This Week in Custody is a newsletter covering technical and narrative developments in digital asset custody written for wallet engineers, digital asset operators, and security engineers.
Quick Links
Networks & News
NEAR launches the Chain Signatures protocol that allows an on-chain NEAR account to authorize transactions on other blockchains. The protocol uses Eigenlayer to bootstrap a threshold signing network to use MPC protocols to jointly compute signatures for other chains.
The Dencun hard fork is successful on Ethereum. Several L2s have started to take advantage of the protocol changes to take advantage of substantially lower gas prices. Also see how various on-chain actions cost across L2s and mainnet. Since blobs are cheaper than calldata, users have started to launch inscriptions using blobs called blobscriptions.
Vitalik writes about what comes after blobs on Ethereum.
Kraken is launching a new custody service for institutional investors called Kraken Custody.
Coinbase is using Base to store client and corporate USDC balances.
AUM in tokenized government securities is now greater than $1B.
BlackRock’s on-chain BUIDL fund launches.
Solana continues to have its moment with several days of higher volume than Ethereum DEXs. Phantom reaches 4M MAU.
OKX is suspending USDT trading pairs in Europe.
Utila raises 11.5M.
El Salvador’s government has its own cold storage wallet within its border.
Revolut partners with MetaMask for Revolut Ramp.
Robinhood Wallet adds Aribtrum for swaps. Their crypto wallet is now available on Android.
Casa launches an inheritance product globally for BTC, ETH, and stablecoins.
It’s really hard to keep up with every new Bitcoin L2, but thankfully there is new dashboard to help track development.
Guides
Fireblocks research on transaction approval policies.
Paradigm shared an excellent breakdown on Ethereum’s state growth.
EIP-4844 explained by Finematics.
Blobscan is an explorer for EIP-4844 blobs.
Bitcoin Magazine post comparing Multisig, Shamir’s Secret Sharing, and MPC.
Nice guide on how to build on-chain non-custodial asset management tools using Safe.
Tools & Software
Coinbase launches Smart Wallet. Worth a try! It’s a smart contract wallet that uses PassKeys for authn.
Coinbase open sources Microscope to help label blockchain addresses.
Trail of Bits releases a tool called AttackNet that uses chaos testing to find bugs in blockchain nodes.
Worldcoin open sources some of the Orb software.
Security
In the last issue, we covered a malicious Exodus wallet appearing on the Canonical Snap store. The issue is not fully resolved as Canonical Snap continues to have a problem with malicious wallet programs.
Remilia’s hot wallet and multi-signature treasury were drained.
Thanks for reading!