Author: SUSS NiFT Researcher @Jesse_meta

The market was relatively sluggish in the third quarter. After a period of low volatility, the market briefly pulled back. This was also expected. The third quarter has performed poorly over the years. Only a deep cleansing can concentrate the chips in the hands of the diamond hands with faith. Even though the financial market is quiet, we still see exciting industry progress and new applications. Let's review the eight hot spots of Q3.

RippXiaobai Navigationle — — A phased victory in the crypto market

On July 13, the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled on the SEC’s allegations against Ripple, stating that XRP, as a digital currency,Token, itself is not a "contract, transaction, or plan" that embodies the requirements of the Howey test, that is, XRP is not a security. Using XRP to invest, issue grants, transfer money to executives,exchangeSales through institutional sales, OTC, ICO, and IEO are not considered securities.

If XRP, as a more centralized currency, is not a security, then other more decentralized digital currencies are even less likely to be securities. Influenced by this news, XRP surged 90%, followed by BTC and ETH. SOL and MATIC, which were previously identified as securities by the SEC, also surged. Coinbase subsequently relisted XRP. This iscryptocurrencyThis is a major victory for the industry in the face of the SEC's strong regulation in recent years. It temporarily clears the haze for the crypto industry and indirectly supportscryptocurrencyexchangesupplyTokenThe legality of the transaction. (The SEC previously sued Binance and Coinbase for providing unregistered securities transactions.)

The SEC subsequently applied to appeal the ruling. The duel between the SEC and Ripple is still to come. The unclear regulatory policy has always been a shadow over the crypto market. The market urgently needs clear regulations to reduce confusion. Only clear legislation can better protect investors. Industry practitioners should also actively communicate with regulators to help regulators better understand the market and achieve a win-win situation.

Layer 2 — ETH in HandTokenNot enough!

Ethereum's second-layer network is still hot and developing rapidly.L2Many of them have been launched online, and even some competing L1s such as Celo have turned to EthereumL2阵营。而空投猎手们面对如此繁多的L2，纷纷表示手中的ETH代币不够用了。

According to L2Beat data, 31 L2s are included, of which 18 have a TVL of more than 10 million US dollars. Currently, Arbitrum ranks first with a TVL of 5 billion US dollars, occupying a market share of 54.31%, far exceeding Optimism with a TVL of 2.42 billion US dollars (25.31% market share). ZkSync Era based on ZK Rollup ranks third with 428 million US dollars, but only has a market share of 4.47%. It can be seen that OP Rollup has an obvious first-mover advantage. However, this does not mean that OP Rollup will have more development prospects, or that it will be developed separately from ZK Rollup. Some projects such as Polymer are trying to combine the advantages of ZK and OP to provide new solutions. L2 that currently uses OP Rollup may also switch to ZK Rollup in the future.

Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwa said at TOKEN 2049 that today’s Ethereum is more like a user-to-chain model and is moving towards a chain-to-chain model. In the next 2-4 years, Ethereum will become the basic settlement layer, providingSafetysecurity, settlement guarantee andSafetyFunctions are given to these chains.

Worldcoin — The savior of the artificial intelligence era?

On July 24, Worldcoin released OpenAIAn open letter signed by co-founder Sam Altman announced the official launch of the WLD token, and major exchanges listed the token as soon as possible.

Worldcoin is committed to creating a new identity system and financial network that everyone owns. It aims to increase new economic opportunities in the era of artificial intelligence and provide solutions to distinguish between artificial intelligence and human identity. Under the premise of protecting privacy, it gives verified unique human identitywalletThe way tokens are distributed to different addresses is explored as a possible path to achieve a global basic income funded by artificial intelligence.

In the era of artificial intelligence, it is foreseeable that a large number of workers will be unemployed due to the improvement of productivity, and artificial intelligence companies will make a lot of profits. Woldcoin hopes to redistribute the profits of artificial intelligence so that every unique human individual who passes the verification can obtain basic income.

To realize the ideal of Worldcoin, we must first realize the unique identity verification of each person to prevent fraud and duplicate applications. After considering government ID, network trust and other models, Worldcoin finally chose biometric technology based on iris scanning. Worldcoin uses a special device Orb that uses iris scanning to detect whether the object is a real person, and can ensure that a real person can only register an identity on Worldcoin. Orb uses a specially designed camera and algorithm to extract iris feature information, completes all processing on the local device, does not save user images, and only outputs signed iris codes.Zero knowledge proofWith userswalletDecoupling to avoid leaking user privacy. As of September 15, 2.298 million people have been certified on Wolrdcoin.

