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GM, and welcome to RollCall by Rollfi!

Get caught up from the past week in 10 minutes or less:

• Prices rebound & ETH Merge date set 📈

• Coinbase employee indicted ⛓️

• Weekly Highlight 🌟

• Other stories from the week 📰

PRICES REBOUND

After a few months of declining crypto prices, we are back! At the time of writing this Bitcoin is up ~12% and ETH is up ~28% since last week.

Bitcoin's increase this week could be for a number of reasons, but is probably a combination of the following:

1. The Federal Reserve is now expected to be less aggressive with rate hikes in the coming meeting, likely opting for a 75bps hike rather than 100bps.

2. Easing sell pressure from the slew of crypto firms that have been getting liquidated over the past few months.

3. People still slowly catching on I guess?

Ethereum, on the other hand, has had some major fundamental news this week.

1. At the most recent Consensus Layer Call, September 19th was suggested for the potential Merge date. As we've covered in previous newsletters, the Merge will effect the economics of Ethereum. And now that a date is set, people are speculating that the price will continue to rise post-Merge.

2. Vitalik Buterin spoke yesterday at EthCC, a conference in Paris, about the future of Ethereum. He stated that at the end of its roadmap, Ethereum will be able to process 100,000 transactions per second, over 4x Visa's reported volume.

3. All the same macro stuff affecting Bitcoin's price.

What happens from here? If I knew I probably wouldn't be writing this, I'd be on a beach somewhere. Until the Merge, however, I'll be mulling this meme posted by @owocki on Twitter:

COINBASE EMPLOYEE INDICTED

Following a months-long investigation, the Department of Justice has indicted Coinbase Product Manager Ishan Wahi along with his brother and friend for an insider trading scheme.

Let's rewind a bit. Speculation about employees at popular exchanges committing insider trading acts had been swirling around the internet for the past few years. But it wasn't until popular crypto commentator Cobie's tweet back in April that people at Coinbase had begun investigating the claims on their own. Phillip Martin, who replies in the thread below, is the Chief Security Officer at Coinbase:

According to the DOJ's press release, Wahi would tip his brother Nikhil Wahi and friend Sameer Ramani about assets that were to be listed on the platform before they were announced. These announcements would typically drive prices up since there would now be increased liquidity and the two were able to make profitable trades with little to no risk.

Wahi attempted to flee the country in May when Coinbase had seemingly caught on, and was stopped at the airport by law enforcment.

The DOJ recognized Coinbase for its cooperation in the matter.

Just a few months after Nate Chastain, former Head of Product at Opensea, was indicted for the first case of insider trading in NFTs, Wahi and his counterparts represent the first such case involving cryptocurrencies.

WEEKLY HIGHLIGHT

Given the amount of negative or just plain gloomy news around crypto the last few months, we figured we'd do something a little different.

Each week, we're going to be featuring one new innovation, project, meme, innovator, or just some uplifting news in the crypto space to remind us all that it's not all doom and gloom, there are some seriously cool things being built by some seriously smart people.

This week, we're highlighting Polygon's new zkEVM. That is, a zero-knowledge rollup that is compatible with any smart contract on the Ethereum Virtual Machine.

zkEVM is a Layer 2 scaling solution for Ethereum, making it easier for developers to build apps on Ethereum that require a much faster processing time for transactions than Ethereum provides.

Complicated, I know. The guys at Milk Road wrote this great analogy on how it is improving the way Ethereum works:

While the technology is complicated, the thought is simple: If Ethereum already has adoption, don't fight it, build something to make it better - and that's what Polygon has done.

MORE STUFF FROM THE WEEK

• Tesla sold 75% of its BTC holdings prior to closing its 2nd quarter books in an effort to maximize its cash position "given the uncertainty of the COVID lockdowns in China." said Elon Musk.

• Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin made a long blog post in response to Balaji Srinivasan's new book, The Network State.

• Three Arrows Capital court filings revealed much about the demise of the fund and the mismanagement of funds by the founders, including the down payment on a $50M yacht while ignoring creditors. (Fortune)

• BNP Paribas is the first major bank in the EU to offer crypto custody services.

GLOSSARY

We're confused too. We're here to help decrypt the crazy world of crypto.

• Merge - Ethereum's transition from a Proof-of-Work consensus protocol to Proof-of-Stake

• Layer 2 - a collective term to describe a specific set of Ethereum scaling solutions. A layer 2 is separate blockchain that extends Ethereum and inherits the security guarantees of Ethereum. (More here.)

• zero-knowledge proof - a way of proving the validity of a statement without revealing the statement itself (More here.)

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