The First Global Lottery

gm Bankless Nation,
A billion people play the lottery every year, and the house always wins. In today's essay, David Hoffman makes the case for Megapot, an onchain lottery built on Base that finally lets you be the house.

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Sponsor: MegaETH — Crypto has new apps, finally.

A billion people play the lottery every year. Half of American adults buy a ticket annually. Eighty percent of UK adults do the same. It's the most universally played game on the planet - and yet, despite the fact that the internet reshaped virtually every other industry on Earth, lotteries have barely changed in fifty years.

That’s the motivating force behind Megapot - a startup building a lottery at internet scale. 

I think Megapot is pretty cool, and the vision behind Megapot has a lot of microcosms of so many reasons why Ethereum is cool: disintermediation, democratization, and coordination, all made possible via smart contracts. 

Patrick Lung, Megapot Founder, understands the potential scale of what he’s building, while also simply being an all-around nice dude with a sharp sense of what it takes to find product market fit. 

So, naturally...

📍 Disclosure: Bankless Ventures is an investor in Megapot.

FRIEND & SPONSOR: MEGAETH

We're past "in it for the tech" or "in it for the money." MegaETH is bringing you products worth using, powered by USDM.

Enter the Rabbithole

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WHAT YOU MISSED

The Ethereum Economic Zone

📈 The Asset

• Bitmine purchased another +70k ETH last week
• The Ethereum Foundation staked +20k more ETH
• Forgotten ETH opened for old ETH recoveries

🏛️ The Protocol

• cart00n.eth shipped a map of Ethereum’s earliest smart contracts
• Justin Drake co-authored a paper with Google Quantum AI on cracking Bitcoin + Ethereum signatures via quantum computing

📱 The Apps

• Aave unveiled its V4 protocol on mainnet
• Asphodel is coming to Ethereum via the Kamigotchi creators
• Circle is rolling out Circle Wrapped Bitcoin
• Clanker is launching the Clanker Ecosystem Fund
• Cloudfare intro’d EmDash, a CMS ft. support for Base x402 payments
• Coinbase secured conditional OCC charter approval
• Decentraland launched on Epic Games and Google Play
• Ethervista is looking to be acquired
• Evm.now, a slick new block explorer, has arrived
• Infinex added support for Lighter perps
• Paragraph debuted Publish, an onchain Gumroad friendly to agents
• Safe unveiled Safenet, a self-custodial defense protocol
• ScopeList will continue developing Tally’s gov platform
• Uniswap Foundation projects runway through Jan. 2027 

🤫 The Privacy Stack

• Ethereum researchers proposed Private Information Retrieval for private onchain reads
• Alpha Network, Aztec’s L2 centered around private smart contracts, debuted
• Privacy Pools revealed its latest roadmap plans
• Safe previewed Private Safes at EthCC

🐸 The Culture

• EthCC kicked off this week in Cannes, France
• Alabama granted legal status to DUNA DAOs
• Base announced its 2026 strategy roadmap
• Shape took Protocol Guild’s 1% Pledge

💽 The Tech

• Gnosis and ZisK announced the Ethereum Economic Zone, a new L1-L2 framework focused on synchronous composability
• Linea rolled out its Yield Boost program
• StarkWare published a primer on its new circuit-based recursive proving method
• x402 Foundation will operate under the Linux Foundation umbrella

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WEEKLY ROLLUP

Google's Quantum Warning

Google dropped a quantum warning aimed squarely at crypto, so Ryan and David dug into what it actually means for Bitcoin and Ethereum.

They also cover Trump's Iran speech, what 3 more weeks of conflict could mean for markets and crypto, the lessons of the $285M Drift hack on Solana, Aave V4 going live, the Ethereum Economic Zone, and more.

Tune into this week’s Rollup to catch it all! 👇

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