A weekly recap of the most insightful news, analysis, and capital flows in the wild west we call crypto.

Hello and welcome back to the Web3 Rewind! Per usual in this industry, lots has happened this past week. Here's what we have in store for you:

• Visa settles on Solana

• Stake hack

• Metamask sell feature

• PUBG’s new chain

• Lufthansa NFTs

The Latest

On Slow Weeks

Why settle dept.

Visa Settlement on Solana

 Ethereum maxis watched in disbelief as Visa expanded its stablecoin settlement capabilities to Solana. You can hardly blame Visa considering Solana has consistently done 200 TPS for months, while Ethereum itself struggles to break 10 TPS half the time, or 100 TPS if you include all the rollups. This comes on the back of Shopify enabling USDC payments via a Solana Pay integration, and potential interest from MakerDAO to launch their new chain as a fork of Solana.

Currently, when a consumer uses a Visa card to make a purchase at a merchant, payments are authorized in real-time, but clearing and settlement often take days. Instant settlement isn’t exactly a thing in TradFi, and any financial payments platform such as Square offering it is simply fronting the liquidity needed. By utilizing Solana as a settlement layer, settlement payments on-chain are now processed nearly instantly, or more precisely, within a 0.6 second block on Solana.

With the launch, Visa — which has been settling USDC on Ethereum since 2020 — has partnered with two merchant acquirers, Worldpay and Nuvei. By partnering with these two companies, a diverse set of merchants around the world can enable card acceptance for USDC, especially for those who prefer to hold USDC within their corporate treasuries over traditional fiat. All this happens through Visa’s Circle Account, which routes these payments in USDC to end merchants.

This isn’t an overnight success story of blockchain adoption. It is something that has been in progress since 2021, when Visa first began testing how USDC could be used inside its treasury operations. With this launch on Solana, things like cross-border settlement just became a lot faster. Near instant settlement on a public immutable ledger is one of the clearest value propositions of blockchain vs. traditional financial rails. Even though FedNow, an instant payment service for banks and credit unions, went live in July this year, access is still fairly limited, with only 35 early-adopting banks and credit unions. In comparison, Visa’s instant settlement capabilities enabled through blockchain are already reaching hundreds of thousands of merchants.

You may wonder how much this Visa USDC settlement on Solana differs from Paypal’s PYUSD on Ethereum, which has garnered $40M in total market cap. The short answer is that it’s not really apples to apples. One is a medium of exchange; the other is a settlement rail. In fact, there’s nothing stopping Visa from integrating PYUSD into its instant settlement capabilities on the blockchain. Whatever the competition, the simple truth is that everyone wins with such announcements and developments, including crypto as a whole, merchants, payment companies, blockchains, and users. Remember how positive sum crypto can be sometimes. — Joseph Cooper, Decential Media

Quick Bits

Stake hack

• Stake is an online betting platform that enables betting through crypto assets. It is one of the most profitable crypto companies in existence, making $2.6B in gross gaming revenue in 2022.

• On Monday, the protocol was exploited for 6,000 ETH, or roughly $40M. This was confirmed by the company’s Twitter account. Considering the company makes this back in six days, I wouldn’t be too concerned about making users whole. But this goes to show the ever-present risk of companies built using crypto rails.

Metamask sell feature

• On Tuesday, Metamask announced its latest feature, Sell. It allows users to convert crypto in their wallet to fiat easily, and is currently available in the US, UK, and parts of Europe with initial support for ETH on Ethereum.

• As cool as that is, it appears that there are a load of hidden fees involved, likely from the vetted providers helping to provide off-ramping services. For example, this user experienced 9% in transaction fees to offramp 0.05 ETH, hardly anything to boast about.

PUBG new chain

• PUBG is a game with 30 million daily players and 294 million monthly players. It is one of the most successful mobile games to date. Last week, they announced that they would be launching a Cosmos-based chain.

• The blockchain will be purpose-built for the creator economy. Various functionalities teased include using stablecoins for gas fees, using NFTs for royalty rights, bridgeless NFT interoperability, and on-demand payout through transaction records.

And last but not least

Lufthansa NFTs

Last week, Lufthansa announced a new NFT program. Through a collaboration with Miles & More, they launched a new platform called Uptrip. Flyers may now scan their boarding pass in the app and exchange it for NFT trading cards. Of course, like many other Web2 companies using blockchain technology, this NFT program is built on the Polygon blockchain. These collectible cards can be combined into different collections and then redeemed for rewards such as airport lounge access, flight upgrades, or for status and award miles. Since launching a week ago, twenty thousand users have already registered, and given that Lufthansa flies 100M passengers a year, I would guess that number still has ample room to grow.

Of course, as usual, the question is, does this need to be on the blockchain? Well, for once, this seems to be an instance where putting it on the blockchain does kind of make sense. For example, later in the year, Uptrip will launch its own marketplace, while customers can already exchange and sell their NFTs on popular marketplaces. If this were built on web2 rails, there wouldn’t be a concept of NFT exchanges, and customers would not be able to trade their NFTs anywhere. Utilizing blockchain rails increases the amount of interoperability across companies and their products. Imagine a hotel chain that wanted to partner with Lufthansa. It’s now as easy as checking in with a wallet, checking that the customer has a certain NFT in the wallet, and perhaps giving a room discount based on that. In Web2, the hotel chain likely would have had to connect to Lufthansa’s flyer database and constantly query it for the same information. Blockchain is just easier. Plans are also underway to expand the range of available rewards.

This is a relatively steep departure from existing airline loyalty programs, which will often only reward you with miles that have an expiry date and various restrictions within a siloed ecosystem. Moving a loyalty system to the blockchain allows for permissionless innovation, increased ease of partnerships, and improved customer experiences. Perhaps the last question to ask is regulation. Historically, government entities such as the Department of Transportation have taken a strong stance on consumer protection for airline tickets. However, the airline industry as a whole is a relatively deregulated one, especially following the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978. Will regulators need to step in if NFTs get too out of control? For now, I don’t think so. Let the free market do its thing. — JC

Have you read the definitive history of Ethereum? No? Well then get your copy of Out of the Ether while you can.