Cryptocurrency
More than one in three of the 535 senators and representatives in the U.S.
Congress showed up to the new session with FTX baggage, having received campaign support from one of the senior executives of the fraud-ridden crypto giant, according to the latest report by CoinDesk's Jesse Hamilton, Cheyenne Ligon and Elizabeth Napolitano.
Bitcoin maintains strength at $21,300.
Roughly flat for the day but up more than 23% over the past seven days. The driving force behind the upturn remains unclear, although a number of indicators offer at least a partial explanation.
Blockchain
Polygon Completes Hard Fork to Reduce Gas Fee Spikes, Disruptive Reorgs
The software upgrade to the Ethereum-scaling project went live on Tuesday and included two proposals from December that Polygon validator teams voted to approve.
The software upgrade occurred at 10:45 UTC (5:45 a.m. ET) on Tuesday, according to a tweet from Polygon Labs, the lead company behind the project.
Web3
Masa Finance launches soulbound Web3 identity protocol for Ethereum
Masa Finance has launched the first soulbound identity protocol for the Ethereum mainnet, according to a Jan. 17 press release shared with Cointelegraph. The protocol will allow for standardized soulbound tokens to be minted on Ethereum for Know Your Customer verification, credit scores and other use cases.
Soulbound tokens are tokens that cannot be transferred from one wallet to another. The concept was popularized via a blog post from Vitalik Buterin, who argued that these tokens could be used to signify governance rights for decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols or to prove that a person has attended an event.
According to the developers, the soulbound credit score system uses over 10,000 data points to determine a Web3 user’s creditworthiness.