This is a very challenging and forward-looking project that has attractedCommunityBut there are also criticisms. Vitalik has raised questions about the project’s privacy, centralization,SafetyIn addition, residents of some economically underdeveloped countries have sold their irises at low prices, which has led to the opposite of the original intention. In August, Kenya was one of the countries where Worldcoin was first launched.Safety, privacy and financial concerns have suspended registration in the country.

Telegram Bots — Innovation and Speculation in Crypto Trading

Unibot is a trading robot on Telegram. The market value of its token soared from around US$30 million on July 7 to US$2 billion on August 10, attracting widespread attention from crypto market players to Telegram robots and related tokens.

Unibot allows users to interact with the robot, monitor liquidity pools, receive alerts for newly minted tokens, trade tokens, and copy trades. Unibot's trade execution speed is six times faster than Uniswap. Token holders can receive 40% in transaction fees and 1% in dividends for the total $UNIBOT trading volume. Unibot's high-speed execution, innovative features, and robust revenue distribution model make it stand out from many competitors. Especially in the current period when there is no new technological innovation and the mainstream market is sluggish, some crypto users seek to trade altcoins or dogecoins to obtain high profits. Unibot just provides these users with services similar to centralized exchanges.

These robots meet the needs of degen players while centralizing. With the great success of Unibot, various types of trading robots have appeared on the market, such as LootBot, Bridge Bot and MEVFree robots to provide different encryption services.SafetyThe risk cannot be ignored. If a user imports a private key into a robot, it may cause the assets to besteal.

According to Coingecko data, Unibot's token $UNIBOT soared 27 times, but fell 70.47% from its all-time high just 27 days later, once again proving that the crypto market is full of financial speculation while innovating in technology.

Friend.tech — Reinventing Web3 Social

Friend.tech is a new social app launched on Base on August 10, which allows users to purchase tokenized shares of KOLs on Twitter to gain exclusive access to private group chats with these social celebrities.

In just the first week of its launch, the transaction volume on Friend.tech exceeded 7,000 ETH, demonstrating its strong market appeal. As of September 12, more than 210,000 users have completed 3.734 million transactions on the platform. This rapid growth is not only due to its close cooperation with crypto Twitter KOLs, but also to its unique progressive web application (PWA). Users can experience it directly on the browser without downloading, making it easy for novices who do not understand cryptocurrency to use it.

Friend Tech's innovation is to use tokens as ownership when interacting with crypto people. Owning a token is equivalent to holding shares in a specific company. The increase in the number of holders of each token on Friend.tech will cause the token to rise. Trading tokens requires an additional 10% transaction fee, of which 5% goes to the protocol and 5% goes to the creator. In just one week, the total income of creators reached $13.25 million. On August 19, Friend.tech announced that it had received an exclusive $100 million financing from Paradigm and introduced a points system to incentivize user participation.

Although user growth has slowed, Friend.tech is still in the Beta testing phase, and the introduction of new features is expected to further stimulate user growth. In addition, subscription-based content platforms have proven their commercial value, allowing fans to participate in the economic construction of creators. However, the sustainability of fan token growth requires specific case analysis.

On August 21, Friend.tech was exposed for providing an API that can directly query users’walletand Twitter information, resulting in the leakage of more than 100,000 user data. Privacy issues still need to be improved. In addition, tokenized stocks may lead to SEC investigations.

PYUSD — Web2 Financial Payment Company Joins the Stablecoin Battle

Stablecoins are an important hedging tool for cryptocurrency investors and an important part of the DeFi system.ether and Circle, MakerDAODeFi native protocols such as Aave and Curve use over-collateralized cryptocurrencies to mint decentralized stablecoins to compete for market share. After abandoning BUSD, Binance began to support FDUSD, a stablecoin issued by a Hong Kong trust company.

Companies and protocols that issue stablecoins can enjoy interest income from underlying assets or minting. The current risk-free short-term U.S. Treasury bond yield is as high as 5%, which also attracted PayPal to announce its entry into the stablecoin issuance on August 7, becoming the first major financial company in the United States to issue its own stablecoin.

PayPal uses Paxos as its issuer, and the underlying assets are fully backed by US dollar deposits, short-term US Treasury bonds and similar cash equivalents. Therefore, PYUSD can be regarded as a centralized US dollar stablecoin similar to USDT and USDC. However, unlike USDT, which does not provide services in the United States, PayPal is open to US users.

