This Week in Web3forGood
Rollups 101 incoming...
gm gm,
We’re back from our two week break, and as usual, there is no shortage of updates. Crypto markets saw their sharpest downturn since November — with nearly 12% of BTC’s market cap erased in a single night. The reason behind this: Federal Reserve officials said they may need to hike interest rates further, as part of ongoing efforts to tame inflation. the troubled Chinese property-development giant Evergrande filed for Chapter 15 bankruptcy in New York, sparking fears that failures in the Chinese real-estate sector could spill into other markets. And the declining prices of BTC, triggered a chain reaction among big-money holders of leveraged crypto derivatives.
That being said, Gitcoin Round 18 is going strong, and you should go ahead and donate if you can! What’s definitely been interesting to follow have been the conversations around the collaboration between Gitcoin x Shell. We’ve definitely been had a lot of thoughts about it - and have landed on the collaboration isn’t a bad thing, it’s how it was represented that led to the reaction.
Now, for something in the works: Scaling Ethereum, Layer-2s, rollups, lower gas fees, Optimism, Arbitrum, Linea, and Polygon zkEVM are likely a bunch of things you’ve been hearing about for some time and you may or may not understand what they mean. We wanted to demystify some of this, as it seems like the future of blockchains, specifically Ethereum, is dependent on a lot of these things happening. So, we are going to be doing a three-part deep dive into Optimism, a leading Layer 2 that is gaining traction by the day.
Here is what you can expect in the coming weeks, starting with:
Week 1: Rollups 101 - What is a Rollup? What problem does it solve and how?
Week 2:Optimism, a rollup chain leading the way to scaling Ethereum
Week 3: Optimism RetroPGF, a fantastic example of how to use public goods funding to bootstrap the network, and the future of Optimism
Note: The Giving Block has set up an emergency response fund to provide support to charitable organizations working on the ground in Maui to assist with relief efforts. The first $500,000 donated to the Maui fund and the participating charities will be matched 1:1. That adds up to a total of $1 Million in support for Maui relief efforts!
WAGMI.
What’s Inside
📣 Latest News
🕊 Tweet of the Week
📚 What We’re Thinking About
🚀 Opportunities
📡 On Our Radar
🌊 Rollups 101
Ever dealt with the high gas fees on Ethereum?! (Nod to all those who donated during the last Gitcoin Round!!), or had to wait and wait for your transaction to go through? Well, you’re not the only one.
With the high demand for Ethereum and its service — congestion became the annoying reality. It’s great for Ethereum as protocol — depicts that there is a clear demand for what it is trying to build but as a user who has to share this limited resource with others…not so much. And eventually, these users will leave a find a different blockchain better suited to their needs. Now, Ethereum doesn’t want to lose its users/customers, so what can they do? And that’s where rollups enter the picture. But before we move to rollups, let’s look at what Ethereum has tried in the past.
Read on to learn all about Rollups…
📣 Latest News
Polygon Labs announce collaboration with Celo around The Value Prop
Coinbase wins approval to offer crypto futures trading in US
Thallo has deployed its first carbon credits onto the Celo blockchain via its two-way carbon bridge
Crypto wallet provider ledger to let users buy bitcoin, ether through PayPal account
🕊 Tweet of the Week
📚 What We’re Thinking About
🗣 “Empowering communities to fund, build, and protect what matters” with Quadratic Funding - Connor O’ Day of Gitcoin shares. (Crypto Altruism)
🗺 Crypto World explores ReFi, and discusses if that can clean up crypto’s dirty image. (CNBC)
🌐 The concept behind RetroPGF is simple: reward those who have created a positive impact in the Optimism Collective. Unsure where to get started? The Ecosystem Contributions page has everything you need. (Optimism)
📔 Celo Africa DAO Report - May, June, July. (Celo)
🌐 How Chainlink And Celo are unlocking the next wave Of Web3. (Chainlinktoday)
👁 Gitcoin Citizens Rounds: Results & Lessons Learned. (GreenPill)
🌲 Money backed by nature: The key concept to learn in this blog post is that blockchain technology actually makes money backed by nature possible - A version of money that would be more friendly to humans and our planet. (MentoLabs)
📃 New research states that Blockchain solutions for carbon markets are nearing maturity. (ScienceDirect)
🪙 An intro to Zero-knowledge proofs, semaphore, and their application in World ID. ( Worldcoin)
🚀 Opportunities & Events
Attend: EigenLayer and Celo Foundation are co-hosting a happy hour during Stanford Blockchain Week, celebrating their recent collaboration to migrate Celo to an Ethereum L2 on August 31.
Attend: Schelling Point’s next destination is Singapore - September 11.
Attend: ReFiKenya, the annual festival celebrating the regenerative community across Kenya takes place on September 13.
Attend: ETHGlobal NY takes place September 22-24.
📡 On Our Radar
Gigawatt Protocol is designed for financing operational & profitable renewable energy sources, bridging attractive carbon mitigating APY opportunities to DeFi.
Lunco harnesses professional space engineers' expertise to create a project focusing on decentralized engineering. Its comprehensive toolkit caters to various hardware or robotics projects, making it an all-encompassing solution.
And one more thing…
The ultimate guide to password management for crypto enthusiasts