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Summary

• Ethereum successfully merged on September 15th, followed by ~17% price decline
• Potential energy crisis continues in Europe continues as the critical natural gas pipeline is destroyed in an anonymous attack
• The Federal Reserve raised interest rates another 75 bps in its ongoing efforts to crush demand and increase unemployment to combat inflation,
• The strong dollar has sent the Euro, Yen, and British pound to multi-decade lows, even forcing the Japanese and British central banks to intervene in the markets

Headlines

• Binance Smart Chain announces its intentions to launch its own zero-knowledge proof scaling technology, zkBNB
• Cosmos announces big changes to network and ATOM tokenomics at Cosmoverse conference
• Circle launching native USDC on Arbitrum, Cosmos, NEAR, Optimism and Polkadot
• BlackRock launches an ETF in Europe with blockchain and crypto company exposure
• Coinbase joins in on the legal fight against the U.S. Treasury’s sanctions on Tornado Cash 

• Algorand undergoes upgrade launching state proofs aiming to increase TPS and cross-chain communication 
• NFT trading volume down ~95% from highs
• Celsius exposes user data
• Cardano successfully completes
• Vasil upgrade, increasing scalability 
• Chainlink announces plans to launch staking and new tokenomics for LINK 
• South Korean court issues arrest warrant for Do Kwon
• Retail trading app, Robinhood, releases new Web3 wallet on Polygon
• MakerDAO to Invest $500M in US Treasurys
• Solana suffers its fourth major outage in 2022
• Zcash (ZEC) blockchain target of apparent spam attack.
  • All nodes in the Zcash network must maintain a list of every single token spent forever. This obviously requires a lot of memory required to be stored by each node. With this spam attack from a single actor that began in July, the amount of storage has tripled to 117GB. If the attack continues, it will eventually make running a ZEC node extraordinarily difficult for the average person given the memory requirements. 
• BNB Chain suffers bridge hack
  • The hacker exploited a security bug, allowing the attacker to withdraw previously locked funds. ~$500M worth of BNB was accessed by the hacker but, ultimately, they were only able to move ~$100 million worth off BNB Smart Chain before a chain halt stopped the attack. 

Source: Ikigai Fund