Coindesk

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:Can Based Rollups solve Ethereum’s problem?Lido goes modularUniswap finally unveils UnichainEthereum’s Pectra upgrade is comingNetwork newsBASED ROLLUPS TO THE RESCUE: In recent years, Ethereum has embraced a layer-2 scaling roadmap—a plan that encouraged the development of third-party auxiliary networks called "layer-2 rollups"—to help scale the base Ethereum ecosystem. Offloading activity to these upstart networks has helped bring down fees and improve speeds for end-users, but it has led to a massive, deeply fragmented ecosystem of layer 2s. But while layer-2 networks all post data back down to Ethereum, they often struggle to communicate directly with...

Circle's USDC, the second-largest stablecoin on the market, rose to a record market capitalization over $56 billion this week as stablecoin growth showed signs of reaccelerating.USDC added $10.2 billion to its market cap over the past month, driven primarily by rising Solana-based DeFi trading volumes, Artemis data shows. That's more than double the $4.6 billion growth of Tether's USDT, the largest stablecoin in the market and Circle's biggest competitor, during the same period. USDT still dominates the stablecoin space with a $142 billion market cap.With the latest growth spurt, USDC surpassed its 2022 peak and fully recovered from the 2023 U.S. regional-banking crisis, which dealt a serious blow to the cryptocurrency. At the time, Circle held a part of...

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) likely doesn’t have jurisdiction over many of the memecoins flooding the crypto market, SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce said in a Tuesday interview with Bloomberg.“We always have to look at the facts and circumstances, but many of the memecoins that are out there probably do not have a home in the SEC under our current set of regulations,” Peirce said. “If that’s something Congress wants to address, they can do that. Maybe that’s something that the wants to address. But many of those, I think, are probably not within our jurisdiction.”Memecoins, unlike cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and ether, have no inherent value. For years, many in the industry have pushed back on regulating them...

President Donald Trump is just about done naming the key figures he's seeking to get into financial regulation posts that will direct the future oversight of the crypto industry, now including lawyer Jonathan Gould as a nominee to run the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency that oversees U.S. national banks.With a widely circulated White House nominations document showing Trump has settled on Gould, a partner at law firm Jones Day who was a top lawyer at the OCC and a former crypto executive, and the president will reportedly nominate the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.'s Jonathan McKernan to run the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the slate is almost clear.Gould had briefly worked as the chief legal officer for blockchain...

Franklin Templeton has made the OnChain U.S. Government Money Market Fund (FOBXX), the third-largest tokenized money market fund, available on Solana in another signal of growing interest in the blockchain.The fund is already available on Ethereum, Coinbase’s Base, Aptos and Avalanche, which were all added last year. The Stellar network functions as the primary blockchain. The asset manager announced the expansion on Wednesday.Solana has emerged as the leading venue for new tokens (mostly memecoins) and decentralized trading. It now accounts for over 90% of all new tokens appearing on decentralized exchanges (DEX), according to a Pantera Capital report. That's up from 1% in late 2023.“Even when innovation doesn’t start on Solana, it eventually finds its way there,” Cosmo Jiang and...