The Power of Crypto Collaborations: Tech, Finance and Creativity

The third and final testnet merge before the Ethereum blockchain moves to proof-of-stake (PoS) from proof-of-work (PoW) has successfully been completed.

The network transitioned to proof-of-stake (PoS) when the Terminal Total Difficulty (TTD) exceeded 10,790,000. That occurred around 1:45 UTC.

The testnet merge brings the project closer to Ethereum's mainnet upgrade. Two previous testnet merges, Ropsten and Sepolia, were hugely successful. It boosted the Ethereum community's confidence in the mainnet Merge, which is scheduled for later this year.

Major crypto exchange Binance has partnered with Mastercard to launch a prepaid card for the residents of Argentina.

In a Thursday message, Binance stated the card is going to let its clients in Argentina use Bitcoin (BTC), BNB and other cryptocurrencies to make purchases and ATM withdrawals in fiat everywhere Mastercard is accepted, which is approximately 90 million merchants globally and online. Also, Argentine cardholders can earn up to 8% back in cryptocurrency from specific buys.

According to Binance, the curtain-raiser for the card was part of the company's active campaign to elevate the global adoption of cryptocurrency. Residents of Argentina will be the first in the region to access the cards.

BlackRock Inc. is partnering with Coinbase Global Inc. to streamline managing and trading Bitcoin for institutional investors. Users of Aladdin, BlackRock's institutional investment management platform, will receive crypto trading, prime brokerage and reporting capabilities if they sign up for Coinbase Prime, an institutional trading solution. Right now, around 13,000 clients use Coinbase Prime.

On Tuesday, Coinbase published a report with the largest quarterly net loss since its listing on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange in April 2021. Although, prices have stabilized recently, and the company struck a deal with BlackRock.

Coinbase named Q2 a "tough quarter" with $802.6 million in revenue, which shows a 45.1% drop from the prior quarter and a shocking 153.1% drop from the prior-year quarter. Its $1.1 billion net loss was mainly driven by $446 million in non-cash impairment charges caused by lower crypto asset prices in Q2.

Nevertheless, Coinbase continues to press ahead toward its goal of being a one-stop shop for crypto trading. Last week, it announced a partnership with the world's largest asset manager, BlackRock.

With the new integration, Reddit users will be able to purchase Ether from supported Reddit apps via FTX's payment and exchange infrastructure platform FTX Pay.

FTX and Reddit announced their intention to incorporate Reddit's Community Points in the United States, the European Union, Australia and other markets. Reddit Community Points are a measure of reputation in communities or subreddits, allowing users to own a piece of their favorite communities.

The partnership features the integration of FTX Pay as a payment and crypto exchange solution to create new perks for Reddit Community Points.

Samsung partners with Theta Labs to run an NFT ecosystem for the latest series of Galaxy phones. According to the company's statement, consumer experience innovations can be promoted through the NFT ecosystem by linking the virtual world through benefits in the real world like discounts and an authentication tool.

Using the ThetaPass technology, 100,000 NFT plus NFT owners can utilize Theta NFT both online and offline. Theta will expand retail and e-commerce stores, as well as utility to increase the perks for owners of Samsung NFT.

Earlier, Theta Networks and Samsung collaborated on NFT digital collectibles celebrating the Galaxy S22 and S8 Tablet launch.

Coca-Cola launches a new NFT collection on "International Friendship Day" on the Polygon Network.

According to the statement, Coca-Cola recently airdropped unique non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to people holding any of the 4,000 NFTs released by the brand since July 2021. The bubbles inside a Coke bottle significantly inspire the design of these new NFTs.

Total of 4,000 NFTs have been published on the Polygon (MATIC) blockchain by Coca-Cola. You can find all these collections on the OpenSea Marketplace.

The 1inch Network unites decentralized protocols whose synergy enables the most lucrative, fastest, and protected operations in the DeFi space.

The 1inch Network's first protocol is a decentralized exchange (DEX) aggregator that searches deals across multiple liquidity sources, offering users better rates than individual exchanges. The 1inch Aggregation Protocol contains the Pathfinder algorithm for locating the best paths across over 240+ liquidity sources on Ethereum, Avalanche, Polygon, BNB Chain, Fantom and other blockchains. In two years, the 1inch DEX aggregator has gained 1M users.

The 1inch Network's governance token 1INCH is used to vote on protocol parameters under the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) model.

Sergej Kunz and Anton Bukov founded The 1inch Network during the ETHGlobal New York hackathon in May 2019. Before 1inch, Sergej Kunz worked as a developer at Commerce Connector, Herzog, and Mimacom consultancy, then at Porsche in DevOps and cybersecurity.

Anton Bukov has been working in software development for the last 20 years and on decentralized finance (DeFi) - for over five years in numerous projects, including gDAI.io and NEAR Protocol.

1inch Network is planning to expand its presence in the Asian DeFi market. Recently, it integrated with South Korea's most popular metaverse blockchain Klaytn, providing users access to the 1inch Limit Order Protocol v2, KokonutSwap, KlaySwap, Klap and ClaimSwap.