Hey team,
Stoked to dive in this week. It really feels like all the things are coming together across the tech side and the comms side. One story, One SDK, One Litepaper, one way to think about the future of communication for web3.
XMTP Updates
- Our first live demo of a client built on top of the SDK! This is a huge milestone, thanks to @nickmolnar @snormore and @martinkobetic for all of the work here.
- Great progress on bringing together our community Discourse & Discord
- Great feedback from a16z on the Litepaper
- Making tons of progress on xmtp.com/.org split
- Great meetings with Anoop for eng manager role - final eng meetings today
Crypto industry news
- Wormhole, a cross-chain bridging protocol created by Certus one, lost 120,000 ETH ($325 million) in an exploit this week, crypto's fourth-largest and DeFi's largest heist of all time. Wormhole's failure to validate "guardian" accounts allowed the hacker to mint around $325 million worth of ETH on Solana, which they bridged back to mainnet. This depleted the reserves of staked ETH that supported the bridged Ethereum on Solana. Soon after the attack, Jump Capital (which had acquired Certus One last August) announced it had replaced the 120k ETH That was stolen and brought reserves back to 1:1 ratio. [Link] [Wormhole Tweet] [Jump Tweet]
- GameStop is partnering with Ethereum L2 protocol ImmutableX to launch its own NFT marketplace later this year. The two will also create a $100 million grant fund to support developers to launch their games on the marketplace. [Link]. Leading up to and immediately after the announcement, GameStop sold $47 million IMX tokens it was granted as part of the partnership, causing the token price to fall over 23% in just 24 hours. [Link]. [Link].
- Yuga Labs, the startup behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection, is reportedly raising $200 million at up to a $5 billion valuation, in a round by a16z. Link.
- NYC was the crypto capital of the US in 2021, with over $6.5 billion in crypto startup funding (46% of all US fundraising in the space). Silicon Valley ranked #2, followed by Los Angeles and Miami tied for #3 with $760 million raised in 2021. [Link].
Let's keep it up this week.