Unchained - How Solana Beat Out Ethereum to Nab New Crypto Developers in 2024 - Ep. 749

Episode Date: December 13, 2024

The 2024 Developer Report from Electric Capital reveals many shifting dynamics. For starters, for the first time in eight years, Ethereum was not the top chain for new developers—Solana was. Meanwhile, Asia has emerged as the leading hub for crypto development, taking the top spot from North America, which dropped to third. In this episode, General Partner Maria Shen explores how Ethereum's Layer 2 solutions are bolstering its position despite fierce competition, why the Bitcoin developer ecosystem remains steadfast, and how emerging projects like EigenLayer are capturing builders’ attention.  She also delves into the top crypto technologies that are fascinating devs, and how their usage and development activity differ across the globe.  Show highlights: Maria’s top takeaways from the report Whether the developer migration from the U.S. will stop under a friendlier regulatory environment How Ethereum has maintained its dominance despite its high fees and the rise of Solana  What the steadiness of the Bitcoin developer ecosystem shows Which other smaller ecosystems are growing the most  How ZK contract usage has been increasing over time Why, despite what one could think, NFT minting activity is higher than ever How stablecoin usage differs from token to token and also across countries Visit our website for breaking news, analysis, op-eds, articles to learn about crypto, and much more: unchainedcrypto.com Thank you to our sponsors! Polkadot Guest Maria Shen, General Partner at Electric Capital Previous appearance on Unchained: Why Crypto Developer Activity Continues to Grow Despite the Bear Market  Links Unchained: A Big 2024 Crypto Trend: Solana Attracts More New Developers Than Ethereum Timestamps:  00:00 Intro 02:02 Key findings from Electric Capital’s Developer Report 08:28 Could a friendlier U.S. regulatory environment reverse the developer migration? 12:54 How Ethereum could stay dominant amid rising competition from Solana 17:48 Insights from the Bitcoin developer ecosystem 21:33 Emerging smaller ecosystems gaining traction 23:41 The steady growth in ZK contract usage 27:39 Why NFT minting activity is at an all-time high 32:31 How stablecoin usage varies across tokens, chains and countries 36:22 News Recap Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Menting volume actually hit an all-time high in 2024. The highest that it reached in January 2021 was $800 million in a month in terms of minting volume. In November 2024, it hit $1.5 billion. And so there's more that's being minted now than there ever was. 97% of that is happening on base. This kind of perception that we have around NFTs, right, that it's art and that it's collectibles. you're really seeing that diversified quite a bit in 2024. Some of the top assets are collectibles or game assets, but a lot of them are reward systems,

right? Or they could be NFT is used in defy activity, or they could be just kind of like a badge or some sort of identity credential that's given out. And so you're really seeing this huge diversification of what it even means to be a at NFTE. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Unshade, your no hype resource for all things crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin. On Tuesday's episode about crypto under Trump, featuring guests Jake Trevinsky and Mike Selegg, Rain tweeted on X, let me tell you about Jake. He's an enlightening,

knowledgeable, total nerd, and defy Chad fighting for humanity's rights and freedoms into centralized finance. Hashtag defy, even pure meme heads love him. If you want to hear your comment on the show, go to X or YouTube to post a comment or retweet. This is the December 11th, 2024 episode of Unchained. Pocod is the original and leading layer zero blockchain with over 2,000 plus developers. And the Pocodot 2.0 upgrade will be a massive accelerator for the ecosystem. Join the community at Pogo dot network slash ecosystem slash community. Today's guest is Maria Shen, a general partner on the investment team at Electric Capital.

Welcome, Maria. Thanks. It's great to be here. Electric Capital's Developer Report is one that the industry eerily waits every year, and it seems that this year there were a lot of big takeaways. What are the top-line ones that caught your eye? So this is the six-year that we've been doing this. And just having you been the privilege of tracing this data for six years has been incredible. There are, well, you know, I guess just as a top-level takeaway,

They are now 23,613 monthly active open source developers in crypto. I always like to caveat and say that this is a massive undercounting of developers in crypto because we only look at open source developers. So this doesn't include a lot of gaming developers, a lot, you know, Coinbase developers usually aren't part of this. And so really any company with a private code base isn't part of this. So, you know, but we're looking at 23,613 developers. One of the things I really like to appreciate each time is just how much crypto has grown.

