Quick Take

• The EU rejects a proposal to limit the use of PoW mining.

• Ethereum’s Merge is predicted to go live sometime in June 2022.

• Yuga Labs acquires the CryptoPunks and Meetbits NFT collections.

• More than 10 Million ETH are now staked on the Beacon Chain.

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European Union Rejects Proposal To Limit PoW 

The European Parliament’s economic and monetary affairs committee has rejected a proposal to limit the use of PoW mining across the EU’s 27 member states. The proposal would have required all cryptocurrencies to be subject to the EU’s minimum environmental sustainability standards before being issued, offered or admitted to trading in the Union.

If passed, the provision would have been part of the Markets in Crypto Assets (MiCA) framework, the EU’s regulatory scheme for governing digital assets. PoW mining has long been a controversial topic among regulators and politicians over energy concerns. French-based crypto hardware company Ledger issued a statement on the matter, saying: "policymakers should neither impose nor discriminate in favor of a particular technology.”

BAYC Acquires CryptoPunks & Meebits

Yuga Labs, the company behind Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) NFTs, has acquired the IP of the CryptoPunks and Meetbits collections from Larva Labs. Yuga Labs now owns the brands, copyright in the art, as well as 423 CryptoPunks and 1711 Meebits. As a first step, the company will be granting CryptoPunks and Meebits holders the same full commercial rights as BAYC and MAYC holders.

The deal originated from discussions between Guy Oseary and Larva Labs founders Matt Hall and John Watkinson. Oseary, a former talent manager for Madonna and U2, signed a BAYC deal with United Talent Agency late last year. Yuga Labs says they don't plan to incorporate the “club” model into the acquired collections as they will keep BAYC as the central project and will maintain CryptoPunks as a historic collection.

Ethereum Merge Predicted For June 2022

“The Merge” - Ethereum’s shift in consensus from PoW to PoS, is predicted to go live sometime in June 2022. The difficulty bomb, a mechanism intended to make PoW mining much more difficult and unprofitable, is timed to explode sometime in June or July of this year. The dificulty bomb was delayed during the Arrow Glacier hard fark in December 2021.

As the new deadline approaches, Ethereum developers will need to determine weather to do a hard fork to delay the difficulty bomb once more, or use the rare hard fork opportunity to implement the merge. After the merge to PoS, Ethereum miners will become obsolete, likely causing an increase in mining activity on Bitcoin. The hardware requirements for validating is much more user friendly and is expected to be 99% more energy-efficient than PoW.

10 Million ETH In Deposit Contract

Ethereum’s staking contract has reached 10 million ETH in deposits, currently worth over $25 billion. More than 300k validators are staking 32 ETH on the Ethereum Beacon Chain, the first step in the transition to the Consensus Layer. According to analytics website Staking Rewards, validators are currently being rewarded 4.81% APR for securing the network. The rewards rate decreases as the number of validators increase.

Among the validators are centralized exchanges like Binance, Gemini, Coinbase, and Kraken, who pool together users' funds for staking in exchange for a fee. Lido Finance and Rocket Pool are among the decentralized solutions for pooled staking. The uptick in staked ETH shows conviction in Ethereum’s success as ETH locked in the contract cannot be withdrawn until after the merge.

WalletConnect Raises $11 Million Series A

WalletConnect, the web3 standard for connecting wallets to dapps, has raised $11 million in a Series A funding round. The round was co-led by Union Square Ventures and 1kx at an undisclosed valuation. WalletConnect says the funds will be used to scale wallet interoperability and develop a generalized messaging layer which will introduce two new protocols.

A direct messaging protocol to allow WalletConnect wallets to message each other.and a push notification protocol to allow apps to notify users of off-chain and on-chain events. WalletConnect is currently implemented on over 200 applications including Twitter’s NFT authenticated profile picture feature.

This has been a roundup of today’s top news stories from ETH Daily. Please support this podcast by supporting our grant on Gitcoin.