Chain Reaction 
Presented by CryptoLink.Tech

Volume 1 | Edition 9 | August 17, 2023

Opening Thoughts

August 17, 2023.

Wow.

Sometimes it’s hard to believe how fast time goes by in this space. It was right around this time last year that Atlas gave the go-ahead to Cletus and I to start working on a rebrand for Printer Financial.

Amazing how far we have come.

Our team has spent over a year and a half building bonds and trust all through a computer screen.

Finally, we are getting together in person.

This is an incredibly exciting time for our team, and you are going to be able to be a part of it!

I won’t give away all of the details right here though. Catch the rest in CryptoLink Connect!

Let’s jump into it for the week.

Cryptolink Connect

The latest and greates in the CryptoLink ecosystem!

Expansion Updates: Base and Arbitrum

If you have been paying attention the last few weeks then you probably noticed that we are heading to a couple new places soon!

INK warps for Base and Arbitrum have both been started and that’s just the beginning!

Our outstanding developer and CFO, Druuu, is updating the team on Friday in regards to the Validator reservation deployment on both of those chains. This will mark the official start to launching there!

I personally hate when we get updates on Fridays because it’s after I write Chain Reaction for the week — However, Druuu is kind of a bada** and I would not dare mess with his chi. 😅

Be sure to stay tuned on Friday for a possible announcement!

You will want to be quick to the trigger when those Validator reservations go live! 😉

Network = Networth: AnyToAny Competition Goes Live, Receives Additional Update

I love a good competition.

This week we launched the first ever AnyToAny referral competition!

We decided that the referral links are a very cool idea, but the community deserves more.

Push out AnyToany.io using your personal referral link and get your network to use it!

The top referral wallets in volume will get a pretty awesome reward on the 26th.

The full intructions on how to participate can be found in the X thread that I have been referencing here!

In some related news, AnyToAny.io got another small UI update this last week.

By clicking the link button you will copy your own referral link to your clipboard, making it significantly easier to share with your friends!

Happy Swapping! 💜

CryptoLink Takes On Europe: First Team Off-Site Meet-Up

This is my favorite news for the week.

We have teased it here and there for a while now, but the time is finally upon us.

On Sunday, Cletus and I rendezvous in Philadelphia and fly off to Spain where we will be meeting up with Atlas, Druuu, and Pista at an undisclosed location in/around Barcelona!

This trip will be incredibly work-heavy with 3 days of workshop intensive itinerary so we can begin to take the next steps necessary in becoming an enterprise-level business.

Now, that probably sounds fairly boring to anyone not interested in the specific direction of the company…

However…

I wouldn’t let a good media opportunity like this go to waste. 😎

While on the trip we are going to try our hand at documenting it for our community!

My goal with the final production is to give everyone a bit of an inside look at what it means to really dig in and build a bootstrapped business. Along with that we will be providing everyone a chance to see our team interact with eachother in-person for the very first time.

I’m so excited for this.

I really don’t know what the final product will look like yet, but I do know that we are going to have a great time making it.

The latter half of the trip will consist of the team exploring Italy for a bit of relaxation.

The best part is that you will get to be a part of it.

Now, some housekeeping things…

The team will still be readily available for anything that comes up on the user side.

We do want everyone to remember that the entire executive team will be in the same timezone for over a week. This means the times where we are most active may change during those 9 days.

Please be extra patient with response times, though we don’t forsee any problems!

Next update will be coming from Spain 🙂 

World Of Web3

This section covers major recent developments and trends in the crypto and AI worlds.

Spy Kids & Nothing Burgers: Machi Backs Out of Lawsuit

It was like edition 2 when we covered MachiBigBrother’s lawsuit against famous on-chain sleuth ZachXBT for defamation.

It seems as though Machi has had some second thoughts.

This past week he and Zach both announced that the lawsuit has been halted and that Zach made a few edits to the post in question.

Here’s what is important:

Neither of these guys are likely to have the money to sustain a high-level legal battle like this.

They both knew that, or atleast Machi realized it before it was too late.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, ZachXBT provides a great service to the crypto community. Machi has provided roughly 0 real value to the space since he has been here.

This smells a whole lot like Spy Kids and nothing burgers, don’t you think, anon?

Either way I’m glad Zach no longer has to deal with the looming legal stuff. He has also set up a refund system for those who donated to his legal battle:

Orange Pill Distribution: Bitcoin Education In El Salvador

News like this makes me happy and annoyed at the same time.

First, huge shout out to El Salvador for this among many other huge improvements they have made in the last year.

