This week in web3—LimeWire capitalizes on nostalgia, could Ethereum catch up with the younger chains on the block? & more

GM!

Here are the biggest news updates of the web3 sphere served hot with a thought piece on the side. Let's look at what happened This Week In Web3, our threads on the women in web3, and ask ourselves—has Ethereum remained the shell of its older self?

In today’s issue, we cover:

• Web3 Weekly Wrap

• Learn with Kable Recap

• Is Ethereum the MS-DOS of blockchains?

This week in crypto 📈

Biden Administration wants to explore a digital version of the dollar

U.S. President Joe Biden signed an executive order on Wednesday, calling on the government to place "urgency" on research & development of a potential CBDC. This doesn’t necessarily mean that The Biden Administration wants the U.S. to launch its own digital currency. Here are some key takeaways:

• The Treasury Department and other key agencies will submit a report by September to the White House analysing the potential costs & benefits of a “digital dollar.”

• Top financial regulators to submit public reports on the implications of U.S. digital assets and how it would impact consumers, investors, businesses, and economic growth.

• The Treasury Department to form the basis for any rulemakings needed to address how cryptocurrencies could aid illicit activities.

LimeWire nostalgia is hitting the NFT community hard

LimeWire, the go-to peer-to-peer platform for 90’s kids looking to download movies, games and software, is making a comeback as an NFT Marketplace. Talk about nostalgia!

Here’s what the new LimeWire looks like:

• The management is led by the Zehetmayr brothers, Paul and Julian. The board of advisors includes the Wu-Tang Clan and H.E.R.

• The platform will allow musicians to sell their music as NFTs. Most of the revenue will go to the artists, with only a tiny cut coming back to the company.

The founders are hoping to evoke nostalgia in the 2000’s LimeWire users, and they’re winning as far we can see 👀

Stripe is building a seamless onboarding infrastructure for FTX

Stripe gave a sneak peek of the upcoming onboarding and identity verification features of the FTX crypto exchange through its statement on Thursday. The goal? To make the process of opening and funding FTX accounts more "seamless". FTX plans to deploy machine learning-driven "Stripe Radar" to lessen any fraud risk.

FTX’s US President, Brett Harrison, said the company is already experiencing far faster speeds of KYC processing, higher rates of automated approvals and an overall improved user experience.

Vitalik Buterin asks for leniency in the upcoming sentencing of Virgil Griffith

Here’s how the story goes... Virgil Griffith, the former Ethereum developer, was arrested in November 2019 after presenting a cryptocurrency and blockchain technology presentation at a North Korean crypto conference earlier that year. His charges? Violating U.S. sanctions law. He pleaded guilty in September 2021 and his agreement could land him in prison for 6.5 years.

Now, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has taken to himself to paint a moving picture of his long-time friend and former collaborator in front of a federal court in New York for leniency in the upcoming sentencing of Griffith.

Learn with Kable👩‍🏫

In honour of International Women’s Day, we decided to exclusively focus on the amazing women in web3.

For Tuesday, we focused on the founders, builders and policy-makers in web3 who have been doing amazing work. They are making web3 accessible & bringing the next generation of on-boarders into the web3 space.

The participation of women in the web3 space is increasing and getting more impactful. We shared the work of some women in NFTs who are making the NFT community a better place and inspiring more women to get into NFTs and web3 in general.

Is Ethereum the MS-DOS of Blockchains?

The mass migration towards the next generation of L1s is being seen as highly scalable. One such blockchain is Solana, claiming to be the fastest blockchain. To find the truth behind the claim, researchers at Dragonfly conducted a study comparing 6 blockchains.

The parameters:

1. The study compared the performance of 6 blockchains by testing the capacity of automated market makers (AMM) on each chain.

2. The blockchains are Ethereum, Solana, BNB Small Chain, Avalanche, Polygon & Celo (CELO).

3. Uniswap v2 was set as the benchmark because

• it’s simple and easy to measure

• every blockchain has a Uniswap V2-style AMM live in production

• it’s typical of common smart contract usage patterns

And, what did the researchers find out?

1. Solana’s speed indeed surpasses other chains including Ethereum

Solana’s Orca decentralized exchange (DEX) hit it out of the park with 273.34 trades per second and created a new block every 590 milliseconds.

BNB Smart Chain wasn’t far behind with 194.6 trades per second on PancakeSwap, with a block time average of 3 seconds.

With a whopping difference, Avalanche stood third with 31.65 trades per second on Trader Joe with a block time average of 2 seconds.

Polygon managed 47.67 average trades per second on Quickswap with a block time average of 2.5 seconds.

Coming fourth is Celo (CELO) with mere 24.93 average trades per second on Ubeswap with a block time average of 5 seconds.

and, finally, Ethereum came the last of the 6 blockchains with its 9.19 average trades per second with a block time average of 13.2 seconds.

2. Competing L1 chains are predicted to outdo EVM chains

As you are reading this report, the blockchains are continually being optimized; that’s why it is guaranteed any one chain say, Ethereum for example, may not stay at the top for long. As different chains mature, clients will have more options and better-operating systems to work with, a win-win!

We, now, already know that Ethereum is behind many other chains. Researchers, GM and Haseeb Qureshi argued, “If you really want high performance now, forget EVM chains; you have to look outside the EVM space.”

At present, researchers are under the impression that

3. Unfortunately, Solana has issues of its own

Solana’s greatest appeal lies in its transactions fees and scalability. Solana’s website says the average transaction cost is between 0.000 to 5 (much cheaper than Ethereum!). Solana is the answer to Ethereum’s scaling problems.

But, Solana suffers the burden of its own problems. The recent Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on Solana wasn’t the first attack on the platform either. Proof Of History allows for deterministic blocks that can easily be targeted by attacks, leaving Solana open to the prediction and picking of attackers.

Could the repeated attacks result from severe design flaws in the proof-of-history consensus protocol—or could it be because of Solana's trade-off between speed and security?

What does it mean?

• Ethereum might be the best block-producing machine around, but it’s a slow fellow when it comes to trades per second.

• None of the other blockchains present in the test were being used to their full potential.

But the question remains, will Ethereum be able to top these younger and faster blockchains for long? The decision is yours to make. 🙌

That’s a wrap for This Week In Web3!

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See you next Sunday! 🚀