ALPEX Global Weekly Newsletter — December Week 2

As a leading fintech company, ALPEX Global aims to educate people on how this disruptive technology will benefit the entire world. ALPEX Global introduces a variety of subsidiaries including ALPEX Derivatives Exchange, ALPEX Academy, and its own APX Token. With a keen eye on the market, ALPEX Global aims to create a safe, reliable, and flexible trading platform building its core on innovation and sustainability. We utilize our years of broad experience and sharp insights to provide our investors with secure operating systems, complete transaction tools, and various financial resources. Our technology helps investors better understand risk and make more powerful trading decisions.

Overview

Quite a lot happened this week. We heard that Meta’s WhatsApp will accept crypto payments through Novi wallet in the U.S. Mir Protocol is acquired by Polygon in a $400M deal to support ‘groundbreaking ZK Rollup technology’, and Coinbase, Binance, and Decentralized Exchanges go down due to AWS outage. After backlash from the community, OpenSea walks back on its IPO plans, while Vitalik Buterin lays out ETH 2.0’s ‘endgame’ roadmap. These topics and more are covered in this week’s newsletter.

As we begin our newsletter, we want to mention that Meta Platforms Inc.’s cryptocurrency wallet, Novi, will allow users to transfer money through WhatsApp, the social media giant’s messaging app. Furthermore, through Novi Wallet, one of the largest messaging apps, WhatsApp has integrated cryptocurrency transaction technology directly into the app. With Meta Platforms Inc’s cryptocurrency wallet Novi, users will be able to send and receive money using WhatsApp, the messaging app offered by the social media giant.

Last week, Novi director Stephane Kasriel announced that a limited number of people in the United States will be able to participate in its pilot program. According to him, WhatsApp personal messages and calls are not affected by Novi. In response to regulatory concerns, Meta Platforms, formerly Facebook, has scaled back its global plans for rolling out a digital currency called Diem while working on its wallet app. Meta, formerly known as Facebook, has long been working on incorporating cryptocurrency into its apps, especially since the company abandoned plans to create its digital currency due to regulatory concerns.

There seems to be no better time than now. Users of WhatsApp will soon be able to send cryptocurrency to their contacts. Meta has not yet revealed what cryptocurrencies it will support. The ALPEX team is keeping an eye on future developments. Stay connected on our social platforms.

We heard last week that Polygon’s co-founder Mihailo Bjelic had acquired Ethereum scaling startup Mir for $400 million. The Mir team of engineers and cryptographers will join Polygon to create Polygon Zero, a “highly scalable, Ethereum-compatible ZK rollup”. In the wake of Polygon’s acquisition of the Hermez Network (now Polygon Hermez) for $250 million in August, the project has announced that it has purchased the Ethereum scaling startup Mir. Mihailo Bjelic, Polygon’s co-founder, announced the $400 million deal on Thursday, indicating that the startup is developing “groundbreaking ZK technology.” The $400 million deal will lead to Polygon’s new ZK Rollup project.

The MATIC native token for the Polygon network jumped 24% in value over the past 30 days, and year-to-date, the MATIC token value has jumped 11,750% in USD. Additionally, Polygon Hermez costs $0.25 per transfer while ether costs $8.31 per transfer, according to l2fees.info. Several other rollups by Polygon have been announced before the acquisition of Mir.

In November, Polygon Miden, a STARK-based, Ethereum-compatible rollup, and Polygon Nightfall, a privacy-focused rollup, were released. As well as acquiring Mir, Polygon’s co-founder details plans for efficient recursive proofs.

A Plonky2 official announcement will occur in the next few weeks, according to Polygon co-founder. Polygon has $4.88 billion worth of value locked in decentralized finance (DEFI). Polygon defi protocols contain 4.88 billion dollars, which is 1.96% of the $248 billion held across all blockchains, according to defillama.com statistics. Defi protocols that use Polygon include Aave, Quickswap, Sushiswap, Curve, and Balancer. With regard to the Mir acquisition announcement, Bjelic post notes that part of the $400 million deal was done with MATIC tokens.

In an unexpected turn of events, Coinbase, Binance, and Decentralized Exchanges went offline due to an AWS outage. dYdX, a decentralized derivatives exchange, suffered an outage due to a centralized cloud service provided by Amazon. In addition to Coinbase and Binance.US, centralized exchanges were also affected by the outage. It took almost eight hours for the interruption to occur and the service disruption to end. dYdX was back online at the time of publication, according to its status page, but the incident once again raised questions about real decentralization.

The team apologized for the outage and admitted that the platform still relies on centralized services. As a consequence, several comments suggested that the team runs the exchange on more decentralized cloud services, but even those are susceptible to technical issues and outages.

The AWS service status dashboard still reported some difficulties with systems in the US-EAST-1 region as of last week’s update. According to Statista, AWS accounts for nearly 30 percent of the world’s cloud infrastructure services. Many people recently learned that too much reliance on a single centralized service provider is a bad idea. Furthermore, During the interruption, the exchange’s native token fell to $8.80 but immediately recovered when services were restored.

In other news, OpenSea’s new chief financial officer, Brian Roberts, complained a lot to the NFT community after making comments he felt were “inaccurately reported.” The world’s biggest nonfungible token (NFT) exchange has denied plans to go public anytime soon. Brian Roberts, the chief financial officer, sparked a public backlash this week when he said, “It would be foolish not to think about going public.” In OpenSea’s crypto native NFT community, the statement caused an uproar. Many see it as a sellout to institutional investors. Almost all transactions executed on OpenSea are less than $10,000.

