Unchained - Unconfirmed: How Another NFT Trend, .eth Names, Has Attracted the Likes of Budweiser - Ep.267

Episode Date: August 27, 2021

Nick Johnson, lead developer at the Ethereum Name Service (ENS), talks about making Ethereum human-readable, why Budweiser purchased an NFT, how purchasing an ENS works, and more. Show highlights: what ENS does and why it is important why Budweiser bought “beer.eth” how ENS names can be used to make Ethereum easier to use what business use cases ENS names make possible what made Nick want to create a naming service on Ethereum how people are using their ENS names why people are purchasing ENS names what privacy issues arise from people attaching their name to an ETH address what happens when Ethereum addresses get spammed with unwanted tokens how to buy an ENS name and how much it costs how ENS handles squatters what happens when you lose access to an address holding an ENS name how ENS is integrating normal domains (ex: “.com”) to Ethereum what ENS has planned for L2 launches   Thank you to our sponsors! Crypto.com: https://crypto.onelink.me/J9Lg/unconfirmedcardearnfeb2021  Polymarket: https://polymarket.com  Sorare: https://sorare.com      Episode Links:    Nick Johnson Twitter: https://twitter.com/nicksdjohnson Website: http://blog.notdot.net/  Ethereum Domain Service Twitter: https://twitter.com/ensdomains Website: https://app.ens.domains/    Miscellaneous links Budweiser ENS purchase: https://decrypt.co/79397/from-visa-to-budweiser-big-brands-are-taking-nfts-seriously Unwanted tokens being sent to addresses https://decrypt.co/79406/budweiser-dick-pic-nft-ethereum-wallet  https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2021/05/12/vitaliks-regift-of-unsolicited-doge-knockoffs-sends-memecoin-prices-plunging/  DNS (.com) integration with ENS: https://twitter.com/ensdomains/status/1430933399745798155    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi, everyone. Welcome to Unconfirmed. The show that reveals how the marquee names in crypto are reacting to the week's top headlines and gets the insights group on what they see on the horizon. I'm your host, Laura Shin, a journalist with over two decades of experience. I started covering crypto six years ago, and as a senior editor at Forbes was the first mainstream media reporter to cover cryptocurrency full-time. This is the August 27th, 2021 episode of Unconfirmed. The Unchained newsletter has switched from a weekly news recap to a daily email. Each morning you'll get four to five. quick headlines, a crypto meme or two, and a few recommended reads. Head to Unchainedpodcast.com and sign up for the newsletter on the homepage. The crypto.com app pays you up to 8.5% interest on your Bitcoin. Get $25 when you download the crypto.com app with code Laura. The link is in the description. Looking for NFTs that are useful and fun, try so rare. The largest NFT-based fantasy game. You can collect, trade, and compete with officially licensed digital cards of soccer. players from over 160 clubs on So Rare. That's S-O-R-A-R-E.com.

Polymarket is the leading information markets platform where you can trade on the most hotly debated topics, whether it's politics, coronavirus, current events, and more, all on the blockchain. For a limited time, sign up with referral code unconfirmed to get your first trade reimbursed up to $100. Today's guest is Nick Johnson, creator and lead developer of the Ethereum Name Service. Welcome to Nick. Thank you. Pleasure to be here. So you're the creator of the Ethereum Name Service and that's been around for quite a while, but this week has been quite the week for ENS with even Budweiser getting in on your invention. Why don't you start first by telling us what it is that ENS is and then we can talk about the Budweiser name. Sure. So EnS's basic job

is to enable users to use simple human usable, human readable names like Nick.Eath. instead of big long identifiers like 0x, 1, 2, 3, 4, etc, etc, or access content on distributed hosting sites like IPFS via simple human readable names as well. It works not just for Ethereum names, but also for pretty much every blockchain in existence. And we've been working since about 2017 to get it rolled out to as many integrations and wallets and apps as possible. Oh, wow. Okay, I wasn't even aware that it was, I mean, it's called Ethereum Name Service, but that's great that it's a multi-chain service.

