First Mover Americas: Friend.tech Drives Up Coinbase’s Base Blockchain Activity

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Coinbase’s layer 2 blockchain, Base, which launched in early August, has seen its daily transactions hit an all-time high, according to data from IntoTheBlock. Base saw 1.88 million transactions on Thursday, higher than layer 2 rivals Arbitrum and Optimism combined, which saw 780,000 and 370,000, respectively. “Interestingly, it is not decentralized finance (DeFi) applications nor non-fungible token (NFT) marketplaces driving the surge in Base's activity. Instead, a significant portion of usage can be attributed to a new social application, FriendTech,” said Lucas Outumuro, head of research at IntoTheBlock. Decentralized social network platform Friend.tech is built on Base and calls itself “the marketplace for your friends.” The platform saw increased usage over the last week, with its daily transactions also reaching an all-time high. Friend.tech’s transactions reached 529,000.

The sale of tokens held by bankrupt crypto exchange FTX will not result in a market shock due to several mitigating factors, Coinbase (COIN) said in a research report Thursday. For a start, the sale of tokens won’t flood the market because liquidations are limited to $50 million per week in the first phase and then increase to $100 million in the following weeks, the report said. Coinbase notes that committees representing FTX debtors need to approve a permanent increase to a maximum of $200 million a week. According to a recent court filing, the crypto exchange holds about $1.16 billion in solana (SOL), $560 million in bitcoin (BTC), $192 million in ether (ETH) and a further $1.49 billion in other tokens. It can now sell and invest these holdings to pay back creditors, the court ruled last week.

The U.S. Department of Justice thinks FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried’s proposed jury questions are “unnecessarily intrusive” and may be intended to support his defense. Bankman-Fried and the DOJ both proposed voir dire questions earlier this week, ranging from standard queries about whether potential jurors were familiar with the case to more specific questions about whether they knew people with ADHD. These questions will help the prosecutor and defense determine a fair and impartial jury. Several of Bankman-Fried’s proposed questions are “intrusive,” prosecutors wrote in the letter to Judge Lewis Kaplan of the Southern District of New York. They called out questions that probed potential jurors’ opinions toward FTX, the allegedly fraudulent crypto exchange that collapsed in spectacular fashion last November.