• MakerDAO $1b RWA competition.

• Dutch court denies bail for Pertsev.

• U.S. judge delays Tornado Cash trial.

• Opposition to EOF in Pectra.

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MakerDAO launched the Spark Tokenization Grand Prix, a competition aiming to allocate $1 billion worth of reserves toward tokenized real-world assets. The competition is open to all RWA issuers. Superstate and Ondo Finance have already expressed their intent to apply. The initiative is part of a reserve diversification effort, kicking off MakerDAO's Endgame, a protocol overhaul designed to expand the DAI stablecoin into RWA products. Applications to the program open on August 12th and will be judged by a panel of advisory companies, including Phoenix Labs, GFX Labs, and Steakhouse, with the final winners being voted on by MakerDAO governance.

Alexey Pertsev, a developer who helped write open-source code for Tornado Cash, has been denied bail and will have to remain in Dutch custody as he prepares his defense for the appeal of his money laundering conviction. In May, Dutch judges sentenced Pertsev to 64 months in prison. Pertsev has already spent ten months in jail. He was first arrested on August 10, 2022, released on bail on April 20, 2023, and detained again on May 14, 2024. According to DL News, Pertsev’s lawyer requested for him to have access to a computer and internet to be able to prepare his defense, but the request was denied by the judge.

U.S. District Court Judge Katherine Polk Failla granted a delay in the prosecution of Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm. The extension was granted during a hearing at the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of New York, which met to discuss Storm's motion to dismiss the case. A trial was initially set to begin this September. Storm’s legal team had requested a continuation of the trial until early 2025. The trial will now take place in December. In August 2023, Storm was indicted on charges of money laundering, sanctions violations, and operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business. During today’s hearing, Judge Failla compared Tornado Cash to WhatsApp, questioning prosecutors why WhatsApp is not charged for criminal activity conducted by users on its encrypted messaging application, and whether the same logic should apply to Tornado Cash.

Ethereum core developer Marius Van Der Wijden expressed opposition to including EVM Object Format (EOF) in the upcoming Pectra upgrade. In a recent blog post, he highlights that EOF would introduce complexity as it adds 19 new opcodes and removes 16 existing ones. Wijden also raised concerns about insufficient impact analysis and security assessments. Wijden says that EOF offers only marginal benefits and suggests focusing on more groundbreaking upgrades like Verkle instead. The Pectra upgrade, set to be one of Ethereum's most extensive updates, features 19 planned EIPs and is expected to launch in the first quarter of 2025.

• Devcon speaker applications

• Relay introduces Chain Pages

• Tornado Cash case analysis

• ETHGlobal x Ethereum Film early access

• OpenSea supports Coinbase Wallet

• Pre-register .super and .chain domains

• ATT data breach

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• Coinbase Wallet launches a new web app.

• Compound suffers a DNS compromise.

• Encrypted transactions on Gnosis Chain.

• Nethermind formal verification framework.

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Coinbase introduced a new web app for Coinbase Wallet, offering a unified portal to track onchain activities. Users can connect multiple wallets to monitor their crypto holdings, NFTs, and DeFi positions across various chains. The portal includes trending dapps and a built-in swap interface for trading over 2 million supported tokens. Coinbase also launched an Onchain Summer points program, enabling users to earn points by completing activities on Base. The experiences were submitted from the Base onchain registry. Users can redeem points for prizes like an ENS subdomain and Base merchandise. Users can track their points and rank on their summer pass. The campaign runs until August 31st.

Earlier today, Compound Finance experienced a DNS compromise on its domain. Attackers were able to redirect users from compound.finance to a phishing site with a wallet drainer. The protocol itself remains unaffected, and users can still access their positions via smart contracts or third-party apps like DeFi Saver. Celer Network's domain was also compromised. Both protocols use Squarespace as their domain registrar. The hijacks come as Squarespace acquired Google Domains in 2023, requiring all users to migrate. Some crypto projects that use Squarespace have not yet been affected, but remain at risk. Users who visited the sites should check and revoke their token approvals.

Shutter Network launched encrypted transactions on Gnosis Chain, marking the first mainnet implementation of Shutter's threshold encryption. The integration, coined as Shutterized Gnosis Chain, introduces an encrypted mempool that provides users with MEV protection, base-layer neutrality, and censorship resistance. To utilize encrypted transactions on Gnosis Chain, users can manually add the Shutterized Gnosis Chain RPC to their wallet. Initially, transaction inclusion times may be slow due to the limited number of validators but will improve as the number of validators and Keypers expands. Keypers are specialized nodes that manage the encryption and decryption keys to secure transactions.

Nethermind released Clear, a formal verification framework for Solidity programs. The framework allows users to define the expected behavior of Yul programs and verify code conformance. Clear translates Yul programs into Lean for verification, generates verification conditions, and provides proof templates. Formal verification refers to the use of mathematical methods to prove or disprove the correctness and security of smart contract code.

• Lodestar v1.20.0 release

• Besu 24.7.0 release

• PartyDAO ERC-2O launch tool

• Chainlink supports Starknet

• Paxos BUSD vs SEC updates

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• StarkWare proposes STRK staking.

• Optimism activates the Fjord upgrade.

• Safe integrates support for TWAP orders.

• CFTC Chair reaffirms ETH as a commodity.

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StarkWare proposed to launch staking for its native STRK token, introducing a permissionless staking protocol and stake delegation program. The proposal outlines an incremental rollout approach. In the initial stage, users can choose between running a full node to stake directly or delegating their stake to a staker who runs a full node. The mechanism will feature a minting curve with 1.8% to 2.5% yearly inflation, adjusting rewards based on the total STRK locked. Staking will require a 21-day lockup period for withdrawals. StarkWare plans to launch the initial stage on mainnet by Q4 2024. In subsequent stages, stakers will be responsible for securing the network by producing, attesting, and proving blocks.

The Fjord network upgrade is now live on the OP Stack, including OP Mainnet and Base. The upgrade introduces support for EIP-7212, a rollup-specific standard leveraging the secp256r1 elliptic curve for secure and efficient signature verifications, which significantly reduces gas costs for smart wallet applications. The upgrade also incorporates Brotli compression to lower data availability costs and adopts a new L1 fee cost calculation using FastLZ compression. A standard ETH transfer on Base using a smart wallet now incurs less than half the gas costs compared to before the upgrade. OP Stack node operators must update their client software.

Safe now supports tiered fees and TWAP orders on its native in-wallet swap portal. Time Weighted Average Price (TWAP) orders allow users to execute large trades gradually, minimizing price impact. The tiered fee structure offers lower fees for higher swap volumes across various token and stablecoin-only pairs, with fees ranging from 0.05% to 0.35%. The integration is powered by CoW Swap, a leading MEV-protecting DEX aggregator. Safe native swaps are available on Ethereum, Arbitrum, and Gnosis Chain.

CFTC Chairman Rostin Behnam reaffirmed that Bitcoin and Ethereum are classified as commodities. The chairman referenced a ruling by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, which determined that the assets are commodities under the Commodity Exchange Act (CEA). In his testimony during the Senate Committee on Appropriations, Behnam also stated that 70-80% of the cryptocurrency market consists of non-securities.

• Golang SSZ 15 library

• World Chain hits 5m verified

• EthStaker survey recap

• Crypto Market Cap chart

• Lava Network airdrop

• House overturns Biden’s SAB121 veto

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