Additionally, users were miffed that a share market listing put an end to rumors that the platform planned to airdrop governance tokens to longstanding community members.

NFT’s marketplaces, whether governed by the community or listed on the stock market, are hot properties, recording $2 billion in trading volume from 1.1 million transactions and nearly 250,000 users over the past 30 days. The platform earns 2.5% of every trade, which amounts to more than $50 million in revenue during that timeframe. Roberts resigned from Lyft earlier this week to become OpenSea’s first CFO. With previous experience at Walmart and Microsoft, he has a strong background in tech and retail.

Before concluding this week’s important stories, let’s review one of the key developments regarding Ethereum’s founder. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin outlined his vision for the future of Eth2, which can increase its scalability while meeting high standards for trustlessness and resistance to censorship.

Buterin presented a thought experiment in his weekly blog post titled “Endgame” that explained how the average big blockchain — defined by high block frequency, large blocks, and thousands of transactions per second — can still be considered sufficiently trustless and censorship-resistant. In exchange for this level of scalability, there is the obvious drawback of centralizing block production. However, Buterin’s solutions, as presented in the blog post, do not address the centralization issue, but provide a roadmap for implementation.

Among Buterin’s suggestions, he proposed “a second tier of staking, using low resources,” for distributed block validation; “introduce either fraud-proof or ZK-SNARKS to make users check block validity directly (and cheaply);” and “introduce data availability sampling to let users check block availability [and] add secondary transaction channels to prevent censorship.” This new model allows the production of blocks to remain centralized, but block validation to become trustless and highly decentralized, and specialized anti-censorship magic prevents the block producers from censoring.

Buterin said block production would remain centralized even after implementation of so-called “rollups,” which are layer-two solutions that execute transactions outside of the main Ethereum chain. In October 2020, Buterin presented a roadmap for Ethereum that is rollup-centric.

The majority of Ethereum activity does not fit into any single rollup. He said they all max out at a few hundred transactions per second. Although rollups may contribute to distributed block production, decentralization may not last due to the possibility of cross-domain maximal extractable revenue, or MEV. Despite its name, MEV refers to the maximum amount of value that can be earned from block production over and above standard block rewards and gas fees.

Despite the path to scalability that is taken, Ethereum’s co-founder concluded that it’s likely to block production will be centralized regardless. The advantage of Ethereum’s rollup-centric roadmap is that it’s open to all futures, he said. Since November 2020, when Ethereum began its long transition to proof-of-stake, excitement has been building about the protocol. The highly anticipated London hard fork, which means ETH will become a deflationary asset, took place in August of this year. With the hard fork, EIP-1559 was introduced, which aims to reform the network’s fee market. Since the EIP-1559 has taken effect, over 1 million ETH have already been burned.

In the last section of our weekly roundup, we discuss Reddit’s plans to offer Ethereum crypto rewards in more communities. Despite initially experimenting with crypto token rewards using Ethereum two years ago, Reddit has taken a deliberate approach to scale the program. Additionally, the community appears ready to expand its reach to a much broader audience.

Last week, the site launched a new website for its Community Points beta program and opened up a waitlist form for users and moderators alike. Ineligible subreddits, users earn Community Points by posting and engaging in discussion. Besides being used to purchase features or participate in community governance, the crypto points can potentially be exchanged for other cryptocurrencies or tokens at exchanges, or used for other purposes outside of the community.

Reddit’s site reads: “Community Points are the first step towards a new future for online communities.” The tokens live on the blockchain, which means they are truly owned by the community. The waitlist represents the first big step forward in months for your community. In the future, you can expect even more control and independence-both on and off of Reddit. According to a detailed job listing from October, Reddit is also building an NFT marketplace.

As we approach the end of the year, we will share with you the top news stories of this year, their impact, and what we can expect in the future. Keep an eye on our weekly newsletter and social media platforms to stay up-to-date.

Marketing Summary:

In market news: According to DappRader data, some popular BSC chain games have crashed recently, resulting in a sharp decline in popularity. There was a 42.7% drop in daily users of chain games within the past 30 days, a 35.8% drop in daily transactions, and a 65.5% drop in overall daily users on the BSC chain in the same period.

A recent interview with CNBC featured Khaldoon al-Mubarak, CEO of Abu Dhabi sovereign fund Mubadala Investment Capital. He stated that the fund looks at the crypto ecosystem and has been investing in it. The UAE’s first regulated cryptocurrency exchange was invested in by Mubadala Investment Capital, which manages $243 billion in assets.

Information about the marketing department : We are growing the ALPEX team. Among other positions, we’re searching for an exceptional product manager. Talent acquisition and growth continue to be strong priorities for us. Look out for our announcement for job openings if you would like to join our amazing team.

In celebration of this joyous time of year, ALPEX Team is participating in a secret Santa gift distribution. Everyone has wrapped their gifts and is eager to see the delight on the faces of their teammates. The shared happiness and teamwork at ALPEX are priceless. We would like to thank our leadership, colleagues, advisors, mentors, and all of our workers for your perseverance and effort to deliver great work. The future of ALPEX looks bright, with many exciting projects currently in production and upcoming. Finally, the ALPEX team is ready for ADNEC Blockchain, which will take place from 15–17 December. We will share the happy faces of our team members next week and share more about what’s to come. Stay tuned.

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