And looking back when Ethereum launched in 2015, we had about 1,000 monthly active developers. And so just that kind of 39% annualized growth is really amazing to take a step back and appreciate this year we included a lot of geography data looking at developers around the world. And I think one of the biggest takeaways is that crypto is now global. And crypto is global and the momentum is really shifting out of North America and out of the United States. So one of the fascinating takeaways is that Asia is now the number one continent for crypto developers. So Asia has the largest developer share, one in three. crypto developers live in Asia. And we can also see which ecosystems are the biggest

ecosystems across these big continents. Ethereum is the biggest ecosystem in every single continent. Salada is number two, and there are different projects that are buying for the number three spot. That's been really fascinating to see as well. Another part of it is the growth of India. is now number two in crypto developers up from number 10 in 2015. The U.S. is still holding on to its lead, but it's been losing developers share every year. So part of that is really just seeing, you know, this shift of developers out of North America, out of the U.S. They're still quite dominant here, but you see the up-and-coming growth of developers coming, especially out of Asia.

Another big takeaway this year is how many new developers really flock to the Solana ecosystem. This is the first year since 2016 where any ecosystem was able to beat Ethereum for bringing on new developers. And so July of 2024, more developers, more new developers joined Solana than they did Ethereum. And so Solana became the most popular ecosystem in 2024. Wait, but for new developers, right? Or new developers. So I understand that's for percentage, but is it also for absolute numbers? Yes.

Oh, okay. Oh, interesting. Yeah, yeah, super fascinating. Ethereum still has by far the biggest number of developers. Yeah, for new developers, Salana saw more new developers this year. And, you know, maybe another part. Part of it is just how diverse use cases are getting. We're seeing this rise in kind of what I think of as low fee use cases across crypto.

So that would be stable coin transfers, that would be Dex transfers, that would be NFT mince, NFT transactions across all of these metrics. There's this kind of unprecedented all-time high activity. and it's happening on these low-fee chains like Solana and Base. And so that's been very, very fascinating to see as well. And so, you know, I think on the other side of that is just appreciating how big the Ethereum ecosystem is. We've looked at, through the report, we looked at multi-chain developers and saw that

one in three developers are now working on multiple chains. Over 70% of those developers are working in the Ethereum, sorry, VM ecosystem, which Ethereum definitely dominates. And a lot of the ways that Ethereum is staying very competitive right now is through its L2s. So through capturing low-fey use cases through L-2s like BASE, but then also continuing to dominate on high-value use cases, like having TBL, like having restaking take off on Ethereum this year through eigenlayer and seeing innovation that way. And so, you know, I think part of this year is really just seeing this diversity in use cases. There are high value use cases. There are low fee use cases. And it seems

like there are very dominant chains emerging for all of these use cases. Yeah, I have to say one other thing that just was notable to me. I don't know if surprising is even the right word was that when you look at the numbers for 2022 versus where we are now, we're still like at half for a number of these metrics. And so it just made me realize that even as much as this year was a bull market year, in a way, I think some of that activity was actually sort of like pent up activity from basically the U.S. government like artificially depressing crypto activity. Like with the launch finally of the ETFs and things like that. Like I feel like, you know, in any other year, some of what we're seeing, like, if there had been more reasonable regulation, then some of that activity would have happened prior. And then this bull market might have started more like after the halving, which is like more typically what we see. But obviously it didn't this time.

So one thing that I just have to ask about is, you know, you talk about the geographic kind of like dispersion. that we're seeing. And, you know, as I mentioned, the U.S., like, basically for a long time was pretty hostile in terms of regulatory pressure in the U.S. on crypto projects. And this year, there was a total C-change. Just, you know, the ETSs, like I mentioned, then as we all know, crypto ended up being a major factor in the election in multiple ways, maybe not in a way that the average voter understood it. But, you know, we who are paying attention to these things, saw obviously, you know, Donald Trump to clear himself a crypto candidate. We saw that once that happened and then Democrats started crossing party lines to vote for crypto bills and then Trump made

all these promises to the crypto community and finally like fair shake. And as the industry generally started just pouring a ton of money into all these different campaigns that propelled this red wave in Congress. And so I wondered, do you feel, and I understand the election only happened like roughly a month ago. But. But just based on all your years of doing this, you know, reporting, do you think that this change in the regulatory atmosphere in the U.S. will result in a change in that geographic movement out of the U.S. for 2025? You know, I think part of it is that crypto is just much bigger.