So let's talk about the Budweiser news. Budweiser bought beard.eath. So what would a company like Budweiser do with an address like that? I mean, first off, there's a good chance that, you know, they wanted the attention it brings, of course, and so we've obliged them the whole community with that, it seems. I guess the things that come to mind are if they're going to be offering up their own NFTs or anything like that

then it gives them a public profile to do so from they can host distributed content on it so you could if your browser has Metamask for instance or if you're using Brave or Opera you can just go to beer.eath in the browser and it will show you their distributed website possibly they could sell beer for ETH but I think that's slightly less likely

And probably people wouldn't take advantage of that. So when people, so it's both for receiving but even also for displaying. Yeah. So one thing we've been focusing a lot on recently is ENS is a universal username and ENS for sign-in. And so with that, if you have set up your username and say you post a bid on OpenC on something or you vote on a snapshot or anything like that, it will show you. your ENS name instead of your address. And recently, in fact, EtherScan added support for that.

So you can actually see transactions as coming from and going to E&S names. Oh, interesting. And so how did you come up with this idea in the first place? I was hired by the Ethereum Foundation back in 2016 shortly after the launch, originally to work on Swarm. And one of the first things I did on Swarm team was they were looking for a naming service of some kind because they had distributed content similar to IPFS. They needed a way to host it in a human, accessible fashion.

And so I was already very interested in naming systems. I'd done a bit of stuff with DNS in the past. And it was sort of fell to me to figure out how this should work in a distributed fashion. And there were existing sort of very basic naming systems that people had put together on Ethereum, but they were all extremely limited. So I see how to create something that was more versatile and accessible. expandable and generally useful. So Ethereum domain names are NFTs, basically, but it's not what people typically think of when they think of an NFT.

So amidst this NFT craze that we're seeing, has the growth in Ethereum names been as explosive as we've seen for the art NFTs? It is. It's really surprised us. In fact, this month we're set to hit $2 million in registration and renewal fees. which is double our previous high watermark. People are clearly very enthusiastic about dot-eath names at the moment, just as they are about art NFTs. And so what are people doing with them now, typically? I think the most common by far is people buy them to use them as identifiers

for receiving eth and tokens and NFTs and so forth, and, you know, to a lesser degree on other blockchains, which is, you know, supported by a number of wallets. secondarily people buy them to host distributed content. There's also a degree of sort of buying them for flex. You know, somehow, you know, back in, I don't know, 2017 or 2018, I set my ENS name as my Twitter handle. And since then, it's become like almost a universal in-group identifier for Ethereum,

which is really weird. I mean, it's great, but it's not what I expected. And so I think a lot of people get it because they're sort of expected to. but with the number of integrations now, it means that effectively you can use it anywhere you would use an address, which has always been our long-term goal. And so how should people handle privacy issues

around these names? Because obviously if our blockchain addresses show our financial history or at least some of it, for instance, I probably wouldn't want to have a business transaction sent to my dot-eath name or I wouldn't want to make a big payment from it So kind of how are people handling that or how do you suggest they handle it? Privacy is kind of a thorny issue on public ledges in general. And E&S kind of highlights it rather than worsening it because when it's associated with a name,

it's suddenly a lot more obvious that, oh, yes, actually all of this stuff is public. Whereas when you're looking at addresses, you can feel yourself that, oh, well, probably people won't make the connection. And so we recommend people take the same sort of privacy steps that make sense in general. And so we have existing privacy tools such as Tornado Cash. And the best general idea is maintain a fairly clean public-facing persona account that you use for things you're happy for everybody to see, like the NFTs you want to show off or whatever spending money you have for coffee

or to pay for dinner or whatnot. And then use anonymity services like Tornado Cash or an extremist. You can use a centralized exchange to send funds. to and from your own accounts, which you keep private. Oh, interesting. Okay. So if I receive something there that I decide I don't want other people to see, then I should use tornado cash to basically send it to a wallet that nobody knows

it's connected to me, something like that. Yeah, pretty much. It's generally a good idea, even if you don't have any Ns name set up, to try and separate out the funds that and the assets that, you know, you're happy having associated with the account you've made publicly known from those that are, you know, you'd rather sort of keep on the download for your own privacy. And I also would like to ask about situations like how Vatolic earlier this year received a lot of tokens that he did not ask for from the Shiba and Akita communities.

