NFTs and privacy 🕵

Dear Bankless Nation,

My nephew recently started researching NFTs.

He’s the very inquisitive type and he’s already learned how to use Etherscan, so he’s been asking me all sorts of questions about how to use Ethereum and NFTs lately.

Before this week, I’d considered using the Tornado Cash privacy solution to fund a new wallet with a small bit of ETH that I could share with him. The idea? Basic privacy, just to avert some of the awkward but innocent questions he might ask me about my wallet activities.

Then, a few days ago the U.S. Treasury dropped OFAC sanctions, which are normally used on people, on the Tornado Cash protocol itself. Now Americans that use Tornado can face 30 years in prison!

The rationale is that North Korean hackers used Tornado, so now the rest of the free world will be criminals if they do the same. What about the internet, should we ban that too since the bad guys use it?

Tornado’s code is free speech and its infra is a public good, open to anyone. In a free society, we shouldn’t cede everyone’s right to basic financial privacy just to counter North Korea. We should go after the enemies of freedom harder in all the other ways that are possible as free peoples. That’s what makes us free and have the high ground in the first place!

I say all this because in a certain sense the attack on Tornado Cash represents an attack on crypto and NFTs altogether. So if ever there was a time to protest for the sake of blockchain privacy, it’s now. In the meantime, thanks for reading everyone, and have a great weekend ✌️

-WMP

🛒 General NFT News

• Arbitrum Nova, an L2 for gaming and social applications, is now open to the public.
• OpenSea announced updates to its copymint and verification systems and its stolen items policy.
• Vitalik Buterin proposed an NFT privacy system involving stealth addresses for ERC721s.

🏆 Collectibles

• CryptoPunks, Rare Apepe YC, and 8liens NFT topped the 7-day trading volume charts this week:

• Finiliar (the project I wrote about back in March) begins its mint on August 18th:

• Anata launched its NFT breeding mechanic.
• Yuga Labs welcomed Danny Greene, formerly MeebitsDAO’s general manager, as the company’s Meebits brand lead.

🎨 Art

• Async Art opened to all creators.
• Gallery migrated to its own NFT indexer.

🎮 NFT Gaming

• Axie Infinity kicked off Origin Season 0, which will last for 30 days.
• Fractional built a binder tool for Parallel Parasets:

💽 Music

• Jonathan Mann of SongADAO just unveiled SongADEX, a discovery and leaderboard dashboard for his song traits:

🌐 Virtual Worlds

• Bank of England said growing use of cryptocurrencies in metaversal contexts could pose systemic risks to international financial stability.
• Webaverse minted out.

💎 DeFi x NFTs

• ImmutableX kicked off a new trading rewards program.
• Sudoswap is now averaging +300 ETH worth of daily volume:

Action steps

• 📸 Watch The CC0 Debate on Overpriced JPEGs

• 📸 Watch interviews with actress Ashley Benson and Improbable’s Herman Narula on Overpriced JPEGs

• 🌳 Watch interviews with Orca Protocol’s Chase Chapman and BrightID’s Adam Stallard on Green Pill

• 🧐 Catch up on my other write-ups from this week: 

  • 💚 NFTs are going green

  • 🐻 How to earn in a bear market (NFT edition)