[Daily] Solana flexes its muscle

Good morning! Welcome to The Daily Moon. Sam Bankman-Fried thought Alameda’s finances were so messed up that it was “unauditable”. A report by bankrupt FTX’s new management found that the trading firm had no idea of its investments. Sometimes, they stumbled upon $50 million worth of assets that were long forgotten. “Such is life,” quipped SBF often. 😡

As of Monday, 7PM IST

The markets recovered on healthy payroll data in the US. Bitcoin was bullish on renewed whale demand. Ethereum saw buying ahead of the Shanghai upgrade. S&P 500 and Nasdaq saw a sell-off in technology stocks. Back home, Sensex and Nifty ended flat over volatile trade.  

Solana Is Getting Better

The network was hit hard after the FTX collapse but Solana has gotten better. The token’s gained ~106% since the start of the year. Its active users have also spiked to 446,000 in April. 

Has SOL recovered for real?Solana reportedly has the second highest number of commits on a smart contract platform next only to Ethereum. Commits is a technical term that reflects the changes made to a code by a developer and tracked on systems such as Github. The higher the commits, the more active the developer ecosystem. That’s not all. Transactions have surged to 30 million, which is an eight-month high. 

Working the NFT magicEthereum rival Solana used to top the NFT charts till the start of 2022. But Polygon moved in aggressively and grabbed market share. Solana’s now fighting back. It has launched a solution called state compression to reduce on-chain storage costs.  

Solana claims that 1 million NFTs can be minted only for ~$110 using this feature. That’s at least ~2,500X cheaper than the current costs. The hope is that it will bring in the OG creators back to Solana.

Arbitrum DAO Seeks A Refund 

Arbitrum allocated 700 million ARB tokens to its Foundation without approval. Now the DAO wants the tokens to be returned. The community will approve the Arbitrum Foundation budget plan only after the refund is processed. 

What is the issue?ICYMI, Arbitrum’s DAO and Foundation are in a cold war of sorts over control of 750 million ARB tokens. The community wants equal control. Meanwhile, the Foundation sold 50 million ARB tokens, so the DAO wants the rest back. Amidst this confusion, 

ARB is down ~4% over the past one week.  

Now what?There’s a fresh proposal to get back the tokens. More than 50% of the community supports the return and seeks to plough ARB back into the DAO Treasury. The developers behind Arbitrum are silent. Let’s see how long this drama continues.

The Biggies Got FOMO

ChatGPT has caused a storm, and not in a good way. Its partnership with Microsoft caused Google to launch Bard. Because FOMO. And now, new reporting has revealed how there was internal opposition to both these launches. 

Not the right timeEmployees at Google and Microsoft flagged concerns early on.There are teams overlooking the ethics of AI at both orgs, but the motivation to launch fast, without enough testing seems only one after the runaway success of ChatGPT, everyone wants to be part of the generative AI party. 

What’s the big deal?Generative AI, the tech behind ChatGPT, is neither fully developed nor completely tested. There are red flags all over the place, like the time AI said it would destroy everything, Bard made an important factual error in its first demo, and Bing has been generating some pretty uncomfortable conversations.

DOGE Wants a Bite 

Dogecoin is on the rise. The reason? Burger King. We’ll get you all the ketchup on this one. 

A small biteOn Sunday, Burger King UK made a cryptic tweet.

Some time before this, it seems it had said “Trying to convince my manager to let me have an office doge”. This was in response to a user saying “We need doge”. Obviously the tweet generated interest from the memecoin’s supporters. 

Up and risingThe crypto was up 1%. This comes after a wild week of rising after Twitter changing its logo to a Doge meme. The social impressions of the memecoin over the past were also spectacular. 

Source: LunarCash

There was some caution among the community too, given how Burger King competitor McDonald’s had turned down Elon Musk’s offer to accept Dogecoin last year. But memecoiners will memecoin.

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