And so as crypto grows, it's going to be inevitable that a lot of that developer share is going to leave the U.S. you know, again in 2015, Europe and the U.S. together had over 80% of the share of crypto developers. But in, so that was in 2015, but that was also the year we only had about a thousand monthly active developers, you know? And so given that we've expanded so much, I think it's inevitable that a lot of that expansion is going to be global. And I think that's going to be really healthy to see that kind of decentralized, geographic, diverse. kind of continuing to enter crypto. That being said, I've spoken to so many founders and people in the space who have actively

moved their engineering teams outside of the U.S., have made me physically themselves moved outside the U.S. because of the regulatory environment here, which, you know, to your point, is shifting. And so I do think a lot of that is going to be stemmed. I'm not sure if it means that necessarily the U.S. is going to gain back developer share. But I do think, you know, this kind of continuous decline of U.S. developer share may flatten out a little bit. And, yeah, that is something that we might be able to see in the future. Yeah. Honestly, one other thing that I realized is if you sort of account for just the literal, you know,

geographic dispersion of the population around the globe, then it kind of does make sense that Asia would eventually rise to the top just because it's the most populated region. And I did look it up. Europe is also more populated than North America. So yeah, as an American, I was actually annoyed to see all that. But then I realized like, okay, maybe we're still punching above our weight. Anyway, so in a moment, we're going to dive into just all the different activity in all these different ecosystems. But first, a quick word from the sponsors to make this show possible. Pocodot is the original and largest layer zero blockchain with over 2,000 plus developers. The anticipated Pocodot 2.0 upgrade will be a massive accelerator for the ecosystem.

Upgrading the infrastructure with 8 times higher transaction throughput and twice as fast block times, tailored core time for the needs of every protocol, trustless bridges to multiple chains, and revised tokenomics with a token burn to reduce inflation. Perfect for GameFi and DeFi to build, grow, and scale. three ideas to market fast. Think big, build bigger with Pocod. Join the community at Pocodot.network slash ecosystem slash community. On YouTube, on the recent episode of Bits and Bips, Adam 72 commented, now that Gary isn't protecting Eath, we could admit it's too expensive and move on to something bigger and better instead of 10 more years of upgrades to just make it useful. Which all I have to say

is that comment is a really great segue to the next part of this interview. which leads me to, yes, say that. I'm back to talking with Maria. So one other, you know, big, big trend for 2024 was what you mentioned earlier, that this Solana-Eath rivalry actually resulted in Solana outperforming Ethereum in multiple ways. And I wonder just generally, you know, what you thought, like, accounted for that and whether or not you thought that would continue and frankly even just how people look at Salon and Base and try to compare them, you know, how you're thinking about the different ways that they're attracting developers. So again, just to kind of recap what happened this year, right?

Salana had the most new developers, which is something that's never since 2016 has ever happened before for Ethereum to be number two in new developers. That's very, very new. and Solana and Base did capture a lot of these low-fee use cases I was talking about. So, you know, Base owns 97% of NFT minting volume. Solana owns 64% of NFT-mit transactions. 81% of Dex trading happens on Solana. Solana has the most unique wallets.

Base is number two in trading wallets. So a lot of these signals from low-fee use cases really kind of. point to the fact that people are not using Ethereum mainnet, right? They're looking to other chains to do that. That being said, I actually think what's really fascinating to see play out is how Ethereum holds on to its dominance. And it's really through the first one is network effects and the second one is through the power of its security, right? The power of the fact that you can do high-value transactions on that. And so when you look at these really fast, really cheap transactions,

Ethereum Mainnet is getting pushed out. People aren't doing these types of transactions on Ethereum Mainnet. But if you flip over and look at high-value transactions, you'll see that Ethereum Mainnet's TBL is 7x larger than the next largest. and you'll also see that there's actually quite a lot of innovation still happening on Ethereum. So I think I mentioned eigenlayer earlier, but eigenlayer being a part of the Ethereum ecosystem, launching, restaking that sector, added $30 billion of TBL to Ethereum, which then also attracted a lot of developers to build ABSs for the eigenlayer ecosystem.

And so now Eigenlayer is growing in developers. And so Ethereum is still, you know, innovative use cases are still happening on Ethereum. High value use cases are still happening on Ethereum. If you look at stable coin transfers, high value transfers are happening on Ethereum. If you look at NFT trades, not NFT mince, but NFT trades, then Ethereum is still the largest chain to host most NFT trades there. So I think what we're seeing is just different chains for different use cases. And where Ethereum's kind of scaling strategy has been really interesting is that Ethereum doesn't lose out or, you know, Ethereum as an ecosystem doesn't lose out just because

