Things are going just great

That’s if all you care about are numbers and cheap engagement.

Story One

EU banning anonymous wallets?!

At least, that was the tenor from Crypto Twitter over the weekend after seeing that the EU was about to introduce further regulation. As so often, rumors spread far and wide, with publications like Cointelegraph reporting that this would mean people cannot send more than 1k euros to self-hosted wallets without additional identity checks. Or, to put it as they did, “The EU is banning self-custodial wallets.” 

Sorry to break crypto’s solipsism, but we’re not all that important. The new laws are a broad initiative to reign in financial crime. Had any of the people bothered to check the source, they’d quickly have found that the restrictions on transfers are limited to crypto asset service providers. What’s more, the draft even explicitly excluded software or hardware wallets from the prohibitions. 

The regulations are expected to be fully operational within the next 3 years after receiving approval from the council and parliament. That’s another 107 crypto cycles in which we’ll probably not learn to check our sources. 

Takeaway: As my high school teacher used to say, “Who reads has a clear advantage.” On that note, congrats to you, dear reader. You engage in an activity that 90% of CT users lack the attention span for. 👏

Story Two

Base suffers from success.

The Layer 2 launched by Coinbase has seen its TVL double in a month, driven by the price of native memecoins like $DEGEN and influencers suddenly discovering it as the new hot narrative. 

As another symptom of success, Base has seen its first large rug in the last week. On March 16th, an anon team raised 877 ETH for its $Ticker token, aided by the credibility of PartyDAO, a platform to launch tokens for communities. Unfortunately, instead of executing an airdrop with funds as he was supposed to, their dev, Jolan, decided to steal the funds and buy Miladys and memecoins—a man of culture. 

After being exposed on Twitter by ZachXBT, the dev said he regretted nothing and went ahead to call people who had sent money to a custodial address morons. He also advised them to touch grass. Overall, not terrible advice. 

PartyDAO was quick to distance itself from such advice, clarifying that the token and sale were created entirely outside of their protocol and that, usually, the default setting was for members to control funds. Ticker circumvented that by setting the creator split to 90%.

Takeaway: A 90% split for creators could have raised some eyebrows, but then again, who can be bothered with due diligence? One thing is clear: any ecosystem that attracts liquidity will eventually see its fair share of rugs. 

Story Three

Polygon zkEVM dead or alive?  

Another thing that didn’t go so great last weekend was Polygon’s zkEVM. Maybe, unlike CT, the sequencer read the news and was so shocked when he realized that Starbucks was ending its Polygon NFT program that he needed a break. 

But then again, despite the advances in machine intelligence, we’re nowhere near machines actually understanding. So, what happened? The sequencer is a piece of infrastructure that connects Layer 2s with Ethereum and is responsible for ordering and submitting batches of transactions. For most L-2s, Polygon zkEVM included, it’s a centralized sequencer, which means that if the one sequencer goes down, nothing works. 

The good news for people prone to getting rugged is that for the 10 hours that the sequencer was down, they could have touched grass without risking losing funds. 

Takeaway: Interestingly, barely anyone on Crypto Twitter seemed to be talking about this downtime. Once again, crypto people have proven masters of cognitive dissonance. They preach decentralization and happily rely on centralized sequencers. We’re not so different from chain-smoking doctors, y’all.

Fact of the week: Speaking of reading, to save you from future embarrassment, let it be known that even though people like to talk about Frankenstein when referring to the monster, the monster in the novel never had a name. Dr. Frankenstein is the person who created it.

Naomi for CoinJar

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