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The Merge

👀 PoW Die-Hards Plan to Fork and Mine Their Own Ethereum Chains After The Merge

SHIFT There is no doubting the excitement in DeFi. The biggest upgrade in the history of Ethereum is rapidly approaching. The Merge will convert Ethereum into a Proof-of-Stake-based blockchain from a Proof-of-Work one. The shift will make the No. 1 blockchain for smart contracts and dApps faster and more affordable. Jazzed investors have sent Ether soaring 52% in the last 30 days.

ORIGINAL But not everyone is happy. Some die-hard miners are facing the obsolescence of billions of dollars worth of mining hardware and a fall in revenue. And they are threatening to maintain the original, Proof-of-Work version of the Ethereum network to protect their investment.

FORK To protest, they could fork off and create their own PoW versions of Ethereum when the upgrade takes effect. The forked networks would maintain the same wallet balances and transactional history as Ethereum prior to the chain-merge.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

Market Action

🚀 Ethereum Classic Shakes Off the Dust and Rockets 174%

Vestige of Old Ethereum Finds New Life as The Merge Approaches

By Samuel Haig

MYSTERIES It’s one of the mysteries of the summer rally. Ethereum Classic, that often-overlooked fork from the early days of the Ethereum, has skyrocketed 174% since July 13.

PERFORMANCE Actually, its performance isn’t so mysterious. The Ethereum Classic community is betting that The Merge will be a boon for their sleepy token. Jamyye, an Ethereum Classic mining pool operator, told The Defiant that The Merge will bring “a ton of hash power over to ETC.”

VALIDATORS Translation: Miners are backing Ethereum Classic in anticipation of Ethereum’s forthcoming chain-merge — which will boot Proof of Work (PoW) miners off the network in favor of Proof of Stake (PoS) validators.

MINING Colin Wu, a Chinese cryptocurrency journalist, recently estimated The Merge will displace $5B worth of GPU and ASIC-based mining hardware. The Ethereum Classic community believes a significant portion of this hashing power will be redirected to ETC. Traders are already betting that Ethereum Classic will win big amid The Merge. Its native ETC token has doubled relative to ETH in past two and a half weeks.

ETC/ETH on Binance. Source: TradingView

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

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Exploits

💸 Wallets Drained In Ongoing Solana Breach as Network Solicits Input from Users

By Aleksandar Gilbert

BREACH Layer 1 blockchain Solana is in the midst of an apparent system-wide breach, with users finding their wallets emptied and NFT marketplace Magic Eden urging others to change their wallet settings to protect any remaining assets. The exploit was first reported by Twitter user SolportTom.

COMPROMISE Crypto auditor OtterSec said at least 5,000 wallets had been compromised. “These transactions are being signed by the actual owners, suggesting some sort of private key compromise,” OtterSec tweeted.

STOLEN ASSETS Users of at least three crypto wallet providers – Phantom, Slope and Trust – reported stolen assets Tuesday. “There seems to be a widespread SOL exploit at play that’s draining wallets throughout the ecosystem,” Magic Eden tweeted just after 8 p.m. ET, before suggesting that users “revoke permissions for any suspicious links in their Phantom wallets.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

Exploits

😲 Nomad ‘Crowd-Looting’ Triggers Exodus From Other Blockchains

By Aleksandar Gilbert

EXPLOIT Users have fled blockchains affiliated with Nomad, the bridge protocol that was emptied in an exploit Monday evening. By Tuesday, users had withdrawn more than half of the value locked in Moonbeam, and one-third of the value locked in Cardano since the attack began, according to data on Defi Llama.

TARGET Bridges allow users to move digital assets between otherwise incompatible blockchains, and have proven a lucrative target for hackers. With about $190M stolen, Monday’s hack was the third largest of 2022 and the fifth largest in DeFi history, according to a “leaderboard” maintained by crypto news website Rekt. Only the hacks of Axie Infinity’s Ronin bridge and Solana’s Wormhole bridge were larger, at $624M and $326M, respectively.

HACKER Twitter user foobar called it “the first decentralized crowd-looting of a 9-figure bridge in history.” Experts who took to social media this week said the money was not taken by a single, capable hacker but by dozens of people who saw the crypto equivalent of an unlocked mansion and went inside to grab what they could carry out.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

Elsewhere

🔗 Ethereum Name Service Domain Registrations Hit All-Time High as Merge Approaches: Decrypt

More than 1.8 million ENS Domain names have been registered, and adoption by non-English speaking communities are rising.

🔗 The zkEVM Wars | zkSync and Scroll: Bankless

Video conversation on Zero-knowledge proofs.

🔗 MicroStrategy's Bitcoin Maximalist CEO Saylor Hands Job to Deputy, Takes Executive Chairman Role: CoinDesk

Saylor says he plans to focus on buying bitcoin, leaving MicroStrategy's software business in the hands of the new CEO.

Solana Status @SolanaStatus

If your wallet was one of the 7,767 impacted please complete this survey – engineers are investigating the root cause

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Trending in The Defiant

The Merge Drives Value of ETH Options Past Bitcoin If investors needed any more evidence The Merge is driving a rally in Ethereum here’s one more compelling datapoint: Open interest on ETH options just leapfrogged Bitcoin. On July 28, the total amount of put and call contracts on ETH surpassed BTC for the first time, according to data provider Glassnode.
SushiSwap ‘Head Chef’ May Pocket a Third of All Tokens Paid to Staff The proposed new “head chef” of SushiSwap could pocket more than a third of the crypto exchange’s total SUSHI coins allocated to staff over the next four years, according to an analysis of the compensation package by The Defiant.
New Aave Stablecoin Clears First Hurdle In a move that may disrupt the stablecoin market, Aave, the leading money market protocol, is poised to create a fully collateralized stable token called GHO. On July 31, more than 99.9% of Aave’s community members voted to launch the coin. It was the first of three governance votes that will take place over coming weeks to determine the design and roadmap for the token.

🧑‍💻 ✍️ Stories in The Defiant are written by Owen Fernau, Aleksandar Gilbert, Claire Gu, Samuel Haig, Jason Levin, and yyctrader, and edited by Edward Robinson, yyctrader and Camila Russo. Videos were produced by Robin Schmidt and Alp Gasimov. Podcast was led by Camila, edited by Alp.

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The Defiant is a daily newsletter focusing on decentralized finance, a new financial system that’s being built on top of open blockchains. The space is evolving at breakneck speed and revolutionizing tech and money. Sign up to learn more and keep up on the latest, most interesting developments. Subscribers get full access, while free signups get only part of the content.Click here to pay with DAI (for $100/yr) or sub with fiat by clicking on the button above ($15/mo, $150/yr.

DeFi, NFT & Web3 Insights - The Defiant

👀 PoW Die-Hards Plan to Fork Their Own…