Mainnet has higher fees. It actually is able to stay competitive through its L2s. So, you know, altogether, I think Ethereum Mainnet and all the L2s account for 65% of code innovation in the EBM ecosystem. If you add up Ethereum and it's L2's Dex volume, it's actually 2x larger than Salinas. And so it, you know, I think Ethereum has these really crazy ecosystem, really crazy network effects that is probably not going anywhere and, you know, has just a lot of healthy signals around it. Okay. Yeah. I, I, also had the same feeling just from reading the report where it really felt like they were

they were just differentiated you know people seem to be gravitating toward toward them for different reasons which is just fascinating because of course like you know the general discourse is like oh they're competitors and whatever and obviously they are in certain ways but yeah it does feel like you know yeah for instance like meme coin activity is really popular on salana um And, you know, base is like sort of where the Ethereum ecosystem is catching up in that regard. So I also wanted to, of course, talk about Bitcoin. In a way, Bitcoin was notable just because it wasn't changing, really. So, yeah, what were you seeing there?

Yeah, I mean, Bitcoin is incredibly consistent, which I think is exactly the type of adjective you want to assign to Bitcoin. You know, if you look at Bitcoin's growth over time, I'm just flipping over to the slides now to get an exact number for you. But Bitcoin is still growing, right? So in 2018, Bitcoin was somewhere around 400 monthly active developers, and now they're at 1,200. So they've 3xed since 2018. And so that's still very, very impressive. And I think what's also really fascinating with the Bitcoin developer chart is that it's, It's just to slow and steady kind of march up. It doesn't really get affected by market cycles. It doesn't really get affected by prices. There is this kind of strong consistency in the Bitcoin ecosystem. This year, Bitcoin stayed relatively flat. It lost 62 developers, which kind of falls within the sort of like noise that you would see typically in a year. And so, you know,

I think effectively that the developer activity was flat over 2024. Again, I think, you know, a positive signal for Bitcoin. Another thing that we track is the number of established developers, which is developers who have been in crypto for over two years. Sorry, in this case, established developers in Bitcoin, right? So they've been in Bitcoin for over two years. And that number is also steadily growing. And so if you look at anyone who's left Bitcoin, they've been newcomers, or emerging developers,

meaning that they joined crypto after 2021. And anyone who joined crypto before 2021 still seems to be marching on, writing a lot of code. And by the way, the reason why we care about these established developers is they write 70% of code commits in crypto. And so they, you know, there's kind of different. different roles that different developers play, hackathon developers play a role, people who maintain code basis play a role, protocol developers play a role, older developers play a role. But it's really cool to see that Bitcoin has continued growth in sort of these older developers, you know,

continuing to stay very, very active. And so as of the report end, which is November 1st, Bitcoin has 672 established developers, which is, again, the line to, you know, the line to go straight up, right? So it's an all-time high for Bitcoin. It's the highest it's ever been. And so Bitcoin looks very healthy. What is interesting about Bitcoin that's slightly different is you also see this growth of developers working on Bitcoin scaling solutions. So again, that's not to say that, you know, Bitcoin is really just staying the same forever. 42% of monthly active developers in Bitcoin right now are working on different scaling solutions for Bitcoin. So I think that's very interesting to see the types of new innovation that's still coming around around the Bitcoin

ecosystem. Yeah, yeah, it was very much a clear trend just, you know, in terms of even if I think about the different projects that we featured on the show, there were a number of layer two Bitcoin projects and we didn't even get to all of them. So yeah, this very active area of development in Bitcoin. I did also then just want to ask you about this like whole slew of kind of newer and smaller chains. that aren't far behind like Ethereum Solana. Some of the ones that you called out in the report were like ICP, Aptos, base, suey, then there were like even smaller ones.

But just where are you seeing kind of the state of play amongst that like sort of lower tier or smaller tier? Yeah. So I think that's, so we have these lists that detail the top 10 fastest growing ecosystems over the past year. and we look at two different types of kind of we define fast growing in two different ways. We define it in terms of total developers. So where were you in Q3 of 20203 and where were you in Q3 of 2024? That's one comparison. And then the other comparison we have is where are you in full-time developers,

full-time developers being developers in your ecosystem who commit code 10 plus days in a month in a rolling 28-day period. And so EigenLayer is the number one fastest growing ecosystem by both overall developers and full-time developers. That consistency is really cool to see. Again, kind of harkens back to the growth of ABSs that happened over the past year. And so you can definitely see that reflected in these developer numbers. The rise of the move ecosystem, you know, APDOS had a lot of overall developers. and so a lot of hackathon participants, a lot of new developer interest.

