Umbria’s Crypto News Digest September 6th-12th
Big Eyes — World’s Next Biggest Meme Coin?
Big Eyes (BIG)’s founders are eyeing a $50 million presale. As the latest new meme coin to make waves, Big Eyes is being touted as a token with the potential to rival the likes of Shiba Inu and Dogecoin.
The community-owned DeFi coin aims to redistribute wealth throughout the community and provide opportunities for financial freedom for all BIG holders. It also has a philanthropic twist with an allocation of tokens being donated to help restore the oceans and combat manmade pollution. There’s a total of 200,000,000,000 tokens of which 80% are available at launch including 5% held in a charity wallet.
What’s happening with Ethereum?
The countdown is on! There’s only one real Ethereum news story at the moment and that’s The Merge — Ethereum’s much-anticipated move from a proof of work system to a proof of stake one. The final dress rehearsal aka the last ‘shadow fork’ has been done and we can expect The Merge to take place on or around the 15th September.
According to Barney Chambers, Co-founder of Umbria:
“The accumulation of Ethereum will centralize in the hands of validators who already hold the majority of the tokens. The Ethereum Foundation claims that the merge will not impact the price of Ethereum, but the Merge will cause a fundamental shift in the way that new tokens are distributed and this will have a dramatic effect on the price of both Ethereum and the entire cryptocurrency ecosystem.”
His view is backed up by a report from blockchain analytics platform Nansen, which highlights that currently just five entities hold 64% of staked Ether.
Polygon news
Coffee giant Starbucks has announced that it will launch its NFT-based loyalty program on the Polygon network. The ubiquitous coffee shop said it is brewing a revolutionary Web3 experience for its Starbucks Rewards members.
Starbucks will utilize a “proof-of-stake” blockchain technology built by Polygon, which uses less energy than first generation “proof-of-work” blockchains.
Read more here.
What’s happening with BNB?
Binance has announced that it will support any potential fork of the Ethereum mainnet post-Merge. This means that all wallet addresses on BNB chain, which hold 0.1 ETH or more will receive airdropped ETH PoW tokens (at a ratio of 1:1). Poloniex, MEXC Global, Gate.io, OKX and FTX are other centralised exchanges that have announced they’ll support the PoW fork.
Optimism News
DEX aggregator 1inch is incentivising participation on Layer 2 solution Optimism by rewarding users with a free airdrop of 300,000 OP tokens. The tokens will be equally distributed between 3,782 selected wallets of the 1inch Wallet’s most active and regular users and are already available for claiming. Find out more here.
What’s happening with Fantom?
DeFi yield optimization platform Unbound Finance is going live on the Fantom Mainnet on September 14th. It has already successfully deployed on Ethereum, Polygon, BNB Smart Chain and Avalanche.
Fantom has released its latest metrics (courtesy of FantomDaily), which showed relatively high active user numbers and daily transaction stats against a bearish market backdrop.
Arbitrum News
Following the Nitro upgrade, it’s reported that there has been a seven times increase in throughput capacity and that Arbitrum transactions have quadrupled to hit ATHs. At time of writing, the protocol has a TVL of $2.85 Billion.
What’s happening with Avalanche?
Bitcoin.com’s web3 wallet now supports Avalanche, which will enable the wallet’s millions of users to buy, sell, send and receive $AVAX. Speaking of AVAX, the token gained over 17% in the week up to September 12th. At time of writing it’s trading at $21.80.