Students as young as 12 years old are being taught how to send and recieve ‘sats’ which are the lowest denomination of Bitcoin.

Members of El Salvador’s Bitcoin Beach attend classrooms every Friday to teach students the importance of cryptocurrency and how to use it safely and properly.

According to its whitepaper, Bitcoin Beach is a movement to ensure Bitcoin’s potential is realized by helping those who have been excluded from the banking system. (Cointelegraph, 2023)

According to Cointelegraph around 70% of El Salvadorians are unbanked. This has been a major point of focus for President Bukele. Bukele has been increasingly vocal in his support of Bitcoin and other tech innovations.

El Salvador even recently eliminated income tax for tech-focused businesses based in El Salvador. (Reuters, 2023)

On one hand I am extremely happy for the people of El Salvador and impressed that the government of such a small, under-appreciated nation can see the vision.

On the other hand, I am increasingly annoyed that the United States continues to generally push back on crypto usage and education.

While children in developing nations are being taught to utilize and master the technologies that will dominate the next 50-100 years, kids in the United States are still taking math tests by hand.

My father is a teacher at a highschool in the Deep South.

They recently had a professional development workshop on emerging technologies and how to handle students using them, namely AI tools like GPT.

Only one teacher other than my father stood up in support of not only allowing students to use AI tools, but teaching them to use them properly and efficiently.

It seems that the U.S. education system is adamant about putting our youth behind the eight ball.

Hats off to El Salvador, though. I don’t want my rant about United States education to take away from the amazing things they are doing there.

I think a visit is in order…

Hopefully the Boss sees this.

Regulatory Dichotomy: Canadian Regulation Experiment Yields Give-And-Take

There are a ton of articles on Canadian crypto regulation right now, so I won’t focus on the meat of the legislation.

Although, after reading a few of them it seems to have some interesting consequences for better or worse.

Canada has built a reputation of being a sandbox-type environment when it comes to regulation. They have tended to stay away from the SEC ways of bait & switch tactics and murky regulation.

This hasn’t come without it’s drawbacks.

The heavy-handed regulations in Canada have driven a ton of exchanges out of the country. Binance and ByBit are two of the larger entities that have exited due to the strict rules and high cost of running a crypto exchange in Canada. (Cointelegraph, 2023)

While regulation is needed, we have seen this story in the United States before.

Regulatory capture is a phrase that I think may be applicable here in the near future in the West.

That’s a lot, I know. But if i’m going to be talking about it then you should have access to the definition.

If you didn’t read that i’ll sum it up.

Highly regulated industries tend to heavily influence the regulators over time. Essentially, regulation consolidates the playing field and those companies are then able to make lots of money and use it to lobby the regulators.

Stigler said that the industry is typically more motivated and prepared to lobby the regulators than the public, and frankly he’s right.

Anyways, you are probably wondering how this applies.

Canada has driven out a lot of competion in the crypto market and allowed a few wealthier entities to take hold in the highly regulated environment.

While Cointelegraph reports that the increased regulation has brought an influx of institutional parties investing in crypto, this increased action within crypto can come with it’s downsides.

If a handful of powerful entities are the gateways in, out, and around the crypto worls then we may just find ourselves in a scenerio that is eerily familiar…

Think JP Morgan, CitiGroup, Bank Of America…

Starting to see where I’m going with this?

Happy to see new faces in crypto, not happy to see the big dogs get bigger all the time.

We shall see how this pans out.

Interchain Intel

Updates and insights from across different blockchain networks.

Layer Meme: Shibarium Blockchain Launches

This one is for the memecoin lovers.

Shiba Inu officially launched it’s Ethereum layer-2 blockchain this week called Shibarium.

Shibarium went through months of testing and apparently reached 21 million wallets which is pretty solid for test-net numbers.

The Shibarium ecosystem on launch consisted of ShibSwap (their own DEX), BONE as a native gas coin, a metaverse and some web3 games.

The interesting part is that Shibarium will be using a PoP (Proof of Participation) validation model.

I had absolutely no idea what that meant before I read about Shibarium, but we are going to dig into that in this week’s Tech Trends so don’t worry!

A user must lock 10,000 BONE in order to run a validator.

Should we head to Shibarium, anon?

Let us know on Twitter!

High Spirits: Fantom DEX Saved By Fellow Ecosystem Project

So all in the course of a week SpiritSwap almost shut down and then was saved/acquired by a competitor.

Yes, you read that correctly.

Our beloved SpiritSwap was possibly going to shut down after the carnage to their treasury post-MultiChain exploit.