And SWI also had 24% of overall developer growth. Aztec had 36% overall developer growth and 47% full-time developer growth. So that's super healthy, Celestia, Polygon ZK, EVM, tons, stacks. I think a lot of these ecosystems are seeing very healthy growth in 2024 as well, which is very interesting to see. So some of the tech trends that you called out were zero knowledge. And that was really, we'll say that was the first one that you called out. And it really looks like that activity is just increasing a lot.

You mentioned that it had 16x from 2020 to 2024. Can you talk a little bit about what you're noticing there? Yeah, definitely. So ZK is a sector that's coming out of research, and you can see that in both the developer numbers and usage numbers. At this point in time, we're looking at 2,054 monthly active developers in ZK ecosystems. So very healthy, very, very sizable at this point, with 823 monthly active full-time. developers working in the ecosystem and about, you know, 200 monthly active developers who are new, sorry, 200 developers per month who are new coming into the ecosystem to do something in the ZK

ecosystem. So all of that looks really, really healthy. The growth, you see a lot of that happening on chain when you look at ZK contract deployments. And these numbers are going to be pretty small, right? So again, this is kind of this points to how early this sector is, but in 2020, there were 40 contract deployments using ZK pre-compiles. And in 2024, we're looking at 639. So that's a huge increase by absolute numbers, you know, still quite small, but I think it means that people are, more and more people are continuing to tinker in this ecosystem. And so, we're seeing a lot of, we're seeing a lot of early growth there. Another thing that we did this year, that's pretty fascinating, is we looked at a lot of activity by time zones. So when did this activity happen? And we try to map where you might be in the world. And, you know, what's really interesting with the ZKK is how consistent it is. If you look at both ZK roll-up users and ZK. roll-up contract employers, their time zones tend to line up with Europe and early Asia

time zones in both cases. It's hard to tell the exact location of participants just based on time zones of activities, but it definitely does seem like, you know, ZK. Roll-up activity in general tends to peak during daytime hours in the eastern hemisphere. And that's very consistent for both users and deployers who are more likely to be developers. Yeah, and one thing actually that I wondered was for the ZK activity, it seemed like most of what you were talking about was roll-ups, but was some percentage of that also privacy-type solutions? Yeah, it's a combination of ZK roll-ups, as well as different languages that are coming out and different libraries that are being used in different languages as well.

Okay, and any hypothesis as to why Asia is using it more than? The West? No, other than the fact that the difference is pretty stark. And so, you know, I think there definitely tends to be more skewed towards Asia in a way that's, you know, you can't dismiss it. It feels like a clear trend. But yeah, no, no clear theories as to why that might be. I mean, you know, certainly it could be that just privacy tech in general is more welcome in certain regions of world. And so that could be, that could certainly be part of it as well. Yeah. Yeah. I honestly was like,

well, there's that whole section of the internet that's like cut off from the rest of us. And maybe they want to hide the fact that they're accessing our part of the internet. But anyway, one other thing that you talked about was NFTs. And I have to admit, I was really shocked to see those stats because I think the perception has been that the market for that has been pretty soft this year up until just like in the last few months. So yeah, just I frankly was just really shocked because it looked like all the absolute numbers are quite a bit higher even than in like 2021. So what were you seeing there? Yeah. So again, it really is like what sector of this are you looking at? And what's going to be surprising to a lot of people is that deployments

has increased by quite a lot. And we're kind of hitting all time high. in deployments. One thing to note, though, is we count a NFT deployment as a first mint into a collection, and that allows us to count across kind of Bitcoin, Salana, and EBM chains as well. So we're using this as a proxy. But effectively, we're seeing a lot of creator activity and NFTs more so than we've even seen during the NFT frenzy back in 2021 and 2022. And so greater activity is higher than ever. And again, What's really fascinating here is that minting activity is higher than ever. I'm pulling up the exact number here, but minting volume actually hit an all-time high in 2024.

The highest that it reached in January 2021 was $800 million in a month in terms of minting volume. In November 2024, it hit $1.5 billion. And so there's more that's being minted now than there ever was. 97% of that is happening on base. That's pretty fascinating. Minting wallets as well as increasing, as well as mint transactions. And when you look at, you know, I think that that honestly, like just looking at how much minting activity has increased was really fascinating and kind of prompted us to dig a little bit more into what were people.

