Sunday Review 13/08/2023

Jack Martin

Aug 13, 2023 - 1 min read

Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic launched the first tourist flight to space this week, carrying a former Olympian and a mother and daughter from the Caribbean.

But wen moon? Maybe a recap of the week's crypto news will help us to find out.

Two big launches here on Earth this week: PayPal finally launched its long-promised stablecoin and Coinbase launched its Ethereum layer-2 network, Base. Coinbase also moved to have the SEC lawsuit against it dismissed, stating that it simply did not trade securities and that cryptocurrencies were more like Beanie Babies anyway.

Justin Sun has been spending again, allegedly putting in $209 million of his own money to prop up his ailing Huobi exchange. Meanwhile, Apple customers have been saving, clocking up $10 billion between them in their Apple Savings accounts. And for those who want to spend but can't save, maybe you could trick a bot into giving you 800 ETH like this NFT trader.

If you're the sort of person who would love to get into blockchain, but just don't have any friends to ask for advice, maybe Aptos has the ideal solution for you in the form of an AI-powered natural language assistant. You'd certainly be doing yourself a favour, because blockchain is now officially more efficient, at least for issuing asset-backed securities.

Thailand's dominant exchange is all set to fork its blockchain to change the consensus to Proof of Stake, while Soramitsu plans to connect its Cambodian gross settlement system to its cross-chain stablecoin exchange and make a pan-Asian payments network.

It seems that Sam Altman's Worldcoin just can't catch a break, with a fresh investigation being carried out into the iris scanning initiative by Argentinian authorities. Neighbouring Brazil, however, not only named its CBDC platform, but also revealed that it will support smart contracts for added functionality.

And with that, we're off to find a trading bot to trick into giving us the $450,000 it will cost for a trip on the next Virgin Galactic trip into space.