And I feel like there was one other that I'm just blinking on. But, you know, I don't know how much of an issue that is, but I have seen on certain other blockchains that, particularly if they're ones with low transaction fees, that sometimes people do spam certain well-known addresses. So how should people do with that? I think it's, to a degree, it's a Vitalik problem in that, you know, not many of us are so famous that people just like randomly send us money because they think it's good for their business model. And, you know, in one extent, I think actually what Vitalik did was a very good way to discourage that sort of thing for everybody going forward

because, you know, people have filled themselves that, oh, well, you know, we'll just send it there. And for some reason, we've decided that he's going to, like, sit on it and not spend it because it's fatalic, I guess. And he went, well, no, actually, I don't want my wallet to be a dumping ground for all of this stuff.

If you send it there, I'm going to donate it to public goods. And, you know, if you don't want that to happen, don't send it. But I guess the broader issue is just that there's no way to control what people send to you and So part of that is you can send it to burn addresses, you can, you know, you can sort of acknowledge that your public profile, you don't have direct control over what's sent to it.

And I think people need to exercise a degree of skepticism when they look at somebody else's address that, oh, look, it's got this, you know, controversial token or whatever, doesn't necessarily mean that that person bought it and wanted it there. you know, if somebody else values enough making a mess, then they can pay to do so, basically. Yeah, yeah, it's definitely obviously quite different from, you know, like putting up your own website or something. I think it's going to be an interesting problem because it's not, that sort of abuse is something that platforms like OpenC haven't really had to deal with much yet. But I can make up a token that, you know, that says, you know, advertises my own shit coin or, you know, you know, is full of profanity or whatever and send it to Vitalik,

and it will show up on his OpenC profile. And I can even write a custom token that is impossible to transfer away. And right now, that would just show up there forever. Dealing with those sort of abuses is something platforms are going to have to figure out options for going forward, I think. Hmm. Wow. A token you can't send away. That's interesting.

All right. So in a moment, we're going to discuss a little bit more about how this works, Let's also dive into some news that ENS has, but first a quick word from the sponsors who make this show possible. Today's sponsor is Polymarket, the world's leading information markets platform where you can trade on the most pressing global questions, all on the blockchain. Choose from a variety of markets. Will Cardano support smart contracts by October? Will the U.S. again have more than 200,000 new COVID cases per day before 2022? Will Trump run for president again? With over $130 million traded on the platform, Polymarket is the go-to place to settle the biggest debates of the day.

For a limited time, sign up with referral code, unconfirmed, to get your first trade reimbursed up to $100. Go to the description and click on the link to get started. That's polymarket.co-unconfirmed. Do you love sports collectibles or fantasy sports? So Rare is blending this together to create an entirely new gaming experience powered by its community. So Rare cards are officially licensed NFTs from over one.

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You can simply go there into the name you want and it will lead you through the process, which requires two Ethereum transactions. It's all run by impartial smart contracts on the back end. And so there are a couple of other sites such as My Crypto and My Ether Wallet that support registering names through their interface as well. And how much does Addi's name typically cost? So we charge or E&S charges $5 a year. for any domain that's five characters or longer. And then four character names are significantly more expensive at $160 a year,

and three character names more expensive again at $640 a year. And that's because those names are correspondingly, you know, more rare and extremely rare. And we didn't want to set up a situation where somebody swooped in right at the beginning and got every three-letter domain and resold it on OpenC. I see. There was a period earlier where they were being, auctioned off. And I can't remember if that's, that's not how it's done right now, right?