minting. What are, you know, what are actually the collections by top minting volume and transaction volume and by mint or count? And it turns out that this kind of perception that we have around NFTs, right, that it's art and that it's collectibles, you're really seeing that diversify quite a bit in 2024. Some of the top assets are collectibles or game assets, but a lot of them are reward systems, right? Or they could be NFT is used in defy activity or they could be just kind of like a badge or some sort of identity credential that's given out. And so you're really seeing this huge diversification of what it even means to be an NFT. And that's been driving a lot of healthy activities for NFTs in general. And I, you know, I think for me, this points to the fact that possibly NFTs is moving

in the direction where, you know, in the same way, we don't really talk about, you know, how our ERC20s doing. I think very soon we're probably not going to be talking about how NFTs are doing either just because the types of things that they can be is just getting so expansive now. Yeah, honestly, like looking at those numbers and then thinking about how the market had seemed dead for most of the year, I realized like, oh, this is what adoption looks like. like there's no meaning with the metrics show like there's actual real activity yeah yeah it's like the creators there but the traders aren't there which is like a much better dynamic i think for like long term growth and sustainability yeah well there there actually is still quite i mean it's it's

not what it was in 2021 or 2022 but there's pretty consistent trading activity as well and i do think nfts you know if you think of nfts as just on chain assets the trading of on-chain assets is going to continue. And so we're still seeing at least 300,000 wallets a month trade across the major NFT marketplaces. And so, you know, I think the two things we're kind of seeing now is trading, staying as a just a useful primitive that probably will always exist for NFTs. And there's a lot of healthy activity continuing there. But to your point, kind of like the, we're not seeing those kind of mania highs at this point in time. in NFT trading activity. And then also just a clear user shift into other things that you can do

with NFTs. And, you know, they're minting NFTs for a plethora of different reasons that often has nothing to do with collecting something or getting, you know, supporting a creator in some way. Stable coins were also a big, big highlight for this year, you know, almost $200 billion worth of stable coins in circulation, $81 billion in a day. tell us about all the trends there because there's quite a lot of different things to point out there. So for Sablecoins, issuance in circulation, Sable coins in circulation is at an all-time high. Most of that is Tether. Tether is the most issued Sablecoin and USDC is second. You know, kind of back to our earlier discussion about Ethereum, Ethereum is the number one ecosystem for Sablecoins.

59% of stable coins are issued on Ethereum, and Tron is the second one. 35% of stable coins are issued on Tron. One thing we did this year was break down transaction sizes for stable coin transactions to look at, you know, to start kind of putting a shape around what are the types of transactions that people do. For most, so we break this down by stablecoin token, right? So there's the USDA, there's D.D, there's D.SDC. So for most of these tokens, the median is under $100. It's pretty fascinating. It kind of points to, it kind of points to potentially a payments use case. That's, you know, that seems pretty solidified in stable coin usage. And there's also some really interesting differences in how different tokens behave. BUSD and SELO, USD 10,000. to skew towards smaller transactions. And some of the more defy associated stable coins tend to skew towards higher transactions. So higher transaction values. And so again, you're starting to see

this diversification, right, where like stable coins is one term, but the way that people are using it, whether it's for transfers and payments or for, you know, on-chain financial activity, you're starting to see some differences here as well. And the last thing around stable coins is we also broke down the time zones for when people do stablecoin transactions. And I think, you know, unsurprisingly, stable coin transactions happen at all hours of the day. And so that does seem to suggest that there is global usage. But there's also a very noticeable peak, again, around Asia and Europe time zones for transactions. there's there's a peak of two to three percent more transactions happening during

Asian, European, and African working hours and then for transaction volume that tends to peak during European and skews a little bit more Western and so that's really interesting as well so you're seeing more people transacting maybe smaller amounts you know, on the easternmost portion of the world. But perhaps on the western portion, there are fewer transactions, but the volume is higher. Yeah, looking at that, I also was thinking about just, I don't remember when this happened maybe like 20 years ago, where, you know, we were saying, oh, like in Africa, they're sort of leapfrogging where they're not even doing landlines.

You're literally just going to mobile phones. And it sort of feels like, you know, in the U.S., we have, yeah, tons of different financial services that we can do for like small transactions or whatever. But, you know, in other places where maybe they don't have such good built-out services. Like, this is a really amazing technology for them, which is why there's some of that difference. Well, Maria, it has been such a pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much for coming on and change. Thank you. Really appreciate it.

