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The Protocol: Ethereum Foundation Fracas

Published

3 месяца ago

23 января, 2025

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Welcome to The Protocol, CoinDesk’s weekly wrap-up of the most important stories in cryptocurrency tech development. I’m Ben Schiller, CoinDesk’s Opinion and Features editor.

In this issue:

DAO governance tool merger

Ethereum Foundation drama

Stablecoin USDh comes to Bitcoin

$25 million grant program for DePIN

Network News

DAO GOVERNANCE PLATFORM ACQUIRES RIVAL: Agora, a blockchain governance startup, is set to acquire its competitor Boardroom. The company framed the acquisition as a strategic move to enhance governance within the broader Ethereum ecosystem, citing expectations of renewed growth in decentralized governance due to President Trump’s promise of regulatory clarity for the blockchain industry. «2025 is the year we make good governance the standard for all protocols in Ethereum,» Agora co-founder Yitong Zhang told CoinDesk. Agora was founded in 2022 by Zhang, Charlie Feng, and Kent Fenwick. The trio initially started working on governance tooling at Nouns DAO, one of the buzzier blockchain protocols to emerge from 2021’s DAO and NFT hype cycle. Agora was founded on the premise that token governance is central to the value of crypto protocols. It aims to provide user-friendly, open-source governance tools for DAOs like Uniswap and Optimism, which both currently use Agora to organize token holders and hold governance votes.Boardroom, which predated Agora and has similar goals, took a more horizontal approach to blockchain governance. Boardroom has gradually transitioned from an Agora-style DAO tooling software to a data feed — similar to a «Bloomberg» for crypto governance data. Agora declined to disclose how much it paid to acquire Boardroom. Boardroom’s employees have been offered roles at Agora, and Boardroom’s founder, Kevin Nielsen, will remain as an advisor. «There’s no plan to deprecate» Boardroom, according to Zhang. Rather, the Agora team will keep both platforms running and will work with users to determine how the tools might gradually be integrated. Read more. – Sam Kessler

ETHEREUM TURMOIL: Konstantin Lomashuk, the founder of the Lido staking protocol, has teased his intention to build a «Second Foundation» to advance Ethereum’s ecosystem. Over the past several days, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has outlined plans for a major restructuring of the Ethereum Foundation (EF), the nonprofit organization responsible for supporting Ethereum’s development. In a series of posts on X (formerly Twitter), Buterin shared details of the reorganization, which he said would streamline decision-making processes and address inefficiencies. The announcement has sparked criticism, with some arguing that Buterin’s central role in the restructuring process undermines Ethereum’s ethos of decentralization. The EF has long been scrutinized for its own centralizing influence. Over the past year, the organization has faced mounting pressure to define a clearer vision for Ethereum’s future as competing networks like Solana make strides. Read more. – Sam Kessler

BITCOIN GETS NEW STABLECOIN: The developers of USDh, a stablecoin built on Bitcoin layer 2 Stacks, have completed a deal to bring around $3 million in liquidity to the token. Decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Hermetica has secured the liquidity, which it says will make it the largest stablecoin on Stacks, through collaboration with Bitcoin lending protocol Zest. The two plan to offer yield on USDh through lending against sBTC, the bitcoin-backed bridging asset that users can use to put their bitcoin wealth in the Stacks ecosystem. The initial liquidity boost could create a short-term window of higher yields, Hermetica said, with projections of an annual percentage yield (APY) as high as 50%. It currently provides an average APY of 18%, Hermetica said in an emailed announcement on Wednesday. Stablecoins play an integral role in the crypto economy, giving users a means of holding their assets in a token that isn’t prone to such significant ebbs and flows in value, because they are pegged to a fiat currency (usually the U.S. dollar). Provision for stablecoins therefore would naturally be an important development in Bitcoin’s evolution into a network that can support DeFi capabilities, a trend that has gathered momentum in the last couple of years. It should be pointed that, however, that the $3 million in liquidity that USDh provides is tiny compared to the dominant stablecoins in crypto. USDT and USDC have market caps of over $138 billion and $51 billion respectively, highlighting the relative infancy of the Bitcoin DeFi sector. Read more. – Jamie Crawley

DEPIN GRANT PROGRAM: World Mobile, a decentralized wireless network, has announced a $25 million grant program aimed at fostering Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Network (DePIN) projects. Tenity, an early-stage investor and global leader in innovation programs and startup acceleration, is a partner in the initiative, which will make available its six international hubs. “By partnering with Tenity, we’re ensuring that the World Mobile Chain Grant Program doesn’t just fund projects but provides the guidance and resources necessary to drive scalable, impactful innovation,” said Micky Watkins, CEO of World Mobile Group. The $25 million offers funding starting at $5,000 and has a focus on decentralized communications, on-chain governance, and the tokenization of real-world assets. World Mobile is an EVM-compatible “Layer 3” developed on Base. Read more.

In Other News

L2s Getting Faster

Layer 2 protocols have achieved record throughput, led by Base.

Letters of Credit for DeFi

Anvil, an Ethereum-based smart contract project, is a step towards creating a new form of money, says its founder Tyler Spalding.

Regulatory and policy

Trump issues executive order on digital assets, among host of post-inauguration initiatives

Calendar

Jan. 20-24: World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland

January 21-25: WAGMI conference, Miami.

Jan. 24-25: Adopting Bitcoin, Cape Town, South Africa.

Jan. 30-31: PLAN B Forum, San Salvador, El Salvador.

Feb. 1-6: Satoshi Roundtable, Dubai

Feb. 19-20, 2025: ConsensusHK, Hong Kong.

