Etherbridge Workshop Week
Market Recap
Markets React To Jackson Hole Conference
Etherbridge Workshop Week
To all our readers,
The Etherbridge team did a week-long workshop and spent some much-needed face-to-face time together. It was a great time had by all, and some essential team bonding occurred.
Due to this, we took a break from writing and so won't be publishing our regular article this week.
We also wanted to ask you if there is anything you have enjoyed about our emails or what you haven't? It is always good to get feedback, and we look forward to chatting with you all.
As always, thank you for all the support and for making what we do worth it.
All the best,
The Etherbridge Team
Notable Articles and News Stories This Week:
Arbitrum Upgrades to Nitro Ahead of Ethereum Merge
The largest Ethereum scaling solution just got a speed boost. Arbitrum, a layer-2 rollup built to settle transactions cheaply on top of Ethereum, successfully deployed its Nitro upgrade after several hours of network downtime on Wednesday.
The successful upgrade is a positive development for Ethereum investors ahead of the Merge, but Arbitrum's centralization tradeoff in pursuit of lower gas fees remains contentious.
Arbitrum launched Nitro exactly one year after releasing Arbitrum One, the rollup's now-defunct first iteration.
Arbitrum expects a lag of days-to-weeks for the sequencer to bring down gas fees — paid in ether — as the system recalibrates. The protocol's developers could not give Blockworks exact figures for how much transaction costs are expected to decrease under Nitro, but earlier in the summer, transactions fees on the network briefly surpassed those on Ethereum mainnet. Nitro solves this.
Read more about the upgrade here
MakerDAO Co-Founder Lays Timeline for Free Floating DAI
Weeks after threatening to "YOLO" DAI collateral from Circle's USD coin to ether, MakerDAO's co-founder Rune has proposed a path to "free floating" DAI — letting the stablecoin de-peg from the US dollar altogether.
Rune's proposal on MakerDAO's forum, submitted on Wednesday, calls for the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) treasury to accumulate ether through its current investments for three years before cutting back on real world plays (RWAs) and reducing its exposure to "seizable" assets.
Rune's plan represents a struggle to overcome a growing schism emerging in MakerDAO, as members plan to avoid potential — and still hypothetical — fallout from the United States' Tornado Cash sanctions.
The proposal outlines three different "stances" for MakerDAO as the organization moves away from real world assets and DAI loses its dollar peg: Pigeon (maximum growth), Eagle (balance between growth and resilience) and Phoenix (maximum resilience at the cost of less growth).
Read more about the proposal here
Tether Pushes Back Timeline on Audit: Report
Tether Holdings Limited continues to move the goal posts on a full audit of its reserves backing the industry’s largest stablecoin.
Chief technology officer Paolo Ardoino — the public face of the company on nearly all matters — said Friday a review of what exactly backs the stablecoin issuer’s coin (USDT) is still “likely months” away, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal.
Tether has repeatedly promised a full audit of its stablecoin reserves for over five years. A spokesperson for Ardoino did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The company does release quarterly attestations, separate from a thorough audit, as required by a 2021 legal settlement with the New York Attorney General’s Office. Following the hiring of its new accounting firm, BDO Italia, earlier this month, Tether said it intends to release them on a monthly basis, beginning early next year.
The world’s largest stablecoin by market capitalization ($67.6 billion) consists of various reserve holdings that back the coin’s one-to-one US dollar-pegged value. As of June 30, Tether and its subsidiaries had roughly $66.4 billion in consolidated assets to $66.2 billion in liabilities, with a roughly $200 million buffer, according to a report by BDO.
Read more about the audit here
Whilst we all have the option to look, to seek to understand, it’s often easier not to. Bitcoin, Ethereum and distributed ledger technology are complex systems that require significant due diligence. At Etherbridge, we aim to lower the barriers to understanding this fast-growing digital economy.
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