Presented by CryptoLink.Tech

Volume 1 | Edition 11 | August 31, 2023

Opening Thoughts

Dear CryptoLinkers, DeFiers, Swappers, Traders, Stakers, PFPers, Gamers, Degens, Anons… ALL THE HOMIES,

We are back! (sort of)

I managed to get my phone stolen in an airport and then came home to a hurricane approaching, so while I’m still gathering myself from the trip I think it’s safe to say the team as a whole is back to full strength!

The trip, as I mentioned last week, was incredible for many reasons. Our team met for the first time in person over a 4 day workshop in Spain and made monumental progress towards achieving our goals for this business.

I’m happy to report that the team is as efficient and aligned as we ever have been to a factor of 10. It’s an exciting time to be a part of the CryptoLink family and it’s great that you are all on this journey with us!

In other news, we are up to edition eleven of Chain Reaction already. Rain or shine, you can expect this bad boy to be in your inbox on Thursdays! As you may have heard me say before, we plan on building out a larger media brand powered by CryptoLink. We will begin to take the first steps in expanding the brand that brings you Chain Reaction over the course of the next few weeks.

Why am I telling you this now instead of in CryptoLink Connect?

Because I don’t have anything concrete to give you yet ☹️ 

Have no fear, we are working on some pretty incredible things in the media department and plan on rolling out more news on that as we have it.

I can tell you this, we may be working with some well known cats in the local DeFi sphere on a podcast/show. I’m confident we are going to make it happen and if it does the CryptoLink brand and our team will have the opportunity to see a much larger audience that we currently have!

Overall we don’t have much in CryptoLink Connect this week but you will find a few short updates!

I’ll wrap up the Intro with something pertaining to one of the themes of our trip,

Struggle is important.

Take it from someone much smarter than myself, @RektDiomedes (Great follow)

Let’s get into this week!

Cryptolink Connect

The latest and greatest in the CryptoLink world!

Pipeline Update: Graphics!

Marketing “Monday”: Thirsty Thursday Edition

Due to the trip lasting until Tuesday, Rob and I decided to postpone this week’s “Marketing Monday” Twitter Space until this afternoon!

Stop by the Gauss Twitter account at the normal time (3PM EST) this afternoon to catch some marketing talk with some sharp people!

World Of Web3

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

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: 10 Trends That Will Likely Blow Up

Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, recently listed out his Top Ten ideas/concepts that developers need to be working on.

Right. Now.

Now, Cointelegraph did an excellent job writing a bit more extensively about this, but I’ll sum them up here in a list. Here’s the Cointelegraph article if you want to read more words. (https://cointelegraph.com/news/coinbase-ceo-brian-armstrong-reveals-crypto-ideas-hes-excited-for)

• “Flatcoin” - A stablecoin that tracks inflation and preserves purchasing power. Potential avenues would be algorithmically controlling supply or backing it with a “basket of assets”.

•  On-chain Reputation - A way to connect a user’s on-chain activity to their wallet ENS for fraud prevention, lending, and ratings.

• On-chain Ad Service - A smart contract system to pay out based on on-chain activity.

• “On-chain Capital Formation” - Decentralized access to fundraising and ICOs.

• On-Chain/Crypto Work Marketplace - Cough W3RKS Cough… I must’ve caught a cold in Europe! Seriously, W3RKS is doing this the best.

• Privacy for L2s - Armstrong believes there should be options to have private L2 ledgers that aren’t on the public L1 that it helps scale.

• Software for “Network States” - These would be tools that help “startup” cities manage governance, voting, and taxes on-chain.

• On-Chain Gaming - I tell you wombats this all the time.

• Fully Peer-To-Peer Exchanges - RBX is working on something like this in the on-ramp/off-ramp sector with SkipShift.

• Real-World Asset Tokenization - ex.) Real-Estate

There you have it — One of the most powerful people in all of crypto just told you what needs to be built! Either build them or watch out for someone else to build them, either way you’ll be early to something. 😉 

GensLer Takes Another ‘L’: Judge Rules in Favor of Grayscale

The SEC got hit with another right hook from its own checks & balances this week in a legal ‘loss’ to Grayscale.

