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Arbitrum is Giving Away $50M, Caroline is Singing, and a BitVM Deep Dive
The Arbitrum community is completing voting today on distribution of its STIP
Decent Newsletter
October 12, 2023
Arbitrum’s STIP (free money) is ready to launch
The Arbitrum community is completing voting today on distribution of its STIP (short term incentives program) which consists of 50 million ARB tokens being allocated to various projects.
Any project within the ecosystem can request a specific number of tokens as part of the program, with the top asks up by vote up until the 50 million token mark being granted. As you can see below the top asks (most of which are granted) are for the heavy hitters like GMX, Gains Network and so on.
One interesting thing to note here is that LIDO is currently pretty low on the voting list, and by my brief calculation earlier was sitting below the cutoff to receive tokens. We will see what ends up happening as there are a few hours remaining until the voting ends, but an interesting development nonetheless.
The proposals are available for anyone see, and should drive some activity on the Arbitrum network. Most grant programs of this size in the past have led to decent surges in volume and user activity in the past, and you can hope to see that for Arbitrum here as well.
A team like GMX is set to receive 12 million ARB, which is about $10 million at today’s prices. Using a combination of trading and liquidity incentives they could really make some noise while we are swimming in this low volume environment as it is.
The Caroline Diaries are one for the ages
There is too much to keep track of when it comes to SBF’s court trial. Yesterday, Caroline Ellison, SBF’s ex (who he was allegedly very much ashamed of) took the stand. Here are some key snippets from what was said:
BREAKING: Sam Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison conspired to keep #Bitcoin under $20k by secretly selling Bitcoin belonging to customers.
🤨
— Bitcoin Archive (@BTC_Archive)
4:30 PM • Oct 11, 2023
“Of what” made me burst out laughing the first time I read it.
Caroline said SBF wanted to be President of the United States - lol
— Paulo (@TycoonPal)
6:29 PM • Oct 10, 2023
While testifying in court, former Alameda Research CEO Caroline Ellison claimed that SBF considered turning to Saudi Crown Prince MBS for help prior to the exchange's collapse.
— Cointelegraph (@Cointelegraph)
4:48 PM • Oct 11, 2023
Apparently SBF also wanted to buy “SNAP”. Yes it just lists the 4 letters in the trial notes so its unclear if he wanted to buy Snap stock or the whole company. Either way the list of things making SBF upset is really amazing.
AUSA: Here is says, "Things Sam is freaking out about"
Ellison: Yes, I updated the list frequently.
AUSA: What does this say?
Ellison: "Raisings funds from MBS." The Saudi Prince. Sam also wanted to set the regulators against Binance— Inner City Press (@innercitypress)
4:22 PM • Oct 11, 2023
This trial is going to give us endless entertainment for quite some time. I love it.
Deep Dive: BitVM
BitVM is a step towards Turing complete smart contracts natively on Bitcoin. This means that a lot of the functionality we have today on Ethereum and other L1s (swaps, lending, borrowing, stablecoin minting, etc.) would now be possible on Bitcoin.
How exactly is this possible? Take a look with our latest Deep Dive below!