No, so there were a couple of phases where we had something like that. When we very first launched, we used a vicarry auction, a second price auction, to release all names. And the money people put in was put into a deposit, which was refundable if you released the name. Two years after launch, we transitioned to the current model, the rent-based model, and everyone who had a name under the old system was able to transfer it with a years-free registration to the new system. We also, more recently, the original implementation of E&S only permitted registrations of seven character and longer names, and that was a sort of a deliberate choice to ensure that all the short names weren't snapped up when it was still obscure and new.

And so when we reduced that limit to three characters, we had what we call the short name auction where basically all the newly released names were put up for auction at the start. Okay. And how do you handle issues like squatters or impostors who could rank in a lot of money if they use the names of famous people? Like, you know, if I create Oprah Winfrey. .eath or something, I could probably collect a lot of money, but wouldn't be very ethical. Yeah. So, I mean, there's sort of two issues here. One is squatting for resale for profit. And we're committed to building a neutral platform that doesn't and in fact can't discriminate based on ownership and so forth.

So the only real mechanism we have there is setting prices to make it cost and effective to try and squat on names. We try and ensure that the price is low enough. It's easy for people to register, but high enough that you can't just register, you know, register 10,000 names and resell them all at a profit. And the impersonation issue, the way I look at it, is that the value of a name comes from it being attested to by the person who owns it. So on its own, nobody would go, oh, I think I'll send some ether to nick.

Because that's probably Nick Johnson. They would first, you know, find out what is Nick's ENS name. And although Oprah Winfrey pretty uniquely identifies the celebrity, anybody's just seeing it off the bat is probably not going to immediately assume, oh, that must definitely be owned by her. They would, you know, first verify. And that's one reason that like ENS names and Twitter handles is so amazing because it means that person is asserting that name is my name and you can rely on, you know, if you send to it, it'll arrive with me. And so what happens if I have a certain address associated with my dot-eath name and then I lose access to those private keys?

And then can I move that Lorishin. Dot Eith or whatever my dot-eath name is? So we have a distinction in E&S between the registrant, which is the account that registers in sort of ultimately controls the name and the controller, which has sort of day-to-day access to update things. So one way to avoid that risk is to make sure that you register it. The registrant is an account that you have backed up in a secure location and so forth. So if you lose access to your day-to-day keys, you can always use that account to transfer it to a new account or to update it to point to a new account. the ultimate issue is this is a self-custody thing, and if you really lose access to all of your credentials, there's no secure, decentralized way to restore that access.

And that's also part of the reason why we have a yearly renewal instead of a yearly fee rather than a forever registration is because it means that it reduces the risk that in looking far into the future 100 years, all the interesting names are owned by people who have, you know, forgotten their keys or lost them or whatnot. Right, which would happen if you didn't have that in place. So you made an announcement today on Thursday, August 26, which is the day before the show

comes out, and that had to do with traditional domain names. Tell us about that. Yeah, so ENES, unlike a lot of, you know, competing decentralized name services, has committed to working nicely and integrating well with the existing. DNS namespace. So we have .Eath, which is our own unique top-level domain. It has its own special properties by virtue of being hosted on Ethereum. But we want to be part of the global namespace, which includes dot com and every other top-level domain you can think of. And so we've been working for a long while on integrating that better into ENS. A couple of years back, we piloted this with

supporting dot XYZ domains on ENS. Just yesterday, we rolled out support for almost every top-level domain in the DNS route. So if you own, you know, dot com, a dot-org, dot domains, you know, name the top-level domain, you can now import that into E&S and use it as your ENS name, the same way you would use a .eath name. And because this always comes up, if you have lauryshin.com and you import it into ENS,

you get lauriton.com, not lauriton.com. That's a separate name. So it allows anyone to use their names directly as they are inside of YNS as native ENS names. Oh, interesting. Okay. Yeah, I saw people responding to the Twitter announcement saying things like, oh, I got rugpole to me, and I took that to me that they had squatted on some names, and then, but you're saying they couldn't have.

I think people are upset because they were speculatively registering, hoping to resell the domains at a profit, and they view the availability of more top-level domains is reducing the intrinsic value of those domains they hold. But we've been very clear since day one that we don't view ENS as an investment vehicle. It's intended to be a utility, you know, and it's intended to be a public good that makes it easier to use Ethereum. We've had on our public roadmap since about 2017, our intention to integrate with D&S. So I, you know, my own view is that we're pursuing what we've always publicly said we want to do. if you took a punt on on ENS names as a investment.

