhere, to build on Solana. When more developers build on it, Solana becomes more relevant. Here’s what has happened so far: 

1. Helium’s parent Nova Labs has built a crypto-powered cellular service called Helium Mobile. This will be the SIM card that powers Solana’s Saga phones.  

2. NFT artist Beeple will debut on Solana through immersive NFTs. So far, he has only made art on Ethereum.

3. Solana wants to integrate crypto with communication via smartphones. These mobile phones will have wallets to store crypto keys and also host dApps on the Solana store. It’s expected to launch in 2023. 

In addition, Google will bring the Blockchain Node Engine to Solana to enable dApp activity. What’s attracted companies to Solana is the blockchain’s lower costs and faster transaction rate. Ethereum’s TPS (transactions per second) is ~25, while Solana’s TPS is ~3,500. 

SOL at $40?Solana gained ~8% in the past week. The TVL or Total value locked has increased by 4.2% to ~$915.9 million over the past 15 days. TVL is the number of crypto funds deposited in a DeFi protocol. The bull may continue if dApp, DeFi, and NFT numbers hold on. And no outages, please. 

Circle Preps For Insta-Redemptions

Your USDC won’t get stuck, ever. Or at least that’s what Circle promises. Circle has set aside funds in the Circle Reserve Fund to ensure that users can redeem their tokens whenever they want.

Future readyThe crypto market crashed after the Terra de-peg. Firms such as 3AC and Celsius went bankrupt, with millions of customer funds stuck. Circle wants to stay cautious. It has partnered with global asset manager BlackRock to run the reserve. BlackRock will offer investment options for the reserves in the Circle Reserve Fund. About 20% of the reserves will be cash and 80% will be short-term US government bonds. 

USDC and beyondUSDC will expand to newer networks such as Arbitrum, Cosmos, Optimism, Polkadot, and NEAR in 2023. With a Singapore crypto licence in hand, Circle will soon handle cross-border payments and domestic payments in the city-state. 

OpenSea’s Sketchy Royalty  

After a rather long wait, the NFT marketplace OpenSea on Saturday revealed its plans for NFT creator royalties. And creators haven’t taken it well.

What does it say?The big takeaways are: 

1. Creators should decide whether to enforce royalties on their projects. 

2. It is launching a tool for on-chain enforcement of creator fees for new collections that went into force on November 8.

3. There is no clarity yet on what happens to the existing projects. A final call will be taken by December 8 after getting community feedback.

So what’s the issue?OpenSea is mum about the royalty on existing projects. In the future, royalty payments may become optional and creators aren’t thrilled. Plus, there is a blacklist option that will prevent NFTs sales on rival platforms with zero or optional royalty. Creators call this anti-competitive, especially since OpenSea itself has refused to honour royalties in the past. 

ICYMI We wrote about the royalty tussle between creators and NFT platforms. You can read it here.

Can The Midterms Reshape Crypto?

The US midterms are just a day away. It’s not US President Joe Biden’s headache alone. Whether the Blues or the Reds take the US Congress, there'll be immediate after-effects for crypto. Whoever wins will decide what to do with crypto assets. 

Here are the two most important proposals that the industry will watch out for:

The DCCPAThis is the Senate Agriculture Committee’s Digital Commodities Consumer Protection Act (DCCPA). The Bill proposes crypto tokens be treated as “digital commodities”. To simplify, this tones down SEC’s anti-crypto stance. However, some of the vague wording in the draft needs to be reworked to make DeFi projects more viable. 

The stablecoin legislationA draft bill wants non-bank issuers of stablecoins to be regulated. Nobody knows who the regulator is, yet. At least there will be clarity soon. 

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