Dear DeFi enthusiasts,

Welcome to EIP-1559 week! After months of anticipation, the Ethereum Improvement Proposal is finally set to go live on the mainnet this week on August 5th, Taiwan time! Ether has also lived up to expectations, leading a surge in DeFi tokens for 12 to 13 consecutive days. Will Ethereum be the main driver of the second half of this bull market? Stay tuned for this week's updates.

Headlines for this week include: Happy Birthday Ethereum! The London hard fork upgrade countdown is six days away, what optimizations are included? Uniswap Labs discusses the possibility of providing liquidity with Robinhood; Goldman Sachs submits DeFi ETF registration application to the US SEC; Synthetix officially launches synthetic asset trading on Optimistic Ethereum L2 solution; Andre Cronje introduces a new project, Iron Bank Fixed Forex, with a Fair Launch approach.

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Highlighted opinions this week include: How did Aave founder Stani Kulechov compare AAVE to HSBC, JPM, and APPLE? Binance founder Changpeng Zhao refutes reporters, stating he has no plans to step down, just not insisting on staying? Also, Ethhub co-founder Anthony Sassano issues a warning as the NFT phenomenon reminds him of past nightmares?

The Ethereum network is set to undergo the London Hard Fork upgrade at block height 12,965,000, scheduled for August 5, 2021. This network upgrade includes five Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs). The most significant change in this upgrade is EIP-1559, which will adjust the current Ethereum mainnet (Eth1) miner fee mechanism by introducing a base fee. The base fee will automatically adjust the gas price required for on-chain operations based on the usage of Ethereum block space, thereby assisting wallet service providers and users in estimating operation costs conveniently.

Ashleigh Schap, Growth Lead at Uniswap Labs, stated at an Ethereum-themed conference in Paris last week that Uniswap Labs has held discussions with Robinhood to explore the opportunity of jointly providing liquidity on their platforms.

The decentralized synthetic asset protocol Synthetix has officially launched synthetic asset trading on the Optimistic Ethereum layer 2 scaling solution, initially supporting sUSD, sETH, sBTC, and sLINK with price feeds provided by Chainlink, and will upgrade to support more functionalities in the coming weeks.

Andre Cronje has published a blog detailing his new DeFi project, Iron Bank Fixed Forex, managed by veIBFF token holders. Fixed Forex allows users to mint and exchange various stablecoins pegged to fiat currencies by providing collateral to the Iron Bank. It stabilizes exchange rates through integrations with Curve Finance, SushiSwap, and DODO.

Goldman Sachs has submitted an application to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for an exchange-traded fund (ETF) named the "Goldman Sachs Innovate DeFi and Blockchain Equity ETF," which indicates that the ETF will invest at least 80% of its assets in securities, depositary receipts, and stocks included in the Solactive index related to decentralized finance and blockchain, aiming to invest in companies aligned with the implementation of blockchain technology and financial digitization.

During PayPal's second-quarter investor meeting, CEO Dan Schulman announced that PayPal will launch a wallet app with cryptocurrency support. The initial version is "code complete," with plans for a full rollout in the United States in the coming months.

E-commerce giant Shopify has enabled platform merchants to directly sell NFTs through their stores, whereas previously, platform merchants could only sell NFTs on third-party marketplaces. The initial batch of Shopify merchants offering NFT sales includes the NBA Chicago Bulls.

A recent development in the U.S. is the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Bill, which brings new concerns regarding "crypto taxation": a wider range of entities to be regulated, extensive KYC requirements, and impacts on non-custodial wallet providers and miners.

Aave Founder Stani Kulechov: HSBC has 220,000 employees, AAVE has…

Binance Founder Changpeng Zhao: We have no immediate plans, but I would love for someone to take over as Binance CEO

Ethhub Co-Founder Anthony Sassano: The NFT craze reminds me of the 2017 ICOs

According to Token Terminal data, in the past 30 days, Axie Infinity's protocol revenue reached $205 million, which is 7.5 times the total revenue sum of ranks 2-10 across the entire network.

Current exchange cryptocurrency reserve data shows a more drastic outflow of Ethereum (interpreted as moving into general HODL wallets) compared to Bitcoin. This indicates a stronger selling pressure of Ethereum within exchanges relative to Bitcoin.

According to Glassnode data, there has been a significant increase in active Bitcoin users in recent days. The last time such an increase occurred was in July 2020. Additionally, according to CryptoQuant data, the largest exchange net outflow in five years occurred on July 28.

Project Development 3, Institutional Attitude 5, Regulatory Attitude 3, On-Chain Data 5

The Nasduck Index is a long and short indicator compiled based on weekly cryptocurrency news and data analysis, aiming to provide a simple forecast for the future trends of the cryptocurrency & DeFi markets. A score of 1 indicates a bearish sentiment, signaling an impending bear market; a score of 5 indicates a bullish sentiment, suggesting a bull market ahead. The Nasduck Index is derived from the average of weekly reference data from project development, financial institutions' attitudes, regulatory agencies, and on-chain data analysis. (Note: Optimistic news tends to dominate, making the Nasduck Index more suitable for comparison between the past and future, rather than considering any score above 3 as bullish for the future.)

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