Optimism Patches Inflation Error

Quick Take

• Google Cloud partners with Coinbase to accept crypto payments.
• The SEC reportedly investigates Yuga Labs.
• L2Beat introduces a new bridge dashboard.
• Binance launches $BUSD natively on Polygon.

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Optimism Highlights 🔴✨

Optimism Patches Inflation Error
Optimism upgraded its contract to fix an error in its inflation rate. The L2 rollup first announced an OP token inflation rate of 2% per year. However, the contract was mistakenly deployed with a 20% inflation rate. The new update changes the contract logic to reflect the 2% rate. Optimism is improving its transparency efforts after it failed to disclose a 350 million OP token transfer back in August.

Google Cloud To Accept Crypto Payments

Google Cloud will start accepting crypto payments for cloud services starting in early 2023. Google Cloud announced Coinbase as its integration partner during its Google Cloud Next conference. Google Cloud will use Coinbase Cloud for Node services, Coinbase Commerce for payments, and Coinbase Prime for custody. Google Cloud will offer developers access to its BigQuery crypto public datasets powered by Coinbase Cloud’s Node service. Coinbase is also using Google Cloud’s compute platform to process blockchain data and to build advanced exchange and data services. The integration will initially be available to select customers, starting with companies in the web3 ecosystem.

Google Search also implemented support for Ethereum wallets, presenting users with a wallet’s ether balancer when searching for an Ethereum address. The data is being sourced from Etherscan’s block explorer. The new search feature only supports Ethereum wallets and displays ether balances on mainnet.

SEC Investigates Yuga Labs

According to a report from Bloomberg, the SEC is investigating Yuga Labs, the company behind Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs, over the potential sale of unregistered securities. An unnamed source told Bloomberg that the SEC is examining whether certain NFTs from the company are more akin to stocks and subject to securities laws. The SEC is also reportedly looking into ApeCoin, the governance token for the ApeCoin DAO. 15% of ApeCoin’s supply was airdropped to holders of certain NFTs by Yuga Labs. ApeCoin is currently trading at $4.73 down by nearly 8% amid news of the investigation. Yuga stated they are committed to fully cooperating with the agency.

BUSD Is Now Available On Polygon

Binance’s BUSD stablecoin is now available on Polygon, making it the second stablecoin after Tether (USDT) to be natively minted on the network. The stablecoin can now be withdrawn from Binance directly onto Polygon. Robinhood also enabled BUSD swaps on its non-custodial wallet, which recently launched exclusively on Polygon. BUSD is managed by Paxos, a stablecoin issuer regulated by the New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS). It’s currently the third-largest stablecoin by market cap. A bridged version of USDC is expected to go live on Polygon in June 2023 powered by Circle’s new Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol.

L2Beat Introduces Bridges Dashboard

Layer 2 analytics platform L2Beat released a new dashboard dedicated to bridges. The dashboard sorts bridges by TVL and features a toggle for canonical bridges such as Arbitrum One and zkSync. The dashboard also displays a risk analysis highlighting the validation method, source upgradability, and destination token type. The validation mechanism is what ensures that a transfer is finalized on the destination chain. L2Beat marks bridges that require validation by a Third Party with a red mark as it recommends users avoid those bridges. Bridges validated by Ethereum are considered to be the most secure. The bridge dashboard is currently in a beta phase.