[Daily] Ethereum got smarter

Good morning! Welcome to The Daily Moon. Crypto scammer Monkey Drainer has allegedly “retired”. They’ve decided to move on to “something better”, whatever that means. Monkey Drainer also advised “young criminals” to commit cyber crimes if they are fully dedicated. They should give a TED talk.🙄

As of Thursday, 8PM IST

The markets were jittery over SEC chair Gary Gensler's views on crypto. Bitcoin was volatile ahead of the expiry of $710 million worth of options contracts. Ethereum slipped on inflation concerns. S&P 500 and Nasdaq fell in early trade on selling in technology stocks. Back home, Sensex and Nifty resumed their downtrend on weak global cues.

ETH Gets A Smart Switch

The Ethereum blockchain has added a new feature called account abstraction, it will help recover crypto in case you lose your wallet’s private keys. It’s just one of the several upgrades on the ETH network.

The ERC-4337 eraThat’s the code-name for account abstraction. Let’s break it down:

1. Ethereum has two types of accounts, externally owned accounts or EOA and contract accounts. EOA are wallets with private keys while a contract account means a smart contract.

2. Under the current design, your crypto is lost forever if you lose your EOA keys.

3. ETH has now tweaked it to allow smart contract based transactions.

4. This means that you won’t need to enter your private keys for transactions.

For starters, it’ll be a layer on the mainnet. As the transactions grow, account abstraction will be integrated into the network.

But what about stakers?Yes, there’s the Shanghai upgrade and it comes at a time when staking returns have zoomed.

The incentives may grow with talks of re-staking via a protocol called EigenLayer. This entity will allow re-staking where staked ETH can be reused for other network services in exchange of higher rewards for stakers.

So far, 531,653 validators have staked their ETH holdings and earned ~$2 billion in revenue. That has brought more investors to the blockchain. ETH’s non-zero addresses touched an all-time high of 94.83 million. These debutants don’t seem to be in a rush to sell, so maybe they’ll turn into HODLers and then stakers?

ADA Battles The Bears

Cardano hit a new milestone of 4.7 million total addresses but there’s nothing to celebrate. Its token, ADA, is down ~9.5% in a week and HODLers are at a loss. Plus, user activity has slowed.

HODLers see redAbout 3.35 million Cardano addresses are sitting on losses. Analysts predict that if the token crashes below $0.35, recovery will take longer. The love for ADA is fading because, well, there’s not too much happening on the network.

What about Valentine?The Valentine upgrade on Cardano will support DeFi projects to function cross-chain and build interoperability. It was also supposed to trigger an ADA rally but that didn’t happen.

ICYMI AI token SingularityNET, which also runs on Cardano, has zoomed ~23% in a week. The ChatGPT effect perhaps?

ChatGPT Is Finally Talking Money

OpenAI, the company that owns ChatGPT, is taking its first step towards monetising its revolutionary technology. It is releasing its application programming interface for ChatGPT.

Application what?API. It’s like a bridge that connects a software product to the world. The best example is Google Maps. It’s “integrated” everywhere. Uber, Tesla, food delivery apps. The mechanism that allows this use is called API. You basically get all the great functionality of Google Maps without having to build it. It's free for individual users, but businesses have to pay a fee. And that earns Google an estimated $800 million. That’s because businesses with millions of users make billions of “calls” to use Google Maps through APIs.

ChatGPT on the API pathNow look at ChatGPT. It’s the fastest growing consumer software in years. It had 100 million users within two months of launch. Businesses have started to sign up. So monetisation was a question of "when", not "if". ChatGPT is pricing its API at $0.002 per 1,000 tokens or about 750 words. It also launched Whisper API, its automatic speech recognition system. Exciting times.

Australia Prepares For eAUD

The groundwork is getting laid for the electronic Australian Dollar. It announced a “Research Project Exploring the Use Cases for CBDC”. The country has generally taken a more progressive view of crypto. This seems to be more nuanced too.

What’s differentThe country’s more focused approach, to begin with. The Australian central bank will explore 14 use cases for the eAUD. And it’s taking along a good mix of traditional and new age firms:

How is this better?The UK wants to do a digital Great Britain Pound. But it's not really clear what those things are going to be. The US has been pretty far behind on CBDCs, except for some experiments being run by private financial institutions. The Australian approach involves its central bank, which has been conducting CBDC experiments for a long time. One to watch out for, this one.

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