Umbria’s Crypto News Digest — November 2nd-8th

5 min readNov 8, 2022

Breaking News: Binance to Buy Rival FTX

NFT Creators Divided Over OpenSea Royalties Stance

NFT-marketplace leader OpenSea is today (November 8th) launching a new ‘on-chain’ tool to help creators enforce royalties. However, it’s being viewed by many as a double-edged sword.

Here’s the catch: the code that the new enforcement tool would require developers to include in their newly-released NFT smart contracts would essentially blacklist other venues. Therefore it would preclude these NFTs from being sold on any listed marketplaces with no/minimal royalties. Plus there are no real answers about what will happen with existing collections.

Much more to unravel here we think!

Meta Chooses Polygon for Instagram NFTs

Instagram’s NFT tool kit is being powered by Polygon

Hot on the heels of the Reddit ‘digital collectibles’ news came details for the Polygon/Instagram tie up. Tech giant Meta is dipping its toes into NFTs with its Instagram platform and has turned to Layer 2 scaling solution Polygon for integrating a full ‘end-to-end toolkit’ for creators. Instagram users will soon be able to mint, showcase and sell their digital collectibles on the Instagram site itself as well as external platforms.

This and other high profile collaborations saw Polygon’s $MATIC token shoot up c.30% in two days.

Read the full story here: https://polygon.technology/blog/meta-to-let-users-mint-and-sell-polygon-powered-nfts-on-instagram

Binance Liquidates $FTT Position

Binance, the world’s biggest crypto exchange, is to sell all of its remaining FTT tokens — the native token or rival exchange FTX, which it used to have a minor stake in. Despite Caroline Ellison, CEO of FTX sister company Alameda Research, offering to buy back any amount of FTT that Binance wanted to offload, the token saw a sizeable decline in price.

Meanwhile, FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried was forced to deny insolvency rumours. The rumours have today been proved to be true.

Coinbase Reports Weak Q3

Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase saw revenue plummet more than 50% from a year earlier amidst turbulent crypto market conditions reports CNBC.

The company reported third-quarter revenue of $576 million down from $803 million in the second quarter and significantly down from the $1.24 billion in last year’s third quarter.

“Q3 was a mixed quarter for Coinbase. Transaction revenue was significantly impacted by stronger macroeconomic and crypto market headwinds, as well as trading volume moving offshore,”

Read the full Q3 shareholder letter here: https://investor.coinbase.com/news/news-details/2022/Coinbase-Releases-Third-Quarter-2022-Shareholder-Letter/

Fantom Partners with Gitcoin

Fantom has partnered with grants protocol Gitcoin and will be the first chain to beta test the platform. This provides teams building on Fantom with the opportunity to present their work to the community and gain financial support. The Fantom Foundation will match public contributions made to projects with the introductory round seeing an allocation of 125,000 FTM in matching incentives.

The application date for grants is November 14th.

Find out more here: https://fantom.foundation/blog/fantom-general-update-november-07-2022/

GMX Joins Avalanche Rush and Receives $4 Million in Trading Incentives

Decentralised exchange GMX, which deployed to Avalanche on January, 6th 2022, has now joined Avalanche Rush — a liquidity mining incentive program by the Avalanche Foundation, which aims to grow the DeFi ecosystem on Avalanche.

The $4 million-worth of $AVAX will be distributed over several months to support GMX and its partner platforms including: Dopex, Trader Joe, and DODO.

Arbitrum Activity Rockets in Recent Months

According to crypto research platform Delphi Digital, Arbitrum transaction activity has surged 550% since its Nitro update in August. The Layer 2 solution now has nearly two-thirds of the transaction activity seen on the Ethereum base layer.

The recent spike could be down to — at least in part — speculators bolstering their on-chain activity in the hopes of getting a bigger bounty in the highly anticipated Arbitrum airdrop.

Read full details here: https://members.delphidigital.io/reports/arbitrum-activity-accelerates-after-the-nitro-upgrade/

Optimism Buoyed by Lido Integration

Optimism increased its unique active wallets (UAW) last month by 83.31%, according to DappRadar’s October Dapp Industry Report. This growth is powered by the integration with Ethereum liquid staking protocol Lido, which provided the Layer 2 blockchain (alongside Arbitrum) a combined $9M in wstETH.

Got a story that you think should be included in the next digest? Email fran@umbria.network

Until next week!

The Umbria Team 🚀