This Week in Web3 | 4.17.23

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Here's what we'll cover today:

• Ethereum's Shapella upgrade: ETH withdrawals are now live!

• Two perspectives on a16z's State of Crypto Report

• Uniswap finally leaves Apple Jail

• Quest feature: Borrowing and lending on 0VIX zkEVM

Sarah at Layer3

WEB3 DIGEST

Ethereum's Shanghai and Capella (Shapella) Upgrades Goes Live

Ethereum's highly anticipated "Shapella" upgrade has finally gone live on mainnet! This milestone marks a critical step in Ethereum's 2023 roadmap, ushering in an array of new features and improvements, including the unstaking of Ether (ETH).

You can learn more about Shapella by completing our Shapella Quest below:

As Ethereum community members expressed their congratulations to the developers, Ethereum Foundation researcher Danny Ryan highlighted the completion of the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) loop. Meanwhile, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin declared the network to be in a "really good place" during a Shapella watch party hosted by the Ethereum Foundation team.

This is because the Shapella upgrade marks a transition where some of the "hardest and the fastest parts of the Ethereum protocol’s transition are basically over," enabling developers and researchers to make other significant upgrades at a more relaxed pace.

Developers and investors alike can look forward to further upgrades in the pipeline, such as the much-awaited EIP-4844, which aims to enhance the scalability of rollups on Ethereum.

As Cointelegraph states, "One of the expected effects of the Shapella update is the onboarding of more institutional investors to Ethereum. Freddy Zwanzger, Ethereum ecosystem lead at Blockdaemon, foresees that there may be more interest in ETH staking opportunities from larger investors since there’s a clear withdrawal option in place now."

INFORMATION DIET

Sarah's Recommended Reads: Two Perspectives on a16z's State of Crypto

Welcome to Sarah's Recommended Reads! Here, I'll be summarizing well-written articles or threads by web3 thinkers and builders that you should know about.

This week, we're chatting the a16z State of Crypto report. We're not going to do a typical summary. Instead, we'll be looking at two opposing perspectives to the report, and thinking about how to critically analyze it in the face of everything that's going on (because we don't just slurp up every VC opinion, and you shouldn't either 😉).

If you're looking for a coherent thread that sums up some of the key highlights of the report, then you're in luck. thecap.eth provides a nice 🐂ish summary here with a few important charts and stats worth looking at, including:

• ~7% of all Ethereum fees are paid by L2 rollups

• Ethereum now consumes 0.001% of the energy that YouTube consumes annually

• Uses for zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs are becoming tangible: scaling and privacy

• NFT creators have earned more than $1.9 billion in royalty revenues

However...if you're like me, and you want to look at a16z's report with a dose of healthy skepticism, then Web3 Is Going Great Creator Molly White has also conducted a more thorough breakdown of some of the claims in the report. Now, I tend to agree to disagree with some of the approaches she's taken to breaking down major catastrophes in web3, but I do think that it's important to engage with opposing opinions — or risk being in our own bubble.

And one of the opinions that I actually agree with in her thread is her breakdown of this graph in the report.

For a venture capital firm, it seems a bit disingenuous to base "Interest" in crypto purely based on...crypto-related mentions on Twitter? Even more, why use the number of stars on public crypto repositories as a indicator of developer activity? Surely we can use a bit more rigor than that for some basic sentiment analysis.

Decide for yourself here:

Quick Hits

• Euler Finance Lets Users Redeem Recovered Funds Following $200M Theft – link

• SEC Sues Terraform and CEO Do Kwon With Defrauding Investors – link

• Uniswap mobile app is finally released on AppStore – link

• Hong Kong woos mainland China crypto firms in push to bolster finance hub status – link

COMMUNITY FEATURE

Featured Quest: Borrowing with 0VIX on zkEVM

Curious about Polygon's new zkEVM chain? Try it out safely in our Quest with 0VIX, a Decentralized Finance (DeFi) liquidity market protocol. 0VIX enables users to effortlessly lend, borrow, and earn interest with their digital assets.

As always, thank you for reading!

Join our Telegram, Discord, and Twitter to stay up-to-date on the latest Quests, communities, and more. Until next week, frens.

Cheers,

Sarah from Layer3