Feb. 23-24: NFT Paris

Feb 23-March 2: ETHDenver

March 18-19: Digital Asset Summit, London

May 14-16: Consensus, Toronto.

May 27-29: Bitcoin 2025, Las Vegas.

Uncategorized

CoinDesk 20 Performance Update: SUI and POL Rise 7.5%, Leading Index Higher

Published

2 часа ago

22 апреля, 2025

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CoinDesk Indices presents its daily market update, highlighting the performance of leaders and laggards in the CoinDesk 20 Index.

The CoinDesk 20 is currently trading at 2556.62, up 2.1% (+52.39) since 4 p.m. ET on Monday.

Fifteen of 20 assets are trading higher.

9am CoinDesk 20 Update for 2025-04-22: chart

Leaders: SUI (+7.5%) and POL (+7.5%).

Laggards: FIL (-4.5%) and XLM (-1.6%).

The CoinDesk 20 is a broad-based index traded on multiple platforms in several regions globally.

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DAO Infrastructure Provider Tally Raises $8M to Scale On-Chain Governance

Published

2 часа ago

22 апреля, 2025

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Tally, a leader in on-chain governance tooling, has secured $8 million in Series A funding aimed at scaling its governance technology to more crypto-native decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs).

Tally is best known for the Tally Protocol, which powers infrastructure to help leading protocols conduct effective on-chain governance of their DAOs, including Arbitrum, Uniswap DAO, ZKsync, Wormhole, Eigenlayer, Obol and Hyperlane.

«We’ve built this complete stack of software for operating these on-chain organizations,» Dennison Bertram, CEO and co-founder of Tally Protocol, said in an interview with CoinDesk. «We can take you from your idea to launching your token, to distributing your membership or ownership, all the way to the value accrual for your protocol.»

The platform began as a DAO governance tool and has evolved into the most widely adopted software stack for on-chain organizations across the Ethereum and Solana blockchains, it said in a release.

«On-chain governance and capital formation could, in theory, dramatically reduce the complexity and cost of forming and operating organizations by moving these processes entirely into software rather than traditional jurisdictions guided by platforms like Tally,» Bertram said.

One day, on-chain organizations might be seen as a way to compete with nation states, he argued, referencing the costly and lawyer-intensive process of registering foundations and other legal entities typically used for crypto.

«Whoever embraces crypto really fully might actually be embracing fully the future,» he said.

Fixing vote turnout for better governance

One issue that Tally aims to tackle with funding from the Series A is low voter participation and apathy in DAO governance, which has led to sometimes controversial outcomes.

Last year, for example, a group of CompoundDAO token holders, called Golden Boys, successfully passed a controversial proposal to create a yield-bearing product called goldCOMP.

Despite initially gaining traction, the proposal faced significant controversy due to perceived irregularities, low voter turnout and a lack of widespread community engagement.

Ultimately, the Golden Boys agreed to cancel goldCOMP, which highlighted the broader issue of governance apathy within DAOs rather than any technical exploit or malicious intent.

«Many of the people that you should expect to vote ‘no’ on something like this didn’t show up,» Bertram said in an earlier interview. «What it shows is that the democratic process of governing a DAO is imperfect and needs improvement.»

To address this, Tally has developed staking mechanisms designed to reward active governance participants economically. Users can stake their governance tokens to receive Tally Liquid Staked Tokens (tLSTs), earning passive, auto-compounding yields while retaining voting rights within DAOs.

“This fundraise is really about leaning into the original vision,” Bertram said. “Now that we’ve proven that this works, that you can have these large organizations, it’s time to really scale it up.”

Institutions are getting involved in DAOs

Bertram also emphasized that recent regulatory clarity and shifts in attitude toward crypto governance in the U.S. have opened the door for increased institutional participation in DAOs.

“With this clarity, we’re going to get a lot more participation, not necessarily from average Joe token holders, but actually from large organizations that depend on the infrastructure they’re building on,” he said. “These organizations are going to need and want the ability to actually govern the infrastructure that they operate on.”

Ultimately, Bertram sees Tally’s role as pivotal in advancing decentralized governance and unlocking greater economic value for token holders by directly rewarding active, informed participants.

«Given the new acceptance of crypto as a key driver of future value in America, it’s time to scale it beyond crypto and make it a core primitive for creating new organizations,” he said.

The round was led by Appworks and Blockchain Capital with participation from BitGo amongst others.

Tally previously raised $7.5 million in 2021 across two funding rounds.

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Dutch Bank ING Said to Be Working on a New Stablecoin With Other TradFi and Crypto Firms

Published

2 часа ago

22 апреля, 2025

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Dutch bank ING is working on a stablecoin, looking to take advantage of Europe’s new cryptocurrency regulations that came into force last year, according to two people with knowledge of the plans.

ING’s stablecoin project could take the form of a consortium effort involving other banks and crypto service providers, both people said.

“ING is working on a stablecoin project with a few other banks. It’s moving slow as multiple banks need board approval to set up a joint entity,” one of the sources said.

ING declined to comment.

Europe’s Markets in Crypto Assets regime [MiCA] requires stablecoin issuers across EU member countries to hold an authorization license, while promoting the potential of euro-denominated stablecoins (the vast majority of the stablecoins in circulation are pegged to the U.S. dollar).

MiCA’s stablecoin rules, which also require issuers to maintain significant reserves in banks based in Europe, have strengthened compliant offerings like Circle’s euro stablecoin EURC over its main rival Tether, according to a note early this year from JPMorgan.

Banks like ING entering the European stablecoin space means French lender Société Générale, the first big bank to offer a stablecoin through its SG Forge innovation division, will soon have some competition.