VISA Is About To Step Up Their Blockchain Game

GM Readers!📪 It's BitDegree Insider, and let's stretch those web3 muscles.

⭐️Today's selection:

• 💳Visa Explores Mass Blockchain Payments
• 💸Someone Transferred 100 BTC From Bankrupted Exchange's Wallets
• 🕶Cool Fact Tuesday
• 👌Selected Meme of The Day
• 📰Bite-Sized News

VISA EXPLORES NEW BLOCKCHAIN OPPORTUNITIES

At simplest terms, this piece of news can be put like this:

Visa is exploring options to automatically send regular payments without manually signing transactions. They're trying to make DeFi feel more like traditional finances.

What concerns technicalities, they chose StarkNet's Layer 2 blockchain for such a solution. Fancy words. But fear no more.

Here's an explanatory 1-minute video about blockchain layers that we prepared. Or if you're a reader-type, you can jump to October's newsletter, where we explained it.

So okay, what does this Visa venture mean?

Automatic recurring payments are very popular in traditional systems. It's thanks to them that people can set up regular payments for utilities, communications, and so on.

On the blockchain, auto payments are more complex…They require smart contracts. And Essentially, such smart contracts cannot be implemented directly on Ethereum network.

Now, this Starknet Layer 2 blockchain thing is a way of setting up automatic smart contracts possible. That's massive. But it's still a work in progress.

Up until now, the StarkNet protocol was enough to make it possible for payments to be sent using a non-custodial wallet without the need for the user to sign in. 

The bottom line here is that such explorations pave the way for mass adoption. Simply because it creates more use cases for crypto. It becomes useful, practical, and accessible. 

Even though it comes from crypto's arch nemesis - a giant of traditional finances.

TL;DR: VISA explores the possibilities of using Starknet Layer 2 Blockchain to create the possibility for mass payments and setting up automatic smart contracts. 

100 BTC MOVED FROM BANKRUPT CRYPTO EXCHANGE'S COLD WALLETS

On Friday, December 16, an unknown person transferred 104.34 BTC from five cold addresses associated with the bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange QuadrigaCX.

Here's what makes the whole thing... Mystical. 

The liquidator company of the venture had previously claimed that it had no access to these assets. Uhmmm... The vibes are Twin Peaksish.

BTW, what happened to QuadrigaCX?

Interestingly, QuadrigaCX is one of the most notorious crypto stories. You see, there's even a Netflix doc made about them.

It's called 'Trust No One: The Hunt for the Crypto King'.

Even though it was made in 2022... you can already tell that the crypto universe has provided more stories that can/will be turned into movies or documentaries.

We're looking at you Do Kwon. Or SBF. Or 3AC's Kyle Davies and Su Zhu. Oh, man. This is like a Wikipedia article saying that 'This list can be expanded.'

Anyway, so QuadrigaCX collapsed in 2019. The main reason for its collapse was the sudden death of its founder, Gerald Cotten.

At the time of liquidation, Quadriga owed its customers over $200 million. And Gerald Cotten took the keys to these assets with him. 

And... After his death, investigators found out that he used the customers' funds as his own secret reserve, or a slush fund if you like. 

And just a few days ago...  over 100 BTC casually took a stroll out of QuadrigaCX's cold wallets. 

Within this context... The whole thing looks straight up spooky, and quite obviously, there's something that investigators don't know about. Yet. 

So yeah. That just happened. 

TL;DR: Someone just transferred over 100 BTC from a bankrupt crypto exchange's cold wallets. Up until now, it was thought that no one had access to these wallets.

COOL FACT TUESDAY

It's Tuesday, it's Coolday. The day when we share something that can make you say 'nice'.

So, Donald Trump has stepped into the NFT game. 'Trump Digital Trading Cards' is the name of his NFT collection. And it is very... Donald Trumpish. Aesthetically. 

The collection consists of 45,000 unique NFTs. They all had the price tag of $99 when they hit the market. 

And in less than a day... All of them were sold out, thus generating $10 million in revenue.

People started reselling them, and it the NFT market received a long-awaited boost. 332,000+ users traded NFTs on Polygon in the course of one week.

The previous week this number was around 250,000.

And... If you bought 45 of them at once... You'd receive the privilege to dine at Trump's estate in Mar-a-Lago. With the man himself.

Here, take a look at some of these chef-d'œuvres.

SELECTED MEME OF THE DAY

BITE-SIZED NEWS

• South Korean Officials Freeze $92M Worth of Crypto Linked to Terra Ecosystem. A low hanging forbidden fruit.
• BlockFi Asks the Court for Permission to Return Customer Funds. What's the magic word?
• FTX Sam Bankman-Fried Reportedly Agreed to Be Extradited to the United States. Country roads... Take me... To the custody?