Don't forget. Next up is the weekly news recap. Today, presented by Wondercraft AI. Stick around for this week in crypto. after this short break. Welcome to this week's Crypto Roundup. In today's recap, we'll cover Microsoft shareholders rejecting a bold Bitcoin treasury proposal, Google's quantum computing breakthrough stirring debate over Bitcoin's security,

and Magic Eden's Emmy token launch making waves despite technical challenges. We'll also dive into Senator Elizabeth Warren's influence over SEC appointments, finance and Circle teaming up to push USDC adoption, RPL's RLUSD stablecoin, getting a green light in New York, Athena's USDA becoming the third largest stable coin, and Coinbase addressing criticisms over account restrictions. Thanks for tuning in to the weekly news recap. Let's begin.

Crypto Advocate, French Hill, to Lead House Financial Services Committee. Arkansas Republican Representative French Hill has been appointed chair of the influential House Financial Services Committee, starting in the next congressional session on January 3rd. Hill, known for his deep understanding of cryptocurrency and blockchain, has been a key figure in shaping crypto policy as chair of the Subcommittee on Digital Assets, Financial Technology, and Inclusion. Hill has promised to prioritize passing legislation on crypto market structure and stablecoins, aiming to clarify whether cryptocurrencies are classified as securities or commodities, and to establish robust collateral requirements for stablecoin issuers.

His leadership is expected to strengthen bipartisan efforts on cryptocurrency. legislation, a stance reinforced by his history of bridging divides within Congress. With the committee overseeing the SEC and CFTC, Hill's appointment signals a proactive approach to crypto regulation. Microsoft shareholders reject Bitcoin investment proposal. Microsoft shareholders have rejected a proposal to allocate company funds to Bitcoin, following recommendations from the company's leadership, with less than 1% of them voting in favor. The initiative, introduced by conservative think tank, the National Center for Public Policy Research, suggested using Bitcoin as a hedge against inflation, citing its limited supply and historical performance. Microsoft's chief financial officer Amy Hood emphasized the firm's commitment to preserving capital and liquidity to support operations,

stating that the company has evaluated cryptocurrencies and continues to monitor the space. Micro Strategy's executive chairman, Michael Saylor, who has championed Bitcoin investments, argued during the meeting that adopting Bitcoin could yield substantial financial gains for Microsoft. Despite his advocacy and the cryptocurrency's remarkable performance this year, the proposal failed to gain shareholder support. Texas proposes Bitcoin, strategic reserve in new legislation. Texas State Representative Giovanni Caprileone has introduced a bill to establish a Bitcoin strategic reserve for the state. The legislation aims to position Texas as a leader in digital asset innovation while enhancing

financial security for its residents. If passed, the bill would enable Texas to acquire and hold Bitcoin in reserve for a minimum of five years, with provisions allowing citizens to contribute donations to the fund. The reserve would serve as a long-term hedge and bolster Texas's standing in the crypto economy. The initiative mirrors similar efforts being discussed at the national level, signaling growing interest in integrating Bitcoin into government-level financial strategies. Google's Willow Quantum Chip sparks controversy. Google's new quantum computing chip, Willow, has ignited debate across the crypto community, raising concerns about the security of older Bitcoin wallets and the broader

implications for blockchain encryption. The chip boasts a 105-cubit capability, which means it can complete tasks in minutes, which would otherwise take millennia, highlighting the vulnerability of outdated wallet formats, such as Bitcoin's pay-to-public key, P2PK system. These older wallets, which include the 1.1 million Bitcoins held by Satoshi Nakamoto, could now be at risk of being breached by quantum algorithms. Avalanche founder, Amin Gunsir, proposed freezing Satoshi's coins to mitigate the threat, suggesting a sunset date for P2PK unspent transaction outputs. As quantum computing gets threatening, the Bitcoin community might want to look into freezing these coins. Saira said on While some developers advocate upgrading blockchains to quantum-resistant cryptography, the idea of freezing coins has proven divisive.

Critics argue such actions could undermine decentralization, while others see it as necessary to maintain Bitcoin's integrity as quantum computing advances. Magic Eden's ME token launch highlights AirDrop Frenzy. Magic Eden, the leading Solana-based NFT marketplace, launched its ecosystem token, ME, on Tuesday amid significant anticipation, but it wasn't without challenges. Early trading saw Emmy's fully diluted valuation soar to $15 billion before stabilizing at approximately $4.5 billion. The token airdrop was marred by technical issues, with users reporting problems with accessing the claim process via the Magic Eden wallet app. Errors like something went wrong, and confusing prompts frustrated participants, some missing the opportunity to capitalize on early price spikes. Despite these hurdles, over

