Riding The Wave News Summary 92
Google Cloud Just Became a Solana Validator, Polygon Studios' Ryan Wyatt talks Web3's core principles and fairer internet & more.
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Table of Contents
Tweets
Polygon Studios' Ryan Wyatt talks Web3's core principles and fairer internet
$1B Crypto Hack Fears Spur 20% GALA Plunge, but Firm Implies It Attacked Itself as a Safeguard
Twitter Reportedly Halts Work on Crypto Wallet, Driving Dogecoin Down 10%
Tweets
Google Cloud Just Became a Solana Validator
Google's cloud computing division Google Cloud announced on Saturday that it’s now running a validator on the Solana blockchain, and will soon add features aimed at welcoming Solana developers and node runners.
Solana ( SOL) rose 12% on the news, changing hands at around $36.80 at time of publication.
it is planning to bring its Blockchain Node Engine to the Solana chain in 2023. The Blockchain Node Engine is a “fully-managed node hosting service” run by the provider, which already supports the Ethereum blockchain.
“We want to make it one-click to run a Solana node in a cost-effective way,” said Google Web3 product manager Nalin Mittal at Solana’s Breakpoint conference in Lisbon.
Google Cloud also announced it’s now indexing Solana data and adding it to its BigQuery data warehouse, a move that will “make it easier for the Solana developer ecosystem to access historical data.” The feature will launch in the first quarter of 2023, Mittal said.
While many other individual investors and I might not be a fan of how centralized Solana is, Venture Capitalists and major companies like Google prefer it over more decentralized projects.
Polygon Studios' Ryan Wyatt talks Web3's core principles and fairer internet
The year 2022 in crypto was eventful in many ways. However, the negative impacts of a bear market dampened the excitement around the blockchain upgrades that significantly brought crypto ecosystems closer to the future of finance.
For Bitcoin, it was the Taproot soft fork upgrade, which was aimed at improving the scripting capabilities and privacy of the Bitcoin network. Ethereum underwent the Merge upgrade to transition from a proof-of-work to a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism.
Leading decentralized Ethereum scaling platform Polygon kicked off the year with mainnet upgrades based on Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP)-1559, otherwise known as the London hard fork. The upgrade was accompanied by Polygon token burning and better fee visibility.
On Jan. 25, Ryan Wyatt joined Polygon Studios as the CEO after resigning from YouTube as global head of gaming. Speaking to Cointelegraph, Wyatt discussed the importance of timely blockchain upgrades and his vision for Polygon.
Before the Merge, almost all carbon emissions on Polygon — roughly 99.9% — emanated from smart contracts and holdings on the Ethereum network. Subsequently, as the Merge has now massively reduced Ethereum’s own energy consumption and ensuing carbon emissions, this positive effect has also rubbed off on Polygon and related platforms, making them much more sustainable as well.
The scaling issue, however, still persists. While the transition to PoS laid the groundwork for sharding and other scaling techniques, it did little to remediate issues with high fees and slow transaction speeds. As such, layer-2 solutions like Polygon still hold invaluable utility. As Ethereum becomes more scalable and efficient, so will Polygon; every improvement made to Ethereum enhances Polygon’s existing strengths.
By the end of the year, Polygon aims to go carbon-negative as it continues to onboard projects that cater to Web3. Businesses in crypto have taken the lead in building Web3 solutions and blockchain networks like Polygon are prepared to onboard, enable cross-compatibility with other ecosystems and improve the overall performance of such offerings.
$1B Crypto Hack Fears Spur 20% GALA Plunge, but Firm Implies It Attacked Itself as a Safeguard
Chaos ensnared Gala Games late Thursday as fears of a potentially billion-dollar hack – or maybe a rug pull – drove its native GALA token down 20%.
Meanwhile, a firm apparently related to the crypto play-to-earn platform said the platform had actually effectively attacked itself to prevent bad actors from absconding with users' money.
Concerns developed after a single blockchain address appeared to mint over $1 billion worth of GALA token out of thin air. When crypto watchdogs PeckShield flagged that, pNetwork – which provides routing infrastructure for decentralized finance (DeFi) and gaming tokens, including apparently GALA – seemed to imply that it was behind the mint.
"We noticed pGALA wasn’t to be considered safe anymore and coordinated the white hat attack to prevent pGALA from being maliciously exploited," the firm said, suggesting the new tokens were printed as a way to help pNetwork drain a faulty PancakeSwap pool.
"A new pGALA token will be created to replace the old compromised one and airdropped in the coming days to those who had pGALA before the pool was drained," pNetwork said.
Self-hacks are definitely chaotic in the short term they are one of the safest ways to fix security issues that could wipe out a project.
Twitter Reportedly Halts Work on Crypto Wallet, Driving Dogecoin Down 10%
Social media platform Twitter has halted its plans to build a crypto wallet as part of ongoing changes kick-started last week by its new owner, Elon Musk, the online publication Platformer wrote Thursday.
"A recently revealed plan to build a crypto wallet for Twitter appears to be on pause," the article said.
Dogecoin (DOGE) recently sank almost 10% in the aftermath of the news. The popular meme coin's price has consistently reacted to Musk's activities and pronouncements. The billionaire entrepreneur and Tesla CEO has been a major advocate for the token.
With Twitter’s current debt and layoffs, I would expect them to shy away from crypto until they get out of the red and into the green for profits. They likely have many half-baked features they can finish up and push out quickly to make money instead of creating from scratch crypto initiatives.
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