Bitfinity Weekly: From Memecoins to EdCon with Bitfinity

Welcome to Issue #54 of Bitfinity Weekly for our #BITFINIANS community. If this newsletter was forwarded to you, sign up here.

What's in Today's Email?

• Global Crypto News
• This Week in our Blog
• NFT Market Bytes
• Tweet of the Week
• Meme Time
• A Matter of Opinion

Global Crypto News

👬 EdCon:  Dominic Williams hinted at a closer an early release for the first stage of the Ethereum Chain-Key integration; pencilled in for late July, the integration will allow canisters to control smart-contracts on Ethereum, and will mark a closer integration between the two networks. For the Bitfinity EVM, the integration will enable liquidity to flow through the network as a settlement layer for both ZK-based and non ZK-based Rollups.  

👬 A Tale of Two Bens: Two crypto influencers, Ben Armstrong (BitBoy) and Ben.eth, have found themselves in a series of controversies these past few weeks with their involvement in memecoin $BEN. Armstrong tweeted that he wouldn't sell his share for six months, only to dump his entire bag just one week after his promise. Ben.eth has moved on to launch another questionable coin, called $PSYOP, which has some extremely concerning details in its smart contract.

👁️ Eye Scanner Darkly: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's cryptocurrency project, Worldcoin, has reportedly raising $100 million for a new round of financing. News of the fund raise has brought scrutiny and criticism to the project, as many people find the thought of verifying "unique personhood" by allowing an "Orb" device to scan their iris more than a little concerning.

☹️ Nobody Liked That: Hardware wallet manufacturer Ledger found themselves at the center of social media outrage this week, following a series of blunderous tweets after the announcement of their "Recover" subscription service. The service, which allows seed phrase recovery, potentially makes a backdoor exploit possible, putting customer wallets at risk. Ledger poured gasoline over the fiery Twitter discussions by tweeting, then deleting, that the backdoor has always existed and that it has "always been possible to <...> facilitate key extraction".

🔌 Truly Offline: In the wake of the Ledger update scandal, crypto native startup Keyp has gotten more attention for their Game Wallet (currently in development). The project garnered modest attention in January, when dev @CupOJoseph previewed a Pokemon-style seed generator. Although the product will be sold as a Game Boy cartridge, allowing original Nintendo Game Boy models to be used as a wallet, the software will be open source, available for everyone.

❌ Farewell to Oz?: The Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC) has terminated Binance's financial service license, forcing the exchange to close its derivatives access to Australian cusomers. While this does not affect Binance's spot exchange service, customers are nonetheless concerned about the future of Binance in Australia. Especially in light of Binance's shuttering its Canadian operations, it seems likely that the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world might be facing more regulatory problems in the months to come.

This Week In Our Blog

The entire crypto community is buzzing about Ordinals. Let's get familiar with the basics of what they are, how they work, and why everyone is talking about them.

Bitcoin Ordinals are Taking Over

Close to five million ordinal inscriptions have been recorded to date on the BTC chain. But what are Ordinals, why the ordinal craze, and why now? What are Ordinals A layer 2 protocol on the BTC blockchain, sometimes called a “digital artefact”, Bitcoin Ordinals are a type of NFT which

Bitfinity BlogDaniel M

Arbitrum has quickly built up an impressive reputation since the chain launched. Take a deep dive with us into why this L2 blockchain has been so successful:

Arbitrum: The Ethereum L2 Solution Taking the Crypto World by Storm

Discover how Arbitrum, the optimistic rollup layer 2 solution, addresses network congestion on the Ethereum network, and how it differs from other layer 2 solutions…

Bitfinity BlogHans

Say hello to our partners at Lunatics! In this special guest post, they explain their Genesis collection of 777 fine art NFTs that evolve over time.

The Evolution of a Lunatic

We’re evolving every day, and so will each and every Lunatic minted in our Genesis Collection of 777 fine art NFTs.

Bitfinity BlogBianca Michel

We're excited to announce that the Bitfinity Network has integrated its own block explorer, which allows users to monitor and navigate the Bitfinity ecosystem!

A New Block Explorer for the Bitfinity EVM

The new block explorer for the Bitfinity EVM, build on the Internet Computer. A go-to tool for developers, investors, researchers, and regulators interested in the Bitfinity EVM.

Bitfinity BlogHans

Crypto traders and web3 builders alike have been observing the Ethereum blockchain with eagle eye focus, as transaction finalization was halted twice recently. Not sure what that means? We've got you covered:

Ethereum Issues Patch Following 25-Minute Chain Halt

The Ethereum Beacon Chain has experienced some issues of late, with transaction finalization being halted on two separate occasions on the 11th and 12th of May. New blocks were still being proposed, but unknown issues were preventing proposed blocks from being finalized. Finality denotes the comple…

Bitfinity BlogDaniel M

NFT Market Bytes

🤍 Milady and Milady Accessories: Milady has been the focus of the entire NFT world since Elon Musk tweeted a Milady meme on May 10th. Since then, not only has price and trading volume spiked, but the top ten trending collections on Opensea have been dominated by Milady derivatives, like Bored Miladys (an unofficial Bored Apes x Milady parody collection).

🎨 Satoshi's (Artistic) Vision: Part of the Ordinals controversy is over the purist view of Bitcoin as a store of value, not as a blockchain that hosts and transacts NFTs. However, it seems that the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, played an important part in facilitating a primitive NFT trade between artist Sabunir and an unknown buyer to the sum of 500 $BTC.

🐧 Flying Off the Shelves: Pudgy Penguins has launched their first physical IP items--a line of children's toys branded as "Pudgy Toys". Reminiscent of nostalgic brands like Beanie Babies and Neopets, Pudgy Toys come with a birth certificate that introduces new customers to Pudgy World, where they can explore a cartoon environment and play games with other Pudgy world members.

🤑 Blending Profits: Blend, an NFT-based lending platform launched by Blur, a leading NFT marketplace, has hit a milestone of 100,000 $ETH in total volume. Blend currently supports six NFT collections, deemed as "bluechips" (those significant enough to withstand price volatility).

Tweet of the Week

Did you know you can easily launch your own memecoin through Bitfinity? Check out our guide on how to get started ASAP!

Meme Time

A Matter of Opinion:

EdCon kicked off this week with much gusto, featuring animated talks from core members of the Ethereum Foundation and the IC's very own Dominic Williams. The representation of Dominic Williams at the event was a landmark for the IC, and hinted at the Foundation's intention to work more closely with Ethereum community in future.

It seems blockchains are moving to an ever-more integrated world, and the narrative of "Ethereum + Internet Computer = World Computer" is one that is embraced, with the EdCon panel acknowledging the unique contributions made by the Internet Computer in the field of blockchain. With this mindset, we as a community need to ask what we can do for both Ethereum and Bitcoin as ecosystems. We have the power to scale both: provide DAO infrastructure for ERC-20s, settle cross-chain transactions. With this in mind the IC seems poised to become a powerful infrastructure orchestration layer for web3.