Great Success 👍

Dear Bankless Nation,

Here’s a recap of the biggest crypto news in the third week of September.

The Merge

When the White House reported last week that the carbon footprint from proof-of-work mining would accelerate climate change, they weren’t referring to Ethereum. 👀

Seven years in the making, the milestone shift to proof-of-stake finally happened this week.

What happened in Merge week? ETH miners power down, bagpipe-style.

With that, Ethereum mining difficulty plummets.

The Merge goes smoothly.

“The only chart that matters post-Merge” - Arthur Hayes

One validator got slashed.

The mainstream media – New York Times, CNBC, CBS – turns its attention to Ethereum. Budweiser says hi to the community.

The Merge overall?

🛠 Looking to stake your ETH post-Merge? See simplestakers.info

ETH PoW

Leading up to the Merge, there was a lot of talk around miners supporting a PoW version of Ethereum (ETHW), led by prominent miner Chandler Guo.

The fork isn’t live yet, but ETHW is already trading on several exchanges in the form of IOUs. ETHW is currently sitting at ~$10, down 79% from the time of the Merge.

Hashrate on the chain suggests that miner support for the fork hasn’t been that spectacular either.

Miners instead, are flocking to the 2016 forked Ethereum Classic (ETC), and some lesser-known chains like Ergo and Ravencoin.

Hashrate on these chains shot up 2-6x in the day after the Merge.

On more established PoW chains like Monero or Litecoin, hashrate hasn’t spiked as well.

Web3 News Roundup

Infura announces launch of decentralized network

Infura is a centralized node provider that runs nodes on the behalf of users, providing them with access to on-chain data. It’s a critical piece of middleware in the Web3 tech stack that is used by popular protocols like Metamask and Brave, and facilitates billions of daily requests.

Starbucks + Polygon

Starbucks is launching its “Starbucks Odyssey” Web3 experience in collaboration with Polygon.

This lets Starbucks loyalty program members earn and purchase digital collectibles in the form of a NFT via the Polygon network

Solana NFTs at ATH

Data from The Block shows NFT mints on Solana racking all-time-highs at the 300k mark.

Other news:

• A South Korean court issues an arrest warrant for Terra founder Do Kwon
• A new Chainalysis report shows China back in top 10 of cryptocurrency usage
• Microstrategy plans to sell $500M stock to buy more Bitcoin
• The SEC sets up a new office for crypto asset filing
• BNB Chain launches testnet for its zk-rollup
• Abra Bank launches as the first U.S. state chartered bank
• Opera browser now supports Metamask

Here’s what we have lined up next week.

1. Ben is showing us the best DeFi business models
2. William is dropping a tactic on how to run your own Ethereum validator
3. Morgan Housel joins us on the podcast to talk about The Psychology of Crypto

See you next week.

- Donovan