ETH 2.0 Arriving Soon

$APE In Hot Water?

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What's Dropping ⚡️

  • Fans of The Walking Dead have had the chance to collect a multitude of NFTs directly inspired by the television series, thanks to Orange Comet. This time, their animated walkers are all 1/1 originals, and will further decompose over time. (Twitter)

  • Vitalik shares his plans for the future of Ethereum at ETHCC conference in Paris. He shared that his plans for the merge are not even halfway complete, and he plans to deliver on his word. (CoinDesk)

  • Gamestop quietly removed controversial NFT after it was traded around for a bit over the weekend. (Kotaku)

  • Check out an expert's opinion on how NFTs can help with ticketing issues worldwide. (CoinTelegraph)

  • NFTs with Artificial Intelligence? Altered State Machine has been working on just this over the past year or so. (Twitter)

  • The debate grows in attention; Should NFT creators reimburse victims of scams? Accountability is central to the success of these communities, though some things are beyond the control of creators. (Decrypt)

  • Web 3 startup Hang receives funding as they help big brands dip their toes into the crypto and NFTs. Loyalty programs and NFTs seem a perfect match. (Hang)

  • One of the most utilized crypto exchange protocols Uniswap is expanding into NFT trading, integrating the technology developed by Sudoswap. (Uniswap)

  • Decentraland lands another huge collaboration, this time with Jose Cuervo tequila. They are currently putting on a week-long event in Vegas. (Decentraland)

ETH 2.0 Is Arriving 🔥

 Vitalik Buterin, the iconic co-founder of Ethereum, provided some exciting insight on the future of the Ethereum blockchain at The Ethereum Community Conference in Paris last week. Currently, the Ethereum network is currently able to process fifteen to twenty transactions a second. The future state of Ethereum’s newly refreshed roadmap the mainnet will be able to process 100,000 transactions a second. The blockchain’s transformation includes the highly anticipated forthcoming merge which will change ETH’s validation system from proof of work to proof of stake. Merge will bolster the network’s decentralization, and make it more powerful since a greater number of validators will be able to participate in the network. We will also witness a 99% increase in the blockchain’s power efficiency and new cryptographic protocols. After the merge occurs, Ethereum will be 55% complete, according to Vitalik. The other 45% of its transformation includes the pleasantly rhymed phases surge, verge, purge, and splurge. 

After the merge will come the "surge", and that’ll make rollups ten times cheaper than they are right now. After the surge comes the verge, and that will be a boon for decentralization since validators won’t need a tremendous amount of disk space to stake. Following the verge will be the purge, and that will strengthen scalability and decentralization by not requiring nodes to store old network history. The final transformation, the splurge, will involve an array of optimizations, potentially mobile phone staking, and upgrades that address defense systems against quantum computing. While developers continue to build on the Ethereum blockchain, Vitalik is ensuring that the very foundation that so many of us are assuming as our base is as powerful, efficient, and decentralized as it can be. 

Currently, the slotted date for the arrival of ETH 2.0 is mid-September.

 $APE In Hot Water? 📉

After countless failed token launches, it seems like people should understand the difference between a failure and a success under construction. Since Yuga’s launch of $APE earlier this year, the token has plummeted approximately 75% from its high of $26.19. This has initiated the law firm Scott+Scott to launch a class action lawsuit against Yuga Labs to represent the investors that have generated losses to, in turn, collect restitution.

On their website, Scott+Scott state that “Yuga Labs’ leadership used celebrity promoters and endorsements to inflate the price of the company’s NFTs and token, by generally promoting the growth prospects and change for huge returns on investment to unsuspecting investors.” They also state that the “touted growth [of Yuga] was entirely dependent on continued promotion (as opposed to actual utility or underlying technology).” In simple terms, they’re saying that Yuga only grows with endorsements, and not by actual product building. Well, now that those endorsements are drying up, they are starting to fall, including the price of their token, $APE.

With that said, what Scott+Scott fail to understand is that Yuga is currently in a building cycle. With the recent unveiling of Otherside, this new cycle is clear and apparent. Token ecosystems like Axie Infinity failed over time due to less liquidity being pumped into the pool, increased stagnation, and more folks utilizing the game as a means of financial gain, thus bleeding the liquidity dry. But, $APE will be the backbone of the entire Yuga universe, which is worth a whole lot more than Axie, even at the game’s high. Yuga won’t let $APE, or the remainder of their holdings fail. They have too much capital to begin to think about going down that dark road. So why not just sit tight and see how the story unfolds? Have they disappointed up until now? Also, these individuals invested knowing that this space is volatile. The peaks are steep, but the valleys are even steeper. WAGMI.

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Disclaimer: The Drop DOES NOT provide financial advice. All content is for informational purposes only. The Drop is not a registered investment, legal, or tax advisor or a broker/dealer. Trading any crypto-related asset is extremely risky and could result in significant capital losses. 

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