Congressional hearings
One of the most notable things happened last week is congressional hearing on crypto. It is one of the largest since Bitcoin has come into place. What happened at Congress last week and what it means?
For starters, the House committee on Financial services held the hearing for almost 5 hours, includingCEOs from FTX, Circle, Paxos, Bitfury, Stellar, and CFO of Coinbase. Tether was supposed to be there but didn’t.
Main points discussed include 1) financial inclusion; 2) financial systemic risks; 3) speculation vs. utility; 4) what regulation is needed.
Basically attendants discussed a series of Qs that most of us in the industry already know. Best highlights come from Brian Brooks (Bitfury) when he defines Web3 on the spot as a network user can read, write and own comparing to Web 1(read only) and Web 2 ( read & write, no user ownership, centralized by big co.) , and accurately set the tone on crypto regulation, explaining U.S. regulators should focus on how to help the country win in a paradigm shift instead of “not losing”, which is, to help Web3 advance instead of chasing its innovators out of the country via nit picking regulations.
Takeaways?
1) The hearing appears to be an “understanding each other” for industry progress instead of a problem pitching one. More friendly than most of us Web3 natives expected given recent SEC statements and rejection of a BTC spot ETF;
2) Industry participants delivered a comprehensive msg on what’s going on: major players are complying with regulation w/ a good faith effort, handling user assets with proper care, enforcing necessary kyc & amls for anti money laundering, and stablecoins (pax, usdc, etc.) have sufficient assets backing. All in all, it is a serious industry which could change ppl’s lives, increase financial system efficiency and transparency.
3) Communications help a WHOLE LOT. After a decade, Web3 industry is out of infancy and getting to the stage of mass adoption. At this stage, working with regulators and delivering the right message to the public is very essential. For any one who’s starting a project in the industry, now it is a must to have a Regulatory and PR strategy.
4) No one likes pure speculative gamblings. If you got lucky by being here early, don’t be a flamboyant asshole. Contribute more, extract less, show off lesser, build together. A bit more of kindness goes a long way.
For a more detailed intern style notes on the hearing visit:
Web 3.3 of the week
3 Articles of the week
Circo Loco by famous cryptohayes:https://cryptohayes.medium.com/circo-loco-53c4b2844c83
TLDR: A rather bear take expecting more tightening macro from the U.S. with tech adoption almost topped in this cycle. From now on until March 22/June 22 outperformed sections maybe P2E or NFT-related which does not rely on global monetary conditions as much. Play extra cautious.
I don’t agree exactly as everything but a very good frame to analysis market/asset performance from a “high perspective”. stay cautious through the year end.
End game by vitalik: https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/12/06/endgame.html
Vitalik infers possible ultimate picture of blockchain scalability: block production may inevitably become centralized, decentralization maybe achieved through other layers such as block validation. Either way, he thinks Ethereum is in a good position with multiple layer 2 developments and scalability researches.
Great Protocol Politics by @balajis: https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/12/11/bitcoin-ethereum-cryptocurrency-web3-great-protocol-politics
An article that explores interaction/similarity of protocol and international policies. A must read as I expect policy and regulatory implications and movements would be one of the major themes for Web3 in the next decade.
3 Tools of the week:
Directory of zkRollup projects: https://www.zkrollups.xyz/ by @joelkite;
A portable, fast and modular toolkit for Ethereum application development: https://www.paradigm.xyz/2021/12/introducing-the-foundry-ethereum-development-toolbox/ by Paradigm;
Web3 explorer by figment: https://hubble.figment.io/;
3 Notable development updates of the week:
Bitcoindevkit v0.14.0 out: https://github.com/bitcoindevkit/bdk/releases/tag/v0.14.0;
Improvements include a new TxBuilder method to embed data via OP_RETURN & updating the Database trait to store the last sync timestamp and block height & integration testing for sending to Taproot addresses.
Ethereum finished its Arrow Glacier upgrade, posting the difficulty bomb to summer 2022: https://ethernodes.org/arrow_glacier
Dot auction round 1 batch 4 finished, with parallel finance winning the 4th slot:https://polkadot.js.org/apps/#/parachains/crowdloan
Thanks for reading through the end here! I enjoyed writing it and hope you enjoy reading it just as much. This newsletter is still in stealth launch mode, don’t hesitate to let me know what you think I should do to make it better for u!