Gm Fintech Futurists —

Welcome to our Web3 newsletter, covering DeFi, digital assets, NFTs, and the emergence of the financial metaverse. Today we highlight the following:

FINTECH & INSTITUTIONAL ADOPTION: EY And Polygon Ready Privacy-Focused Ethereum for Enterprise Release
CRYPTOECONOMICS & PROTOCOLS: The =nil; Foundation Raises $22MM To Build Marketplace For Zero Knowledge Proofs
DAOs, NFTs & METAVERSE: Gamemaker Shakes Up NFT Royalties With New Smart Contracts

Are we covering the right projects and protocols? What are the top things on you radar? Leave a note for us in the comments.

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Fintech And Institutional Adoption

⭐ EY And Polygon Ready Privacy-Focused Ethereum for Enterprise Release - CoinDesk

Paul Brody prbrody.eth 🦇🔊 @pbrody
EY, along with our friends at @0xPolygon, are excited to announce a new update to the source code for Nightfall. Developers can now use the protocol to create #privacy-enabled transactions on the public #Ethereum ey.com/en_gl/news/202… #Nightfall #privacy #blockchain
ey.comThe EY and Polygon organizations update source code for blockchain privacy-based protocol NightfallLondon, 18 January 2023. The EY and Polygon organizations have updated the public domain source code for Nightfall to enable the development of privacy-focused enterprise blockchain solutions.
2:30 PM ∙ Jan 18, 2023
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Nightfall, a zero-knowledge optimistic rollup, is developed by EY in the public domain. The latest update to Nightfall includes fully decentralized code and X.509 identification certificates. The network is built for enterprises that want to use Ethereum but require privacy, scalability, and lower gas fees.
Rollup Economics
In September 2021, EY teamed up with Polygon to create a beta version of Nightfall. Nightfall aggregates zero-knowledge proof transactions into optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollup operators bundle multiple off-chain transactions together in large batches before submitting them to Ethereum.
They're "optimistic" because they assume off-chain transactions are valid and don't publish proofs of validity for transaction batches posted on-chain. Users are incentivized to challenge incorrect blocks to ensure that only correctly formed L2 blocks are in the final blockchain record. When a challenge is made, the smart contract arbitrates the accuracy of the challenge, rewarding correct challenges and removing the incorrect L2 block. Unlike optimistic rollups, zero-knowledge rollups publish cryptographic proofs of validity for off-chain transactions.
Source
Rollup implementations — zero-knowledge, Arbitrium, Optimistic — are live on Ethereum today, and they all rely on a sequencer to order transactions. And while a sequencer cannot steal funds, it learns transaction information and can profit from MEV (maximal extractable value). On that note, Flashbots is working to mitigate the costs associated with MEV, and we just published a short take on their recent raise. Cryptography has come a long way, especially with advancements in zkEVMs, but it is still a multi-year engineering effort ahead.
Overall we are excited to see EY push forward with this technology, as it can bring more real-world economy business into settling in Web3. EY is a distributor of digital transformation, and this allows them to charge for deploying an open source solution leveraging emerging infrastructure.
👑Related Coverage👑
Podcast conversation: Implications of the Ethereum Merge for Web3, with Justin Drake of The Ethereum Foundation
$1B valuation for MEV project Flashbots