In This week's hottest news to hit your Crypto feed, Kris Merkel visits Decentraland for the Too the Moon Music Festival, takes a look at Visa's crypto partnerships, Digs into the low Ethereum gas fees, and the new London Hard fork which introduces EIP-1559 along with everyone's favorite actual unicorn, Uniswap.
Coachella won’t be back until 2022 but virtual music festivals could fill the gap until the world returns to normal. In just a second we’ll explain how an upcoming Decentraland festival is going to work and what kind of NFTs you can get for attending.
In other news, Visa is diving deeper into crypto, the gas fees on Ethereum are the lowest they’ve been in a year and NFTs are settingsales records even as the crypto markets have been trending down lately.
Gather up your virtual festival gear and settleinfor the headliners on this week’s Exodus Crypto News Out of all traditional finance companies it’s Visa that’s taking crypto the most seriously.
In March Visa announced that they were going to start using the stablecoin USDC to settle some of their payment transactions. Just a few months later Visa is back again,this time with the announcement that they have 50 active partnerships with various crypto-currency firms. There are a lot of names on the partnership list but a few that stand out include Binance, Crypto.com, FTX and Coinbase.
All of these firms are offering a Visa-linked debit card which lets their users spend crypto at any one of the 70 million merchants worldwide that accept Visa payments. The crypto payments are converted to dollars behind the scenes, so merchants get paid in fiat without having to hold Bitcoin or Ethereum.
Crypto payments are a win-win for everyone. Holders can pay with their favorite coins,Visa makes money from transaction fees and the merchants get business that might have otherwise gone somewhere else. BlockFi is another Visa partner and they’re offering a dollar denominated credit card which pays out crypto rewards with every purchase.
Visa is definitely a company to keep an eye on as they continue to integrate crypto solutions into their company. Partygoer's are probably going to have to wait another year for their favorite festivals to come back in real life but that doesn’t mean there isn’t an alternative.
The virtual music festival To the Moon is scheduled for a debut next week in Decentraland. The event, which is going to be held at Known Origin’s Decentraland headquarters, features a pretty solid lineup including: Autograf, Ookay, SNBRN,Fred Thurst and Win and Woo. Anyone who attends the virtual festival can get a virtual Proof of Attendance Protocol token that they can put on their decentralandprofile.
There’s going to be other merch for sale as well, including a hat, a bomber jacket and a few other outfits designed exclusively for the concert. As more people and companies embrace virtual worlds like Decentraland we think that you’re going to see even more shows debut over the internet instead of in person.
Even though the To the Moon festival is one of the first of its kind, we don’t think this is the last you’ll be seeing of virtual festivals and gatherings. Coin Metrics recently released a report showing that the gas fees on Ethereum are averaging 15 to 30 gwei, with some dips to as low as 10 gwei or less.
That’s 10 to 15 times cheaper than what gas fees were in April, when users were paying $10 or $20 just to send some ETH. The last time gas fees were this cheap wasMarch of 2020 and the question on everyone’s mind is whether these low fees are sustainable? Are Ethereum scaling solutions finally solving the gas fee problem? It’s probably too early to say, however,for the long term we’re definitely optimistic that scaling solutions like Arbitrum and Polygonate going to make Ethereum usable and affordable for everyone, not just the whales.
Sticking with Ethereum The long awaited London hard fork is set to go live on August 4th and we couldn’t be more excited. Why is this upgrade such a big deal? Although the London hard fork has a lot of different updates, EIP 1559 is what everyone is really looking forward to.
When EIP 1559 goes live it’s going to make gas fees way more predictable. Instead of guessing, Ethereum users will know exactly how much gas they have to pay to get their transaction included in the next block. EIP 1559 is also going to burn a portion of all the transaction fees.
The hope is that enough transaction fees are burned that it meaningfully reduces the supply of ETH and drives prices higher, just like what happens when Bitcoin goes through its halvening. As long as all of the Ethereum developers,clients and miners agree to the upgrade it will go live in a few weeks.
It’s an exciting time for Ethereum as EIP 1559 has been in the works for more than a year. From $14 to just over $20, the UNI tokenis up almost 50% in the last two weeks. The way the market is moving it almost feels like there is a large fund that’s buying up a significant portion of UNI’s supply.
It makes a lot of sense for investors to get interested in Uniswap since the exchange is consistently doing more than $1 billion a day in trading volume. That’s more than $300 billion in yearly volume which is enough to give Uniswap an annual revenue of $1 billion, making it a Unicorn! The coolest thing about Uniswap is that if it keeps growing as fast as it has been, in a few years it’s going to be the biggest crypto exchange in the world, even bigger than centralized exchanges like Coinbase and Binance.
Awesome