As we celebrate the victories of unions and labor movements, it's important to remember that Banks and governments, those twin pillars of oppression, have long colluded to control the flow of wealth and information. They surveil our transactions, inflate away our savings, and hold us captive in a financial system designed for their benefit.

It's important to remember our cypherpunk roots; as our systems of currency and finance slowly gain acceptance, the powers that will continue their struggle to co-opt and regulate our industry into middling financial solutions.

Happy Labor Day!

What's in this edition:

1. Nominate yourself for upcoming Synthetix Council elections
2. Vega Protocol rugs after 3 years
3. BitGo CEO calls WBTC critics "intellectually dishonest"
4. GammaSwap Raises 342 ETH for their LBP
5. No more Uniswap sandwiches

Don't forget to check out the best longform "Good Reads" at the end of the newsletter

Apply for the Synthetix Council Elections

It's that time of year again. Synthetix is starting its elections for the Spartan Council on its newly deployed SNAXchain L2.

Anyone can nominate themselves for election. All you have to do is bridge over some ETH to SNAXchain and then nominate yourself.

You can add SNAXchain with the following info:

RPC: https://mainnet.snaxchain.io/
WS: wss://mainnet.snaxchain.io
Block Explorer: https://explorer.snaxchain.io/
Chain ID: 2192
Bridge: https://snaxchain-mainnet.mainnets.rollbridge.app/
Superbridge: https://superbridge.app/snaxchain-mainnet

Nominations are open until September 15th when voting ends, so go participate now.

Vega Protocol to shut down, dilute 5:1

Imagine you get $60m dollars from investors. You launch an L1 with your own token. You run for 6 months, and after not finding PMF, you decide to halt the L1 and focus on "open source building."

Oh yeah and you dilute existing token holders by 5:1 because you burned through so much capital and your token is down 99.99%

This is the story of Vega Protocol, as outlined in their recent blog post where they announced the shutdown of their L1 and shift to focusing development on the Nebula project, a new retail-focused decentralized exchange (DEX) built using the Vega protocol. Nebula will launch its own chain and NEB token, offering VEGA token holders the opportunity to swap their tokens for NEB. This swap, if approved by a community governance vote, would dilute VEGA holders up to 5:1.

The proposal has 3 days left in the voting period, but it's already at 75%.

Vega previously raised $60m from a token sale on Coinlist.

Bitgo CEO calls WBTC critics "intellectually dishonest"

BitGo CEO Mike Belshe has defended his company's controversial partnership with BiT Global, a Hong Kong-based crypto custodian partially owned by Tron founder Justin Sun.

tBTC Proposes Merger with WBTC! Justin Sun Gone?

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Flywheel | Your grassroots media source for DeFi cultureSamuel McCulloch

Speaking at Korea Blockchain Week, Belshe dismissed critics as lacking "intellectual honesty," suggesting that competitors like Threshold and Coinbase are more interested in market share than genuine concerns about centralization.

“They’ve even said publicly that if they had all of Wrapped Bitcoin’s market share, their token's value would be 35 times higher. I understand that they want their token to go up, but we’re facing attacks from every tBTC holder who wants to see that happen,” Belshe said about Threshold's offer. “Let’s be intellectually honest here: criticizing our efforts to decentralize Wrapped Bitcoin just to boost their token’s value is beyond ridiculous."

And on Coinbase he said:

"Of course, the central bank, CB, Coinbase, they also would love to have Wrapped Bitcoin under their belt. There is no doubt that the model that BitGo is proposing, how we're going to store the keys, is far superior to anything that Coinbase can or would concoct."

He emphasized that the deal aims to enhance security by distributing key custody across multiple institutions and expand BitGo's presence in Asia.

Belshe acknowledged Sun's controversial reputation but stressed the importance of transparency in the partnership.

Despite initial concerns from some community members, on-chain data has not shown a significant exodus from Wrapped Bitcoin following the announcement, suggesting that the market has largely accepted the move.

GammaSwap Raises 342 ETH in LBP

Congrats to the GammaSwap team for launching a great product and finishing their fundraising using a liquidity bootstrapping event.

The GS/ETH pool is now seeded, and you can buy their token on DeltaSwap.

No more Uniswap sandwiches

A new implementation of Uniswap V2 has been created that offers robust protection against sandwich attacks, a common form of market manipulation in DeFi.

Sandwich attacks combine a front run with a back run, where a MEV bot sees an order in the mempool about to be executed, then purchases tokens in the same block, pushing up the price to the maximum allowed slippage of the order, then immediately dumps the tokens once the trade is complete.

This solution, developed by Diego aka 0xfuturistic, requires only 19 lines of additional code and leverages the Greedy Sequencing Rule (GSR) from the academic paper "Credible Decentralized Exchange Design via Verifiable Sequencing Rules."

The modified smart contract preserves atomic composability, has no external dependencies, and doesn't require any off-chain computation or additional infrastructure.

The implementation works by enforcing a specific ordering of buy and sell orders within each block, based on which type of order would receive better execution relative to the block's starting price.

This clever mechanism effectively prevents proposers from profiting from sandwich attacks, as they cannot include the final leg of the attack (typically a sell order) after a user's buy order without violating the sequencing rule.

While this approach significantly mitigates the risk of sandwich attacks, Diego acknowledges some limitations, including potential price discovery issues in multi-pool scenarios and the possibility of attacks spanning multiple blocks if consecutive block proposers collude.

Good Reads

• 1kx publishes Blockchains as Worlds for Fun and Play
• 2077 Research publishes EIP-1559 - Separating Mechanisms From Memes
• Donnoh.eth threads on Eclipse's architecture
• IOSG Research writes Prediction Markets of the Future - Challenges and Innovations
• Scroll hints at an airdrop