That's not something we've ever really intended to support. And so you should bear that in mind when you're thinking about buying a name to resell. All right. Well, what other new features can we expect to see from ENS going forward? The big thing we're working on at the moment is support for layer two's in order to reduce gas costs. So, you know, we see ourselves as a public good. we don't want to pick one layer two and endorse it as the layer two for ENS. And we're aware that ENS users use pretty much everything.

So what we're doing is we're building a platform that will make it possible to move an ENS name and all its subdomains to any layer two system. And then update the records there. And anyone who resolves your name like in Metamask or any other wallet will be able to just transparently resolve it against whatever a layer two solution you're choosing use. And that's going to massively reduce the gas costs for updating and registering subdomains and so forth. Which layer twos do you intend to support first? So we're kind of building like a really simple base layer first, which is that we're building a framework so you can support

anything, and that will include your own database on your own server and so forth, which most people may not think of as a layer two, but with the great signatures can have the same security assumptions. Beyond that, I've built a prototype on optimism, and it's currently the one we understand the best, and so it'll be the easiest to roll out first, I expect. Beyond layer two, we're really focusing on the core usability sort of features of Ethereum, and a VNS. And so layer two support initially will just support setting your already registered domain to resolve via layer two, but we'd like to start to do things like move registration and setting reverse records and so on onto platforms that have lower gas cost as well. Really, in the long run, we're focused on

making things as efficient and easy to use for people as possible. We're also really hopeful that this layer two support will lead to really high adoption of wallets, assuring names, subdomains to their users and so forth, which means we'll be able to onboard a whole new group of people who might not have bought their own. Dot E's second level domains. Great. All right. Well, this has been super fun. Thank you so much for coming on Unconfirmed. Thank you. Don't forget. Next up is the weekly news recap. Stick around for this week in crypto after this short break. With over 10 million users, crypto.com is the easiest place to buy and sell over 90 cryptocurrencies. Grow your crypto with crypto.com earn, which pays up to 8.5% interest on your Bitcoin and 14% interest on

your stable coins. When it's time to spend your crypto, nothing beats the crypto.com visa card, which pays you up to 8% back instantly and gives you 100% rebates for your Netflix, Spotify, and Amazon Prime subscriptions. Download the crypto.com app now and get $25 by using the code Laura. The link is in the description. Thanks for tuning into this week's news recap. First headline, a wall of institutional money is coming for NFTs. On Monday, Visa announced its purchase of Cryptopunk 760.10. The payments company spent $49.5Eath or approximately $150,000 on the NFT. Visa has been collecting such items dubbed historic commerce artifacts for over 60 years. The expensive JPEG will be joining early paper credit cards and the zip-z-z-zap. machine among Visa's collection, not exactly the most inspiring company for NFTs to be lumped into. However, Visa is bullish on NFTs. In a report, the payments giant said that, quote,

NFTs represent a deeper and more innovative way for fans to engage in potential new revenue streams for organizations. We think NFTs will play an important role in the future of retail, social media, entertainment, and commerce, said Kai Sheffield, Visa's head of crypto. Visa was not the only, quote-unquote, institution to make NFT news this week. Budweiser also made a splash in the non-fundable world, purchasing a hand-drawn beer rocket, NFT for 8th, in addition to registering the Ethereum domain name beer.eath for 30th, or roughly $100,000. Also, Fox Entertainment invested in Aluvio, a blockchain focused on storing, distributing, and monetizing digital content at scale in a series A valuing Aluvio at $100 million. As part of the deal, Aluvio will act as the

technology platform for Fox's NFT business, blockchain creative labs. Next headline, analysts barish on Bitcoin price as positive Bitcoin news holds steady. Bitcoin broke 50K for the first time in three months on Sunday. However, according to Arcane research analysts, the seven-day average BTC trading volume is lagging behind the positive price action. If the trend continues, Arcane analysts think the market could become exhausted and fizzle out. On-chain analyst, Will Clemente agreed, saying he, quote, was short-term bearish on Monday, citing illiquid supply and coins moving onto exchanges. At publishing time, it appears that Will and Arcane could be right about BTC moving bearish, with the price falling back down to 46K. Despite all that, Bitcoin had a pretty good week.