As a veteran electronic payment company from Web2, PayPal has a distribution channel that Web3 companies cannot match. Even if the use scenarios on the chain are limited at the beginning, given its good reputation in the payment field, if PayPal takes efforts to stimulate the existing massive users to use PYUSD, or reduces the merchant's handling fees to encourage merchants to support PYUSD payment, then PYUSD may quickly gain more users than the stablecoin pioneers in the short term. On September 12, PayPal launched a cryptocurrency to US dollar exchange service for US users, providing crypto players with a safe withdrawal option. Therefore, we see that PayPal has the potential to promote the further expansion of cryptocurrencies and make stablecoins a daily payment method for people.

Considering the high pressure on DeFi policy in the United States in recent years and the regulatory uncertainty of stablecoins, the development of PYUSD remains to be seen.

FTX Liquidations — Can the Market Take the Selling Pressure?

On September 14, according to CoinDesk, the judge ruled that FTX can sell, pledge and hedge its cryptocurrencies to repay creditors. Currently, FTX has about $3.4 billion in Class A cryptocurrency assets with good liquidity, including about $1.2 billion in SOL, $560 million in BTC and $192 million in ETH. In addition, Class B assets such as SRM and MAPS are difficult to realize due to low liquidity.

In addition to cryptocurrencies, FTX has about $4.5 billion in venture capital. Equity investments includeAIStar enterprise Anthropic's $500 million, and important Bitcoin mining company Genesis's $1.1 billion. In addition to equity investment, FTX also cooperates with multiple funds in asset management and provides loans to financial technology companies. Given that some of FTX's investment projects have good fundamentals, there is a possibility of obtaining high valuation returns in the future.

According to Messari's statistics on September 11, BTC and ETH held by FTX and Alameda account for about 1% of weekly trading volume, and are expected to have little impact on the market. SOL and APT held by FTX account for 81% and 74% of weekly trading volume, respectively, but these assets are currently in the unlocking period, which means there may be long-term selling pressure in the future. In addition, liquidation also has a certain degree of impact on TRX, DOGE, and MATIC, with FTX holdings accounting for about 6% to 12% of weekly trading volume. It is reported that FTX's weekly liquidation limit is US$100 million, and the possibility of clearing a single currency within a week is small. The impact of actual liquidation on the market has been priced in to a certain extent.

From the FTX liquidation assets, investors are once again warned to pay attention to the liquidity of investment products. Although altcoins may have higher gains than mainstream assets such as Bitcoin during the rally, their liquidity should be closely monitored, otherwise it is just paper wealth. Decentralization is the value of Web3, and only sufficient decentralization can make it safer.

Snaps — MetaMask’s self-disruption

The MetaMask wallet, which is almost a must-have for crypto players, undoubtedly plays an important role in the Ethereum ecosystem, providing users with the ability to access the EVM chain through RPC. Some non-EVM chains such as Cosmos, Solana, Sui, Starknet, etc. are loved by users and developers for their unique technical advantages and ecological applications. However, when using these chains, users often need to use corresponding special wallets, which greatly affects the interactive experience.

To solve this pain point, MetaMask launched the Snaps API access specification, integrating wallets of non-EVM chains, allowing MetaMask users to experience non-EVM chains in their original wallets and open up a new multi-chain world.

In addition to non-EVM interoperability, Snaps can also provide clear transaction insights, allowing users to understand potential security risks before interacting. This can greatly reduce the possibility of phishing attacks when self-custody. Snaps can also obtain specific information that needs to be known in the wallet, adding communication capabilities to the wallet.

Snaps is MetaMask's self-subversion. By integrating various wallets, it has transformed from an EVM wallet overlord to a traffic entrance for full-chain wallets and decentralized applications. Developers can use their imagination to expand functions on MetaMask and create a new Web3 experience for users.

Although MetaMask has conducted self-audits and third-party audits, there are still potential code risks inherent in Web3. However, Snaps is currently only running in a sandbox test environment, and cannot access MetaMask account information, and the original MetaMask assets are isolated.

The article comes from the Internet:Q3 encryption market hot topics review: market correction, industry progress and new application highlights

Related recommendation: Are you really suitable for Web3?

Written by: Wen Xin Original link: https://mirror.xyz/wheart.eth/XccYBJ2OeSEmcrGvtD75x6c1DRWkzbTElzRZZpqEsOE Actually, a long time ago, I planned to write a "Web3 Beginner's Tutorial" for those who want to enter Web3 or have just entered...