Weekend Recommended Reading | Vitalik and his father discuss Ethereum and the industry situation; those who left big companies for Web3 to BUIDL
This week's top 10 recommended articles in the cryptocurrency industry.Organizer: Gu Yu, Chain Catcher
1. “Those Who Left Big Companies for Web3 BUIDL”
With more and more evangelists, explorers, and experimental products, Web3 is becoming more concrete from a vague concept.
Capital and new entrepreneurs are flocking into the NFT, metaverse, and GameFi craze, and the slogan "All in Web3" has been shouted out. Traditional internet professionals, who have been in the game for years, are also starting to stir. Under the immediate "Web3 Research Institute" topic on social media, employees from leading internet companies, self-identified as "Donkey Factory" (Alibaba), "Goose Factory" (Tencent), etc., are often seen observing, learning, and testing the waters. However, with the recent market cooling down, the voices have weakened. Chain Catcher interviewed those builders who transitioned from big companies to Web3, trying to glimpse what challenges they encountered during their transformation.
2. “Dialogue with Vitalik and His Father: Many Are Overly Pessimistic About Ethereum's Shift to PoS”
Despite being a billionaire, Vitalik explains that money has never been his focus or motivation. He dislikes the speculation around Ethereum and believes that blockchain networks have more use cases beyond finance. This article is an interview with Vitalik and his father during Father's Day 2022 by Fortune magazine, discussing their journey in the crypto space, regrets and visions for Ethereum's future in the industry, the highly anticipated merge, the collapse of the Terra ecosystem, and more.
3. “ZKSync Products and Ecosystem: A Flexible Shortcut to Scalability”
With Optimism launching tokens and Arbitrum starting the Odyssey rewards battle, the second half of 2022 is destined to be a stage of flourishing L2 solutions. ZKSync's style is somewhat akin to Apple, adept at assembling mature technologies into new products usable by consumers, and its Solidity-first strategy is very developer-friendly. For ZKSync, whether the existing zkEVM can quickly attract mature applications from L1 and increase TVL will be crucial. This may also be a shortcut for ZKSync to secure a place in the L2 competition. This article will deeply analyze ZKSync's product architecture and operational ecosystem in comparison with StarkWare.
4. “Game NFT Market: The Easiest Cake to Cut Off from Opensea”
The NFT market over the past year has been insane. It seems that at a certain moment, well-known celebrities began purchasing NFTs, changing their Twitter and other social media avatars to these cartoon animal images. However, with the explosive growth in the number of NFT users, different demands for NFTs will arise, leading to the further development of more types and functions of NFTs. In the next cycle, we will see more vertical trading markets starting to seize shares from Opensea. The author believes that thanks to real utility, the game NFT trading market is likely to become one of the earliest successful vertical platforms.
5. “The Pillars of Web3: An Overview of the Decentralized Storage Ecosystem”
If we want to advance further in the decentralized internet, we will ultimately need these three pillars: consensus, storage, and computation. If humanity successfully decentralizes these three areas, we will step into the next journey of the internet: Web3. Storage, as the second pillar, is rapidly maturing, with various storage solutions already applied to use cases. This article will further explore this pillar of decentralized storage.
6. “Messari: How to View Ethereum's 'Rollup-Centric' Future?”
To alleviate the current scalability issues, Ethereum is shifting to a "rollup-centric roadmap," combining the best on-chain and off-chain scaling solutions. Ethereum's on-chain scaling solution, danksharding, provides ample data space for the flourishing development of L2 (Layer 2) scaling solutions like Optimistic Rollups and ZK-Rollups.
Both Optimistic Rollups and ZK-Rollups have their drawbacks: most Optimistic Rollups have long withdrawal waiting periods between layers; while ZK-Rollups often require extensive computation, making seamless composability difficult. To keep a rollup-centric future viable, rollup solutions must prioritize reducing execution costs, cross-layer interoperability, and user privacy.
7. “Zeeprime Capital: The Current State and Future Development of Cross-Chain Composability”
Most cross-chain bridges are built to meet the immediate needs of DeFi users, whereas general messaging protocols are more fundamental service infrastructures. As an observer and long-term investor in this field, Zeeprime Capital has studied the architecture of general messaging protocols and discussed the ecological development based on these framework protocols.
The sudden exposure of 3AC's $1 billion creditor, Voyager, is very mysterious, with massive assets amounting to $6.2 billion last year, primarily from customer deposits. Voyager currently has a total loan value of $2 billion, which includes approximately $1 billion in 15,250 BTC and 350 million USDC from 3AC. This article interprets Voyager's financial report to help readers understand the reasons behind this.
9. “Outlier Founder: Don't Rush to Define the Crypto Winter; the Market Is Far from as Bad as in 2018”
Last week, from Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong to CoinDesk reporters, various sectors of the crypto industry reported that we are in a "crypto winter." But what is a crypto winter? How can we objectively measure a crypto winter? Jamie Burke, CEO of the Web3 accelerator Outlier Ventures, answers these questions from the perspective of investing throughout the entire crypto winter of 2018. He provides a framework to help better define and assess the overall health of the industry, understand the differences between 2018 and now, and offer insights on what he believes is the direction of industry development.
Now, it has been a year since the Salvadoran Congress passed the Bitcoin law, during which the country proposed a series of plans, including building a Bitcoin city, using geothermal energy from volcanoes to mine Bitcoin, and issuing $1 billion in Bitcoin bonds. Over this year, what has been the actual situation of El Salvador's various plans regarding Bitcoin? What impact has Bitcoin had on this country?