Here are five highlights. Substack, a newsletter and content platform, integrated Bitcoin as a payment option through a partnership with OpenNode. On-chain analyst Willie Wu and Dan Held, Director of Growth at Cracken, will be some of the first writers to accept Bitcoin sent on-chain or through the Lightning Network. El Salvador plans to launch its government-supported Bitcoin wallet on September 7th, according to President Naïbe Buckele. Those who download the wallet will receive $30 in Bitcoin. The wallet release will coincide with El Salvador's Bitcoin law coming into effect. Business intelligence firm Micro Strategy announced another Bitcoin purchase this week, adding $3,907 coins, or $175 million at an average price of $45,000. The company now

hotels roughly $109,000 Bitcoin on its balance sheet, or roughly $5.5 billion. City Group is awaiting regulatory approval to begin trading Bitcoin futures contracts on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. If approved, City would join Goldman in offering Bitcoin futures trading. Blockstream, a Bitcoin technology company raised $210 million in Series B funding, valuing the company at $3.2 billion. The new influx of cash will fund an expansion into manufacturing mining ships, also known as A6. Binance increases verification requirements for users as rumors of a $200 billion raise swirl.

Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange is now requiring all new users. to complete its intermediate verification process. Existing users who have not yet completed intermediate verification will see their accounts severely limited. This means customers will need to submit a government-issued ID along with a selfie to obtain approval to trade, deposit, and withdraw on the platform without restriction. The move is meant to align Binance with what the company called evolving global compliance standards, with which the crypto exchange has become intimately familiar as of late.

The new verification mandate is the latest in a string of compliance-friendly moves by the exchange. A few weeks ago, Binance reduced the daily withdrawal limit for non-verified accounts from two-buccoin to 0.06. The company also recently capped trading to a maximum of 20x leverage down from 100x in July. One explanation for the increased verification requirements could be that Binance is attempting to raise money, as Chinese journalist Colin Wu reported. Wu cited multiple sources writing that, quote, Binance is considering obtaining investment and protection from government funds and evaluation of $200 billion.

Singapore is one of the most likely options. In related news, the UK's Financial Conduct Authority published a memo saying Binance is not capable of being effectively supervised by the agency. Last month, the FCA banned Binance from conducting regulated activities in the country. The infrastructure bill is likely to leave the content. controversial crypto provision intact. A controversial crypto provision tucked in the bipartisan infrastructure bill is likely to become law after the House voted to move forward without any new amendments, as in the Senate. The decision is a blow to the crypto industry because the current wording

could classify miners, validators, and developers as brokers. Each broker would be responsible for a filing of a 1099 form on behalf of their customers and reporting any transactions over $10,000 to the IRS. For many entities, captured, by the current broker definition, it would be nearly impossible to comply. According to C&C, an unnamed Treasury official said that the U.S. Treasury Department will not target non-brokers, such as miners, hardware developers, and others, even if there is no amendment. Coin sender Jerry Bredo remains unconvinced, though.

Quote, I'm glad to hear that Treasury officials are telling reporters on background that they don't intend to target miners if the infrastructure bills crypto tax provision becomes law. But I'm afraid that that is a... of little comfort. For now, the plan is for the House to vote on the infrastructure package by September 27th. If approved, it will go to President Joe Biden, who will almost certainly sign it into law. In other regulatory news, Representative Darren Soto, Democrat of Florida, reintroduced two bills on Wednesday. The first is the U.S. Virtual Currency Market and Regulatory Competitiveness Act, which directs the CFTC to produce a report on worldwide digital currency regulation

and how the U.S. can promote digital asset innovation. The second is the Virtual Currency Consumer Protection Act of 2021, which asks for a report on price manipulation in digital assets and recommendations for regulation that could mitigate any found issues. Next headline. USDC plans to make reserves 100% backed by cash. Circle announced that its stable coin at USDC will be 100% backed by cash in short-term U.S. treasuries by September.