Our Team had been keeping a close eye on the situation as our liquidity is hosted there, but it seems a solution has been found.

SpiritSwap was initially asking for funds in the 5 digit range to replenish some of the treasury and in-turn the entity funding that would take control of SpiritSwap forever.

Fellow DEX and NFT project ‘Power’ stepped up to the plat and went above and beyond the call to action.

Sheeeeeeeeesh!

Power was not messing around and clearly saw a great business opportunity to acquire a compeitor and a recognizable brand in the Fantom ecosystem.

I don’t know a ton about Power but I will ahve to start doing a deep dive after this!

I believe that SpiritSwap will now remain fully operational and we shouldn’t have to do anything on the CryptoLink end. We will continue to monitor the situation regardless. 🙂 

Base Breach: RocketSwap Hacked for Six Figures

No one is ever safe it seems. ☹️ 

Popular DEX RocketSwap was brute force hacked on August 14th for 471 ETH, or ~$865,000.

RocketSwap has acknowledged the hack and has since released somewhat of a ‘recovery plan’…

Now, I truly feel for these cats.

This sucks all the time no matter the circumstance.

However, asking the attacker for the funds back seems like a fairly weak recovery plan…

I commend them for trying to put out the best plan possible but I hope recovery doesn’t hinge on the bad guy doing good guy stuff…

Fingers crossed they get this figured out!

Tech Trends

Here, we explore the latest technological advancements and innovations in the blockchain space.

Pay To Play, But Play By The Rules: Breaking Down Proof of Participation

You’ve heard of Proof of Work.

You’ve heard of Proof of Stake.

But, have you heard of Proof of Participation?

This is the consensus model that Shibarium and some other layer-2 blockchains are using though it’s still fairly new.

The model is pretty simple.

Stake a flat amount of blockchain native coin to run a validator. In Shibarium’s case this would be BONE.

The consensus model then chooses validators based on the quality of their prior block contributions.

Think of it like a point system.

When a validator lies or does bad work they are penalized points. When they do good work and tell the truth they gain points.

As validators gain points and rise the ranks of the quality scoreboard, they are allowed to add more blocks to the chain.

This system ensures that consensus is not dependant on a race to stake the most (PoS) but is not as energy inefficient as Proof of Work (PoW).

I personally think this is pretty cool. I don’t know a ton about it, but the idea sounds great.

Reward the validators that do good work and penalize those who do bad work. Don’t leave room for 51% attacks while also limiting the impact on the power grid.

Seems pretty solid.

So when someone is asking about “that new model that Shib is using”, you can now sound like the smartest cat in the room. 😉 

Decoded

In this section, we decode complex blockchain and cryptocurrency concepts into understandable language.

Token Standard Series Part II: ERC-20 Tokens

This one is simple because if you are reading this then you probably use these every day.

ERC-20 tokens are fungible onchain assets. Open your MetaMask, look through all your tokens… they are all probably ERC-20 unless you are looking at NFTs.

ERC-20 is the token standard for fungible assets on Ethereum. This is the same standard that is used by just about all EVM blockchains, meaning your MATIC is also ERC-20!

The standards for ERC-20 are as follows:

• TotalSupply: The total number of tokens that will ever be issued

• BalanceOf: The account balance of a token owner's account

• Transfer: Automatically executes transfers of a specified number of tokens to a specified address for transactions using the token

• TransferFrom: Automatically executes transfers of a specified number of tokens from a specified address using the token

• Approve: Allows a spender to withdraw a set number of tokens from a specified account, up to a specific amount

• Allowance: Returns a set number of tokens from a spender to the owner

Any token launching on Ethereum or an EVM blockchain must be launched with these standard functions.

I told you this one was simple!

It’s hard to imagine trying to navigate tokens that don’t have all of those previously mentioned functions…

I guess that’s why Vogelsteller thought this was a good idea. 🧠

Final Byte: Wally’s Wisdom

Another week in the books.

I got smarter this week because of Chain Reaction. Writing this forces me to stay up-to-date on all of the latest in web3. Then I get the pleasure of passing that info on to all of you!

Thanks for stopping by again this week.

Chain Reaction doesn’t happen without the people that read it.

Stay tuned for those Validator reservation announcements coming Friday! Also, be sure to watch our socials over the next two weeks to catch bits of our team meet-up!

Also,

I love you for reading this. ❤️ 

Best,

Wally
CMO CryptoLink.Tech

ZEALY CODE: VIVALAWALRUS