1) Solana introduces State Compression, a new way to store data that uses significantly lower costs.

Solana has a crucial upgrade where their blockchain state can be compressed thus decreasing the cost of storing data on-chain significantly. This technique is done by using Merkle Trees to store small bits of data on chain and updates directly in the Solana ledger. You can learn more about Merkle trees here.

According to Solana, they are able to reduce the cost for compressing 1 million NFTs from $253 million down all the way to just $10k. This upgrade is necessary as Solana is one of the fastest blockchains that processes tons of transactions per seconds, which means the data stored on-chain grows exponentially fast, thus with state compression, not only this will save cost, but will also reduce the storage requirements for users to run nodes as the state grows bigger to handle more transactions.

2) Less than 1% of global investors pay taxes on Crypto in 2022.

According to Divly, they estimated that just 0.53% of crypto investors declared their cryptocurrency activity to their local tax authorities in 2022. Many people endured a long bear market for the majority of the year 2022 due to the collapse of large centralized entities and regulatory crackdown that causes a selloff of cryptocurrencies, thus there are a few theories that may explain why people do not pay taxes on crypto:

(a) The country only charges tax if it’s realized capital gains. During the bear market, investors may sell them at a loss, they won’t be taxed as this action will be reported as capital loss instead of gain.

(b) People who live in countries like Germany do not need to pay taxes if they buy and hold their cryptos for more than a year without selling.

(c) People live in crypto tax-free countries may not need to pay taxes.

Tax-free countries can attract more people to migrate to their countries and stimulate higher economic activity, but as more people convert their wealth into cryptos, governments may impose tax on cryptos to generate more revenue.

3) Malaysia PM Anwar: There’s no reason to depend on the dollar in investments.

As the US Dollar continues to lose its dominance, Prime Minister of Malaysia, Anwar Ibrahim is also leaning towards attracting investments from other countries apart from the US, such as China where he also announced that Malaysia secured a RM170 billion (~$39 billion) worth of investment commitments from China. This will be beneficial for many industries in Malaysia such as the automotive & semiconductor sectors where a lot of major components are imported from China.

He also mentioned a proposal to revive discussions on an “Asian Monetary Fund” to which the idea was hindered during his first stint as finance minister in 1990s due to a strong dollar that weakens the Ringgit and other Southeast Asia currencies. It will be interesting to see whether if cryptocurrencies will be included in the discussions, as China state-owned banks are offering services to foster crypto firms in Hong Kong. It would be interesting to see whether a partnership between China & Malaysia may also potentially bring more funding to crypto startups in Malaysia thus fostering more innovation growth in the blockchain & cryptocurrency space.

4) Elon Musk changed Twitter logo to Dogecoin, DOGE price pump by more than 30%

Dogecoin’s price action really has the habit of following Elon’s actions unlike many other cryptos which their price actions follow fundamental growth. Changing the Twitter logo to Dogecoin logo causing the price to surge 30%, and then later drops 8% after the logo has been removed.

It’s definitely doing what memecoins are doing best, but we need more cryptos with fundamental use cases in the top ten that is able to bring organic growth into the crypto ecosystem.

5) Sri Lanka launches SSID solution powered by Algorand

On the opposite spectrum of the Dogecoin news, the National Savings Bank of Sri Lanka has launched a self-sovereign identity solution to address problems of the people who are lacking identity & access to financial services.

I covered how self-soverign identity works in my previous article. I’m not Sri Lankan so I’m not too sure how this may work, but the most probable process I thought of would be that the Sri Lankan users are the holders of their identification issued by the Department for Registrations of Persons, then the National Savings Bank will be the verifier to verify the user’s identification without the need to store their credentials in their centralized database. This will ensure holders will always be the sole owner of their identity while also eliminates the risks of data breaches from centralized databases.

6) Argentinian Airline issues every ticket as an NFT

Another real-world use case from the Algorand ecosystem is that an Argentinian Airline company, Flybondi, issue flight tickets as an NFT to passengers, developed by a company called TravelX. The revolutionary use case of flight ticket NFTs is that you can buy flight tickets in advance, resell them to other passengers if you suddenly can’t board the flight, and you can use those NFTs as collateral for other payment methods not mentioned. This also reduces Flybondi’s cost of customer service & increases their revenue where they will charge a 2% fee for any reselling of the NFTs from passenger to passenger. This will set a standard for other airlines to come out with new use cases of issuing ticket NFTs to their passengers.

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