The judge ruled that the SEC did not provide ample justification for denying Grayscales request to transform its Bitcoin Trust into a traditional ETF. (Cointelegraph, 2023)

This comes on the tail-end of some unfortunate times at the SEC with the Ripple lawsuit and the most powerful financial entity in the world filing for a Bitcoin ETF (BlackRock).

What does this mean for the greater web3, you may ask?

Bloomburg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas says that it could mean bluer skies are in-store for 2023.

Bloomburg has raised the chances of the ETF being approved by ten points, up from 65% before the Grayscale announcement.

If those ETFs get approved… hang on, anon.

We will have to wait and see!

Interchain Intel

Updates and insights from across different blockchain networks.

Flash In the Pan? Friend.Tech Pronounced Dead

Jesse Coughlin from Cointelgraph is writing that the recently booming platform friend.tech is now being proclaimed “dead” by “critics”.

I think calling a project dead and simply citing “critics” could be a bit out there, but there does seem to be evidence of a massive downtrend.

Friend.tech is a social platform that allows the trading of “keys” that enable access to private messages and group chats with other buyers and sellers.

The platform takes 5% in transaction fees, which surpassed $1 million in its first 24 hours. Users were paying up to 1 ETH to get these keys and it attracted popular figures even outside of crypto, such as Faze Banks.

The fun began to slow down quickly. There was a competitor that launched, the CEO of friend.tech made a poorly thought-out decision to limit users that used the competitor, and things took a turn for the worse.

Their fees are down over 80% and transaction volume has nearly come to a halt.

I never used it, but I surely saw a ton of content about it. It’s incredible how fast some of these things come and go.

Was friend.tech just a flash in the pan?

Or does a platform like itself have room to grow in web3?

Is this what on-chain socials will look like?

So many questions…

Tech Trends

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

Enterprise Building On-Chain: Lufthansa Builds On-Chain Loyalty Program

We love news like this!

The second largest airline in Europe (including subsidiaries), Lufthansa, has announced that they are building an on-chain rewards and loyalty program using NFTs on the Polygon network.

The program is run through an app called Uptrip.

Users will be able to directly connect their crypto wallets and trade their NFTs with others to try and complete collections for rewards.

The NFTs will include destinations and different airplanes.

This is a fantastic milestone in the process of onboarding enterprise level business. Everybody loves a good rewards program, why not on-chain?

A great step towards true digital ownership and the ability to trade that ownership.

Lufthansa, alone, carried 108 million passengers in 2022. (Statista, 2023)

Decoded

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

Token Standard Series: ERC-1155 Tokens

Who doesn’t love some flexibility?

That was the thought when the ERC-1155 standard was created for tokens on the Ethereum Virtual Machine.

Before, we talked about two distinct token standards:

• ERC-20 (fungible tokens)

• ERC-721 (non-fungible tokens)

Within these frameworks developers and users alike are a bit hamstrung.

Contracts can only deal in one or the other, meaning a new contract must be deployed for each new token (fungible or not).

This also means a contract can’t wrap both types of standards into one and send those off in what is called a “batch-send” to multiple recipients.

You may be wondering, “I don’t need to do that now, why would I ever need to?”

Games are a big one.

In Massive Multiplayer games users need to interact with and collect both fungible items (currency) and non-fungible items (weapons/armor/items).

Without ERC-1155 each of those tokens would need an individual contract deployed for it… This could be upwards of 100,000 contracts!

These tokens also allow for users to send both an NFT and fungible tokens in the same transaction!

ERC-1155 aren’t widely used, yet. However, the use-case for them is endless and I wouldn’t be surprised to see more projects using them for the sake of interoperability and ease.

Final Byte: Wally’s Wisdom

That’s all I have for you this week, folks!

The rest of this week consists of a lot of grinding on the teams end to put our new processes in place, so if we seem a bit quiet just feel free to ping us in Discord or shoot us a Tweet!

Thanks for tuning in this week, you all make this newsletter a joy to write.

CryptoLink loves you ❤️ 

Oh, and share the newsletter link around! Don’t forget you have a referral link below this with rewards for milestones!

Plus, it’s free to promote your favorite cats on the blockchain 😉 

Best,

Wally
Marketing/Branding/Media
CryptoLink.Tech