70,000 users claimed nearly 69 million ME tokens in the first hour, according to Magic Eden. The chaotic rollout highlighted the challenges of large-scale airdrops, but also underscored the growing popularity of such initiatives. Other projects such as Fuel and Movement Network are also leveraging AirDrops to engage users. Fuel and Ethereum roll-up introduced its native fuel token this week, while Movement Network also launched its main net beta and token, utilizing the move programming language for secure and efficient transactions. Elizabeth Warren to influence SEC Commissioner selection. Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, known for her critical stance on cryptocurrency,

is poised to have significant influence in selecting the next Democratic SEC commissioner. According to party insiders, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has given Warren a pivotal role in recommending candidates to replace outgoing commissioners, Gary Gensler, and J. Jamie Liza Rugga. The SEC can only have three commissioners from the same political party. With one Democratic spot still open, Warren's input could shape the future of the agency's approach to crypto regulation. Schumer's decision also reflects a political test for Warren.

Sources told Unchained that Schumer, who is a moderate, is challenging her to nominate a candidate who can secure confirmation in a Republican majority Senate. If Warren's choice fails, it could bolster Schumer's case for a more centrist approach. Binance and Circle, forge alliance to drive USDC adoption. Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, and Circle, the issuer of the stable coin USDC, announced a partnership aimed at expanding USDC's global reach. Revealed at Abu Dhabi Finance Week, the collaboration seeks to enhance USDC's role across Binance's ecosystem, including trading, payments, savings, and corporate treasury operations.

This represents a major shift in the emerging crypto market structure, said Circle CEO Jeremy Aller on X. Finance plans to integrate USDC more extensively into its services, providing its 240 million users with greater access to the stablecoin. Additionally, Binance will adopt USDC as its primary treasury stablecoin. The development also positions Binance and Circle to navigate the European Union's upcoming MECA regulatory framework, which may limit the use of less transparent stablecoins such as Tether's USDT. Also this week, Circle announced the upcoming launch of the second version of its cross-chain transfer protocol in early 2005 to enable faster USDC transfers with low-latency settlements across Ethereum, base, and avalanche, with plans for broader blockchain integration.

Ripple's R-L-U-SD stablecoin secures New York approval. Ripple's RUSD stablecoin has received final regulatory approval from the New York State Department of Financial Services, paving the way for its official launch. Ripple's CEO Brad Garlinghouse announced the milestone on social media, stating that exchange and partner listings for RLUSD will be activated soon. The stable coin, first unveiled in April, operates on both the XRP ledger and Ethereum networks. Testing began in August, with Ripple forming partnerships to ensure liquidity and adoption. Notable collaborators include exchanges, uphold, BitStamp, and Bitso, as well as market makers B2C2 and Keyrock.

Athena's USDA becomes third-largest stablecoin. Athena Lab's synthetic stablecoin, USDA, has surged to become the third largest stable coin with a market capitalization of 5.65 billion, overtaking makers die, now known as USDS, at 5.2 billion. The leap follows the addition of its staked version, S-U-S-D-E, as a collateral action. asset on Ave in November, driving significant adoption and liquidity. Ave's integration enabled users to leverage the Ave Thina strategy, which involves depositing S-U-S-S-D-E as collateral,

then borrowing tether's USDT or Circles, USDC, and recycling funds into more S-U-S-D-E. This strategy boosted Aves' stablecoin borrowing rates to over 20%, said Athena's head of growth seraphim on X. USDE's unique model collateralizes with assets such as Bitcoin and Ether, hedging them through short positions to generate a yield currently at 27%. This yield-centric approach has drawn investors seeking passive income, propelling USDA's rapid rise in the defy ecosystem. Coinbase responds to criticism over account restrictions.

Coinbase has addressed user frustrations regarding account restrictions, attributing the issue to a surge in fraudulent activity following the U.S. presidential election. In a statement posted on X, the exchange explained that its fraud prevention systems were working as intended amid a significant increase in new and returning users. Coinbase noted a 2-3x increase in fraudulent attempts, which led to more restricted accounts and longer customer service wait times. The exchange dismissed claims of widespread restrictions as misinformation, but acknowledged user concerns, stating that it is working to resolve issues quickly. Some users still criticized Coinbase's response, sharing experiences of prolonged restrictions

and inadequate support. And that's all. Thanks so much for joining us today. If you enjoyed this recap, go to UnchainedCripto.substack.com that is Unchained Crypto.com. And sign up for our free newsletter so that you can stay up to date

with the latest in crypto. Unchained is produced by Laura Shin with help from Matt Pilchard, Juan Oranovich, Megan Gavis, Pam Majimdar, and Margaret Korea. The weekly recap was written by Juan Aranovich and edited by Nelson Wang.

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