8/20/24: Solana's Newest Casino 🎰💸🇺🇸

Top News

  1. Drift launches prediction market ‘BET' on Solana

  2. Tether mints another $1B USDT on TRON

  3. DNC chair meets with Marathon Digital BTC miner

Specs’ Insights

1. Drift launches prediction market ‘BET' on Solana

⌐◪-◪ → Drift, Solana’s largest perpetual trading platform just launched a prediction market called BET, a direct competitor to Polymarket.

BET is short for “Bullish on Everything” and offers some improvements on Polymarket such as earning yield on positions and supporting 30+ collateral types.

Without taking sides in the Solana vs. Ethereum tribal wars, I think multiple prediction markets are a good thing. Aside from driving healthy competition, it means more arbitrage opportunities between markets — which means more accurate predictions.

I will add, given Solana’s reputation as crypto’s #1 casino, BET might have a real chance at competing with Polymarket in terms of volumes. With that said, Polymarket is the incumbent brand in the space and won’t go down easy.

2. Tether mints another $1B USDT on TRON

⌐◪-◪ → Tether, the #1 largest stablecoin in the world, just minted an additional $1B USDT on the Tron network — bringing USDT’s total market cap to $117B.

For context: Tether minted $33B USDT in the past year, $19B of which was minted on the Tron and the other $14B on Ethereum.

It’s starting to feel like Tron season is here. Aside from the fact that Justin Sun has infinite money, Tron is:

  • the most used $USDT network, over $60B settled

  • is now a top 10 crypto with a market cap of $13.15B

  • boasts over 1.9M daily active users

Tron might be controversial (thanks to Justin Sun), but it’s starting to feel like it can’t be ignored.

3. DNC chair meets with Marathon Digital BTC miner

⌐◪-◪ → The Democratic National Committee Chair, Jamie R. Harrison, met with Bitcoin miner Marathon Digital earlier this month.

The meeting covered several topics, including ways to mitigate the environmental impact of Bitcoin mining, what issues matter to crypto voters, and high-level policies that would make sense for the DNC platform.

While the party is certainly reaching out to the crypto industry, including this meeting with Marathon and more, their 2024 platform did not reference crypto or blockchain once.

This is an upgrade from having anti-crypto rhetoric (i.e. crackdowns, chokepoints, bans, etc) it’s still pretty far from pro-crypto policies in the Republican party platform.

While I have no doubt crypto will be (and should be) a non-partisan issue, I do wonder if that will happen this election cycle or next.

Everything Else

⛓️ Crypto & DeFi

  • Base announces ENS subnames ‘basenames’

  • UXD Protocol DAO votes on sunsetting its stablecoin

  • Chrome extension ‘Bull Checker’ leads to exploits

  • Genesis-linked wallet hacked for $238M

  • ADA drops out of the top 10 coins

  • Clearpool develops Ozean, L2 chain in Optimism ecosystem

  • Status ETH-based dapp collaborates with Linea on L2 rollup

🏦 Wallstreet & VC

  • Bitwise acquires ETC Group to bring AUM to $4.5B

  • Fabric raises $33M to develop cryptography processing unit

🏛️ Legal & Regulatory

  • Democratic Party releases platform without mentioning BTC or crypto

  • Top Democratic donor Ron Conway leaves crypto super PAC

  • DNC chair mets with Bitcoin miner Marathon, exec says

  • SEC rejects Cboe’s 19b-4 filings for Solana ETFs

  • NY Judge rejects SEC effort to block Tron's arguments in ongoing suit

  • Mango Markets DAO votes on SEC settlement proposal

🌎 Rest of the World

  • Japan’s Metaplanet buys an additional $3.5M worth of BTC

  • Hong Kong lawmaker urges DAO regulation post-Mantra case

  • China classifies crypto as money laundering in AML updates

🖼️ NFTs & Metaverse

  • NFT Nate shares documentary of Pump fun rugger

  • Simon's cat CAT presale goes live tomorrow backed

  • Floki secures deals with EPL teams to boost FLOKI

  • PEPE & BRETT to get Upbit listing

  • Politics powers nearly 90% of Polymarket's trading volume

  • Elon plugs DOGE in mock government role

  • Parcl faces front-end exploit

  • Rekt Drinks rolls out a content creators program

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