Top Story: Trump’s recent pick for AI and crypto czar, David Sacks has created ripples (Well I mean ripple (XRP) did gain 300%+ over the past month, so quite literally!). Leaving our terrible joke aside, Trump claimed that Sacks will be focused on “free speech” and steering the economy away from “Big tech bias and censorship”. What does this mean for us degens? Only time will tell.

Blockchain Start-up of the week:

XMAQINA: Xmaqina allows businesses to tokenize their robots. Robot tokens are issued to support the deployment of robots by entities. Anyone can be a liquidity provider to these robot tokens and in turn you earn passive income from the operations performed by the robots. Xmaqina positions itself as the DePin of tokenized autonomous robots. Read more about the project at our medium here!

The Week in Crypto:

a. BTC finally over the 100k USDT mark. Do the anticipated rate cuts offer tailwinds? We are not sure whether the tailwinds will outpace the liquidations.

b. Solana developers propose increasing the networks’ block compute limit from 48 million to 50 million units without compromising stability

c. We in the era of web3 native laptops? Thomson Computing leads the way.

d. Even with Trump claiming to create a ‘strategic bitcoin reserve’, Filecoin and Blockfrost still believe decentralisation can be achieved. Read more here.

Crypto 101:

What is Proof of work?

The two most popular consensus mechanisms are Proof of work and Proof of Stake. ‘Proof of work’ is a mechanism through which activities on a network can be verified without a central authority. In the case of Visa or Paypal, there is a centralised body which confirms an individual’s balance before a transaction can go through. In the case of Bitcoin the ‘miners’ are the ones who create a hash matching the current target (read more here). Given the massive amount of computing power required, it’s only after the hash has been matched, the work is said to be done i.e. another block is added and the activity has been verified after which the transaction can go through. The proof of work mechanism ensures that there is no double spending of digital assets. Moreover, the miners are rewarded with BTC for their proof of work. A number of miners would be expending computing power to arrive at the correct hash but the one who gets to it the earliest is the one rewarded. Proof of work is used by Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin and others.

Local Spotlight: Berkeley and Bay Area Scene

Upcoming Events:

a. December 14: Bitcoin Holiday Party with Bay Area Bitcoiners (Link)

b. December 13: BitcoinFi Accelerator Meet & Greet (Luma)

c. December 19: Ho Ho HODL 🎅 A Bullish Holiday Party with Constellation, Base, and Sui (Luma)

Reading suggestion: Secrets of Sandhill Road | Scott Kupor

Opportunities in Blockchain:

Full-Time roles:

a. Technical Write at Braintrust (Link)

b. Product Marketing Manager at Starkware (Link)

c. Investment Analyst at Tron DAO (Link)

d. DeFi Lead at Avail (Link)

e. Business Development at Cash DAO Network (Link)

f. Senior Software Engineer at Ripple (Link)

g. Staff Blockchain Security Architect at Coinbase (Link)

h. Director of Risk Management at Bitgo (Link)

i. Software Engineer at Alchemy (Link)

Internships:

a. Freelance 3D Artist/Illustrator at Braintrust (Link)

b. Data Engineer Intern at Pinata (Link)

Funding rounds:

a. Crypto wallet Deblock raises £13.3m. Headline, Hoxton, 20VC and Chalven participated as lead investors.

b. Blockchain Payment Network Partior raised Series B funding of $80 million from Deutsche Bank and others. Other investors include JPM and Standard Chartered

c. Union Labs raises $12 million Series A round to further interoperability between blockchain networks.

d. CAT Labs, a cybersecurity startup focused on recovery of digital assets raises $5.4 million seed round

e. Fiamma raises $4M seed round to continue their work on making Bitcoin more programmable using ZK and BitVM2

Stay Connected.

Twitter: @cesium77

Telegram: @karan_curry, @riadokania

Email: [email protected] , [email protected]

Fun Fact: Cryptology began in the ancient world. The ancient Greeks used a scytale, in which the person sending a message wound a strip of cloth around a stick, wrote the message vertically, filled in some random letters, unwrapped the strip, and sent it to the recipient. The message looked like random letters until wrapped around a stick the same size as the original. 🙃