DAO to Earth

Chart of the Day

After several weeks of green, the overall crypto market is currently experiencing a pullback. BTC and ETH are leading the way on this, with the prices of these two top cryptocurrencies by market cap seeing double-digit percentage drops in the past week. Despite a brief recovery over the weekend, BTC continues to drift south of the $60k mark as many are anticipating low BTC trading volumes in the coming weeks in light of the impending holiday season. Investors are also warily waiting to monitor the consumers' responses to the fastest CPI increase in three decades, so that they will be better able to evaluate if the 'BTC as an inflation hedge' narrative will hold up.

Unfortunately, ETH is mirroring BTC's post-weekend performance, as the price of ETH has just plunged 4% after buoying above the $4,300 mark over the weekend. However, there is a silver lining for ETH. A total of 972,624 ETH, worth around $4 billion, has been burnt since the recent EIP 1559 upgrade, and the daily burn rate has only been steadily increasing. Because of this, some analysts expect ETH to follow the same trajectory that BTC took off on during the 2017 cycle.

Talk of the Town

"ConstitutionDAO" is a term that is currently trending within the Crypto Twitter community, and for good reasons. For some context, ConstitutionDAO is a collective that kickstarted a $40 million decentralized fund-raising initiative to bid on an extremely rare copy of the U.S. Constitution. However, they ultimately failed to gain access to said rare copy, losing in the auction to Citadel's CEO, Kenneth Griffin.

The DAO now faces the Herculean task of refunding all the money — including the gas fees spent, which is approximated to be around 200 ETH, or $860k according to the latest spot price — to their decentralized web of donors. This sparked a lot of anger amongst the Ethereum community with regard to the ever-rising ETH gas fees, with influential figures like Su Zhu, the CEO of Three Arrows, even going on record to accuse Ethereum of abandoning their users. On the refund front, several options and processes are currently being discussed. However, the feasibility of said solutions remains to be seen, especially due to the fact that many donors are non-crypto natives.