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⌐◪-◪ → DASTAN, the parent company behind Rug Radio and Decrypt, just announced MYRIAD Markets — a new prediction market and creator monetization platform.

From what I can tell, the platform has two key components:

1. Quests: A method to track and reward content consumers for their attention, like reading articles or watching videos.

2. Markets: Let users predict (bet on) the future by embedding prediction markets across users’ entire browsing experience.

This means you could bet on something like “Will DOGE hit a new ATH this year?” directly from a YouTube video from your favorite creator.

I’m excited to see where this goes. The team is certainly shaking things up in the media space and creating new monetization opportunities for creators.

One risk here, which exists for anything with financial incentives in web3, is Sybil attacks and other methods of gaming the system.

If you want to learn more about MYRIAD, follow them on Twitter.

⌐◪-◪ → Coinbase’s layer 2 network, Base, is killing it. They now have more weekly DEX users than all the other layer 2 networks combined.

Base’s success is a testament to the power of community, good marketing, and a builder-first mindset — earning itself the #2 spot on L2 Beat’s TVL leaderboard.

While Arbitrum is still #1 with 38% market share (in terms of TVL), Base is #2 with 18% market share — beating out major competitors like OP Mainnet, Blast, Mantle, and others.

Base’s Onchain Summer event saw participation from over 2M unique wallets, a massive increase from the 250k wallets in 2023.

Crazy to think how far they’ve come — they are now (in my opinion) the go-to EVM network to build anything new on. The real question is, can they keep up the momentum?

⌐◪-◪ → The SEC has collected a whopping $4.68B in crypto fines this year, a 3,000% increase from last year’s $150M in fines.

Zooming out, the SEC has collected $7.42B in total fines since 2013, which means 2024 represents 63% of the total.

While fines are up over 3,000% this year, the number of actual enforcement actions is down from 30 in 2023 to 11 in 2024 — with a majority of 2024 fines ($4.47B) coming from the Terraform Labs case.

This signals a shift in the SEC’s strategy to focus on fewer, high-impact cases.

Unfortunately, until Congress steps in and provides much-needed regulatory clarity, we will likely continue to see heavy enforcement action from the SEC.

Now you know why crypto firms hate Gary so much — he’s being greedy.

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