Umbria’s Crypto News Digest — October 12th-18th

4 min readOct 18, 2022

Azuki launches ‘Scan-to-Own’ concept with Physical Backed Token ($PBT)

First scan to own drop is proof of skate

Anime-inspired NFT project Azuki is further blurring the lines between the physical and digital worlds. Its BEAN cryptographic chip unlocks a ‘scan to own’ experience. Users scan the chip with their phone to mint or claim a new physical backed token (PBT), which connects a digital token to a physical item.

PBT enables decentralisation authentication and tracking of the full ownership lineage of physical items all on chain. On October 21st, the project is launching its first physical drop with PBTs: a series of nine 24 karat gold-plated skateboards.

Binance launches first in a series of CoinMarketCap partnered indices

Binance — the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange by daily trading volume — has launched the Binance CMC Top 10 Equal-Weighted Index. This marks the first in its series of CoinMarketCap (CMC) partnered indices. This specific one tracks the performance of the top ten digital assets by market capitalization on CMC and will be available from November 2022. Anyone will be able to purchase digital assets in the Index via Auto Invest Protocol.

The ‘Equal-Weighted Index‘ will be rebalanced monthly, and is designed to help investors evaluate price and performance. Furthermore, users can expect additional indices to be launched in the future to encompass “more digital assets in a diverse set of products.”

51% of Ethereum blocks compliant with OFAC standards

Censorship is becoming an increasing concern within the Ethereum ecosystem with the blockchain having just hit a new censorship milestone. From Friday 14th October, over half the blocks produced over a 24-hour period followed the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) compliance recommendations.

This begs the question of whether this is the future of Ethreum where everyone will be profit-incentivised to ‘follow the rules.’

Zed Run World Cup

ZED Run is hosting a month-long celebration inspired by the 2022 World Cup. Zed Headz can represent their country and take part in team and individual challenges for a chance to win prizes in wETH and NFT packs from Zed Run partners. To take part in the challenges, participants will need to own one of 32 ZED RUN World Cup skins (inspired by each nation playing in the competition) and attach it to a ZED RUN racehorse that they own.

Read more here: https://win.zed.run/wc22/

And don’t forget where you can bridge to wETH cheapest👇🏻

OpenSea marketplace live on Avalanche

In another key advancement towards a multi-chain future, OpenSea announced that it had launched support for Avalanche. This gives creators on the network an additional high profile marketplace to display, list and trade NFTs and gives OpenSea users outside of Avalanche greater access to the NFT community on the AVAX network.

“The future of web3 is multichain; and it’s always been our goal to offer the best selection and connect people with projects and creators across the chains they prefer,” Shiva Rajaraman,” VP of product at OpenSea

Fantom showcases its GameFi credentials

8BIT Metaverse — one of the many games on Fantom

The future is looking bright at Fantom Foundation. The platform has revealed a list of just some of the GameFi projects building on the Fantom blockchain, which demonstrates nicely how a bear market is a build market. In a separate post from last month, community manager Nick.ftm gives the rundown on the games to have on your radar.

Offchain Labs expanding Arbitrum project with Prysmatic Labs acquisition

Offchain Labs, the group behind Layer 2 heavy-weight Arbitrum, has bought Prysmatic Labs — one of the core development teams that architected The Merge. The move marks a marrying of prominent Layer 1 and Layer 2 teams.

The future of Ethereum relies on Layer 1 for consensus and data availability, and layer 2 for execution and scalability. A sustainable future for Ethereum, needs not only greater communication between teams developing on both layers, but more direct collaboration as well.

Optimism Demo Day — October 19th

The Optimism ecosystem is expanding in terms of number of projects and TVL. To showcase all the exciting developments on the network, it hosts. Optimism Demo Days. These happen every two weeks at 4 PM CET in their Discord.

Tomorrow will be Umbria’s turn alongside ShineDAO, OpenXSwap and DefiEdge: Please join us on the Optimism Discord (you’ll need to visit and verify on Optimism’s Discord beforehand).

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

Until next week!

The Umbria Team 🚀