Riding The Wave News Summary #49
Major South Korean crypto exchanges delist Litecoin, Solana Commits $100M to Support South Korean Crypto Projects, & more
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Tweets
Solana Commits $100M to Support South Korean Crypto Projects
Metaverse tokens up 400% year on year despite altcoin bloodbath
New York Governor yet to commit to signing Bitcoin mining ban into law
Tweets
Major South Korean crypto exchanges delist Litecoin
Major cryptocurrency exchanges in South Korea have delisted Litecoin (LTC) weeks after flagging its privacy-focused MimbleWimble (MWEB) upgrade.
In a public announcement on Wednesday, Upbit cited the Act on the Reporting and Use of Specific Financial Transaction Information, which prohibits anonymous transactions as the key reason for ending support for LTC.
The delisting comes in the light of the much-awaited MWEB upgrade that made LTC transactions private, hiding some of the key identifiers. The upgrade was released earlier this year, nearly two years after its first proposal.
The crypto exchange reached out to the Litecoin Foundation to understand the privacy-focused upgrade, and after a thorough review, the exchange decided to end support for LTC transactions. Exchange users have 30 days to withdraw their LTC funds.
The delisting of LTC was highly anticipated especially after a warning by exchanges earlier this year. Korean exchanges have delisted several other privacy coins in the past as well.
This delisting is likely completely unrelated to the Luna crash and completly due to the network upgrade. Even though it is unrelated I would expect South Korea to draft new laws to prevent another Luna crash type incident as they have some of the strictest regulations. They could choose to ban certain mechanisms that leave no room for human intervention like the ones Luna had to keep there peg at $1 by selling Bitcoin. This would allow them to target the specific risk that led to a crash without neccesarily crushing development in the sector of stablecoins.
Solana Commits $100M to Support South Korean Crypto Projects
Solana will pump up to $100 million into South Korean crypto startups as it looks to penetrate a developer market still reeling from last month’s Terra ecosystem collapse.
Two key players in the speedy network’s ecosystem, Solana Ventures and the Solana Foundation, will seed investments and grants “across all web 3 verticals,” a press release said. But their emphasis will be on courting South Korea’s crypto games development sector.
The weeks-old funding effort puts Solana in direct competition with Polygon, Avalanche and other smart contract platforms all gunning for Korea’s trove of orphaned crypto developers. It’s unclear how many Terra developers will return to the ecosystem after its May implosion wiped out billions of dollars in wealth.
Alot of this is less support and more an attempt at sweeping up great talent and large projects that no longer want to continue on Luna & would be excited to move to another chain with a bit of monetary incentive. While transitioning between chains can be difficult/expensive it is not impossible and is frequently done by projects that are no longer satisfied with the chain they have built on.
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