Kalam Crypto #83: Base L2 Summer, Paypal Stablecoin, and SBF Bail Revoked

“The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools.” Thucydides

Ahlan wa sahlan, and welcome to the 83rd edition of CoinMENA's weekly newsletter, Kalam Crypto. This week, payments giant PayPal launches a stablecoin, Base, the Ethereum Layer 2 form Coinbase launched, Microstrategy sells stocks to buy more bitcoin, SBF bail revoked, and Curve recovers 70% of stolen funds. All that and more, so let's dive into this week's letter, and talk crypto:

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Lightning Round ⚡️

PayPal Launches a Stablecoin on Ethereum: Fintech giant Paypal launched a U.S. dollar stablecoin PYUSD, as an ERC-20 Token on the Ethereum blockchain. In their press release, PayPal cited the inevitable shift to digital currencies, and will gradually roll out this service to it’s 400 million accounts, starting with U.S. users.

Base Summer Drops: Base, the Ethereum Layer 2 platform from Coinbase officially launches to the public, with over 100 dApps. Base was created with a clear vision: bring the next million builders and billion users on-chain. 

SBF in Custody After Bail is Revoked: A judge ruled that Sam Bankman Fried repeatedly violated his bail conditions by tampering with witnesses, using disappearing messages on Signal, using VPN, and several other violations. He is now in the custody of the U.S. Marshals.

Microstrategy Sells Stocks & Buys More Bitcoin: Microstrategy enters into an agreement to sell $750 MILLION worth of Class A Stock in order to buy more bitcoin. In July, they acquired an additional 467 BTC for $14.4 million and now hold 152,800 BTC. 

Curve recovers 70% of stolen funds: The hacked DeFi protocol successfully recovers 70% of stolen funds, worth $50 million.

Local News 📍

Dubai's Department of Economy and Tourism (DET) and Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (VARA) Join Forces: Dubai’s DET and VARA have joined forces through an MoU to collectively enhance support for the virtual assets sector. The partnership aims to ensure a secure and well-regulated environment for virtual assets in Dubai. The collaboration covers aspects such as customer care, business inspections, Virtual Asset Service Provider (VASP) registration, and knowledge sharing. As a licensed entity, we welcome this collaboration that aims to maintain high consumer protection and security standards as the virtual assets ecosystem evolves under VARA's regulatory oversight.

Class of the Week 🎓

We launched our free learning platform, CoinMENA University, because crypto education is a key pillar for us at CoinMENA. Each week we will include one article for you to explore, or deepen your understanding of the topic. We hope you find this useful! This week’s article is about the different types of stablecoins, and the pros and cons of each.

Tweet Of The Week 🐥

Three years after Microstrategy adopted the bitcoin standard, their financial performance has outperformed Bitcoin, S&P500, Nasdaq, Gold, Bonds & Silver.

CoinMENA News 🗞

Proud moment for CoinMENA! Our CEO, Talal Tabbaa, was acknowledged by His Highness Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed, as one of UAE's inspiring youth, driving innovation in the UAE! InternationalYouthDay. Talal was also named a member of 'Young Arab Pioneers' by The Arab Youth Center for his work in digital currencies and youth engagement. 

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Quiz Corner ✅ 

Last week’s question: When was Ethereum invented?

Answer:  2013

This week’s question: All cryptocurrencies aside from BTC are known as _________ .

• Supercoins

• Memecoins

• Altcoins

See the answer in next week’s newsletter. Or check out our new learning platform https://university.coinmena.com/