Argent Newsletter - Issue #23

gm everyone - we hope you’ve all had a great week. If you have any feedback or suggestions to help improve this newsletter, please email edward@argent.xyz.

TLDR: 

1. Apple wants 30% from every NFT in-app purchase
2. Reversible transactions: threat or foe?
3. Another example of regulation by enforcement, this time by the CFTC

Now, let’s get into it all! 🚀

💰 Show Apple the money!!

Apple announced that they will support buying and selling NFTs via its App Store. The catch? A 30% fee from each transaction. There's no way to avoid this fee. Pay it, or you can't support buying and selling NFTs. This has sadly caused many web3 apps to limit NFT functionality, and this will continue to remain until this issue gets fixed.

Apple continues to muscle in and force itself in on the latest trends by utilizing its anti-competitive platform against app developers. Either give Apple a massive slice of the pie, or you won’t get to offer something that everyone wants.

For comparison, OpenSea charges a tiny 2.5% as a platform fee. Yet that fee receives regular complaints from the community. But at least it’s lower than Meta’s 47.5% fee for their digital good marketplace.

⏪ Should you be able to reverse transactions?

There are many problems with crypto that are holding mainstream adoption back. Hacks, exploits, and fraud, to list a few. A solution to this problem is reversible transactions: if a transaction is fraudulent, a decentralized court would decide, and if they agreed, the transaction would be reversed.

Sounds great, right?

But one thing that makes crypto exciting is that it’s permissionless. There are no intermediaries. Once you’ve made a transaction, it’s done. As Wintermute CEO said on Twitter, if we move to permissioned DeFi, we “might as well get back to databases run by legacy banks.” And that’s from someone who recently was a victim of a massive exploit.

Many of the issues that are holding crypto back from the masses can be solved with Account Abstraction. Guardians can be used to ensure that there is 2FA behind transactions. Eliminating seed phrases removes a single point of failure. Fraud monitoring can protect users from sending assets to a fraudulent address. And much, much more.

With crypto being early, it’s exciting to see people coming together and discussing how potential solutions to help bring crypto to the masses. That should be encouraged as we’re all working towards something more significant.

👮‍♂️ Knock knock. It’s the regulators.

Earlier this week, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) charged Ooki DAO, formerly bZx - the trading protocol that provided easy access to margin and leverage trading for crypto. 

The complaint from the CFTC is that bZx operated illegally by offering leveraged and margined retail commodity transactions in digital assets and more. When bZx renamed itself and turned into the Ooki DAO, it would continue to operate in the same vein, thereby violating the law. 

But this case goes further than the regulators going after a trading platform. It also goes after anyone who participated in DAO governance as they're also deemed culpable for the illegal activities.

📚 What we’re reading

Blockchain apps - Polynya

Sudoswap, Fractionalization, and The Problem of NFT Liquidity - 10xdegen

HMS Gyroscope: The history of stables, death spirals, stablecoin governance and much more - RainandCoffee

💭 What’s happening at Argent 

Argent is a fully remote company with employees across Europe, and this week we all met up to discuss strategy and meet all the new faces. We worked on many exciting ideas, like integrating StarkNet into the mobile app, multi-accounts in the mobile wallet, and product features that will turn Argent into a super-app. We’ll be sharing more over the coming weeks. But if there’s something you want to know more about, please get in touch.

🤔 Smaller but interesting news

Here are a few smaller things we’ve found interesting this week:

Crypto Darling Helium Promised A ‘People’s Network.’ Instead, Its Executives Got Rich

NFT royalties are significantly helping artists make a living

More Than Half Of All Bitcoin Trades Are Fake

How to become a web3 developer

An explainer on Alpha Relay

Awesome MEV resources

Infrastructure trends that could catapult crypto out of the bear market

Why Dutch Auctions are Great for NFT Pricing