Center, the consortium building USDC, formed by Circle and Coinbase, cited community sentiment and a commitment to trust and transparency as reasons for the change. In July, it revealed that USC only held 61% of the reserves backing USDC in cash and cash equivalents, with arrest backed by Yankee certificates of deposit, meaning CDs issued by foreign-s-non-US treasuries, commercial paper, municipal, and corporate bonds. From Circle's perspective, the move to back USC by cash and cash equivalents come shortly after the company, A, shared plans to go public via a SPAC, and B, announced its desire to become, quote, a full reserve national bank. Speaking of stable coins, Paxos, the blockchain infrastructure firm, is rebranding

its stable coin from Paxos standard to Paxos dollar. The token formerly P-A-X will now be listed as USDP. Next headline. Avalanche's AVAX. token pops amidst liquidity mining program. AVAX, the native token of the scalability-focused blockchain avalanche is up about 100% over the past seven days, the largest price increase for a top 100 token by market cap. Avalanche's defy ecosystem has also been flooded with deposits, ballooning from just $380 million in total value locked to $2.4 billion in total value locked in just seven days. The network's popularity coincides with the recent launch of Avalanche Rush, a $180 million liquidity mining incentive program spearheaded by the Avalanche Foundation. Phase one of the Rush

program has already begun, with three D-Fi stalwarts, Avey, Curve, and Sushi, participating in the liquidity mining program. Over the next three months, $40 million in rewards will be given to Avalanche-based LPs providing liquidity on those platforms. Going forward, it remains to be seen whether Avalanche will thrive once the incentives dry up. As crypto investor Muni told CoinDesk, it could go one of two ways. The liquidity mining incentives kickstart a flywheel effect around their ecosystem, or enthusiasm dries up and the hot ball of money moves to the next pot of honey. For now, Avalanche will continue onboarding blue chip DFI protocols. Next headline, Andrewson Horowitz publishes best practices for defy delegation.

In a Thursday blog post, A16Z, shared details about its token delegation process, including best practices, delegate assessment criteria, legal mechanics, the current delegate network, and ideas for future improvement. As an early investor in DFI protocols like Uniswap, Compound, and Selo, among others, A16Z has collected a large number of governance tokens. Over the past year, A16Z has delegated the majority of its governance rights in protocols to a collection of nonprofits, startups, and universities, with the idea of lowering A16 Z's sway in on-chain voting. Quote, unlike traditional companies,

protocols are meant to be governed on a decentralized basis. This unlocks their core value prop neutrality and ensures they'll remain open to anyone who wants to use slash build on them, tweeted A16Z's Jeff Amico. To truly serve this purpose, though a strong form of delegation is needed, one that not only reduces surface level concentration, but that optimizes for certain other key principles as well, including quality, diversity, engagement,

perhaps most of all, independence. Time for fun bits. Board Ape Yacht Club versus Arizona IST. Last Friday, Arizona ICT announced that it had aped into the Board Ape Yacht Club collection by scooping up one of the 10,000 popular NFTs. DeC reports that while the board ape Twitter account welcomed the brand into the community, B-A-YC creators think the brand overstepped its commercial limits in its announcement. UGal Labs grants a commercial license to board Ape NFT owners to use the image as they see fit.

However, Arizona ICT used the board ape yacht club name and logo with the announcement, which apparently does not count as authorized use. Quote, owning one of our NFTs does not give any rights to our name, logos, or branding. However, that was inappropriate usage and we've messaged them about it. The Ugo team told the crypt. All right. Well, thanks for tuning in to learn more about Nick and the Ethereum Name Service. be sure to check with all links in the show notes. Unconfirmed is produced by me, Laura Shin,

with help from Anthony Yoon, Mark Murdoch, and Daniel Ness. Thanks for listening.