Web3: Fidelity "free" BTC & ETH trading for all investors; Kraken and Gamestop launch NFT marketplaces; Solana using Helium for phone network
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:
DEFI & DIGITAL ASSETS: Crypto Wireless Carrier Helium Mobile Will Power Solana’s Saga Smartphone
CRYPTOECONOMICS & PROTOCOLS: Google Cloud Just Became A Solana Validator
DAOs, NFTs & METAVERSE: Crypto Exchange Kraken Launches 'Gasless' NFT Marketplace
FINTECH & INSTITUTIONAL ADOPTION: Fidelity Offers Retail Investors Commission-Free BTC And ETH Trading
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DeFi Protocols And Digital Assets
⭐ Crypto Wireless Carrier Helium Mobile Will Power Solana’s Saga Smartphone - Decrypt
🎈 @helium builders and partners talk about their migration to @solana at #SolanaBreakpoint. On stage are @web3princess of @BAXUSco, @jhiller Technical Director at @heliumFndn and @jmarcelino of @RAKwireless.The Helium network, a decentralized telecommunications network with 970,000 hotspots worldwide, and Solana Labs, the company behind the Solana blockchain, have announced a partnership to integrate the upcoming Helium Mobile service, a 5G wireless service for smartphones, with Solana’s Saga phone. Both are due to launch in early 2023. In September, The Helium network proposed to move from Proof-of-Coverage (PoC) and Data Transfer Accounting to Oracles, entities that connect blockchains to external systems. The proposal also included migrating its network onto Solana, so the partnership makes sense.
Solana Saga will come with a free 30-day trial for Helium Mobile in the US, offering unlimited voice and text use during that span, with plans for as low as $5/month. Users can opt into earning tokens by sharing location data with the network. Notably, the phone will not be exclusive to Helium Mobile. It will feature 512GB storage, 12GB RAM, a 50-megapixel camera, and the latest Snapdragon 8 Plug Gen 1 chip for about $1,000. The device enables improved dApp performance, crypto payments, and NFT wallet features.
We want a crypto phone to succeed, because it enables an upstream distribution platform that competes with Apple and iOS. But we are skeptical about how this gets pulled off, in the sense that people still buy phones based on mobile app features, not crypto features.
👑 See related coverage 👑
See here for our short take on Saga and the implications of phone competition.
Long Take: Can anyone fight Apple's monopoly power over Web3, the Metaverse, and Finance?
⭐ MSCI Enlists Goldman Sachs To Organize Crypto Market Chaos - Blockworks
⭐ Binance Moves To Liquidate Its Entire Position In FTX Tokens - Decrypt
Divisions In Sam Bankman-Fried’s Crypto Empire Blur On His Trading Titan Alameda’s Balance Sheet - CoinDesk
Circle Begins Putting Reserves Into New BlackRock Fund - CoinDesk
Strategy Tokens Could Simplify Trading For Mom And Pop Investors - Blockworks
Circle's Euro Stablecoin Coming To Solana In 2023 - Decrypt
Cryptoeconomics And Blockchain Protocols
⭐ Google Cloud Just Became A Solana Validator - Decrypt
Did you think we only had one announcement? Think again. Google Cloud is working with @solana to bring Blockchain Node Engine to the Solana chain next year, so it will be easy for anyone to launch a dedicated Solana node in the cloud ↓So important we are covering it twice. 👉 See here for our short take on this topic.
Google Cloud is now running a validator on the Solana blockchain, and by Q12023, it will bring its Blockchain Node Engine to Solana. The Blockchain Node Engine is a fully-managed node hosting service that already supports the Ethereum blockchain.
Blockchains consist of stored and encrypted transaction data. The atomic unit of blockchain infrastructure is a node — a device containing a full copy of the blockchain's transaction history. Google Cloud's Blockchain Node Engine is a fully managed node-hosting service that offers (1) streamlined provisioning, by letting developers deploy a new node with a single operation and specify the desired region and network; (2) secure development, by placing nodes behind a Virtual Private Cloud firewall, only trusted users can communicate with client endpoints, protected from DDoS attacks; and (3) fully managed operations, where Google Cloud actively monitors the nodes and restarts them during outages.
Okay, we need to talk about Hetzner banning @solana nodes. I monitored the infrastructure decentralization of Solana throughout all of August via a tool that I built. ~40% of Solana validators live on hetzner, adding up to ~20% of total network stake. A thread 🧵 (1/10)As a counter example, on November 2nd, cloud service provider Hetzner Online GmbH blocked all Solana activity on its servers, taking 1,000+ Solana validators offline. Hetzner's decision did not take the network offline wholly, but almost halfway there. Approximately 40% of the Solana network's validators, and 20% of the network's total stake, were housed on Hetzner. This teaches us the important lesson that underneath the chain’s nodes are devices, and those devices usually sit in a server farm, and that server farm is usually owned by a business that can be censored.
Thus the importance of decentralization, redundancy, and anti-fragility.
⭐Rocket Pool: Liquid Staking Lifts Off - Messari
⭐ JPMorgan Trade On Public Blockchain ‘Monumental Step’ For DeFi - Blockworks
