2. Euro zone inflations keeps surging along a taming energy crisis

The Facts:

• The euro zone inflation hit another record high of 9.1% in August, 0.1% above expectations of a Reuters poll.
• The boost in inflation is primarily resulting from soaring food and energy prices.
• Energy came in with the highest YoY inflation rate at 38.3%, slightly down from 39.6% in July.
• While the largest euro zone economy Germany saw increasing inflation rates of 8.8%, the highest level in almost 50 years, Spanish (10.3%) and French (6.5%) inflation slowed compared to July.

Why it’s important:

• A significant rate hike is now more likely despite looming elections in Italy, as the new inflation report comes while the ECB debates the size of next week’s rate hike.
• Meanwhile, Europe is still fighting with Russia, its largest energy supplier, dropping gas exports sharply resulting in energy prices hitting unprecedented territories in recent weeks.
• However, Europe’s benchmark power price more than halved within three days this week as the European Commission confirmed various emergency measures to address the energy crisis.
• Despite Europe likely facing a rather difficult winter as a result of the current issues related to energy, the economic pain forcing adjustments will likely yield more independence as a more diversified energy mix will eventually disarms Russia’s energy weapon.

3. Arbitrium’s Nitro upgrade launches successfully

The Facts:

• Optmistic rollup Arbitrum successfully completed its highly anticipated Nitro upgrade on Wednesday.
• Arbitrum is the most adopted L2 rollup of Ethereum despite not having a token with currently $2.89b TVL and 3.7m transactions within the last 30 days, followed by competing optimistic rollup Optimism.
• The Nitro upgrade improves transaction speed, lowers fees, and improves user experience for developers building applications.

Why it’s important:

• With the Nitro migration now in place, significant calldata compression is already resulting in 1000-2000 L2 transactions per batch compared to 100-200 prior.
• By that, transactions costs are now reduced to a level of $0.02, similar to Optimism’s current transaction costs.
• Arbitrum, like any other rollup, still has to improve their degree of decentralization by opening up more addresses to submit fraud proofs and by decentralizing their sequencer.
• Previously, Arbitrum’s Odyssey, an adoption campaign that likely leads to the release of Arbitrum’s native platform token, was paused due to high demand and corresponding scaling issues.
• The Odyssey is now expected to continue following the successful migration.

In other news

• CeFi platform Celsius seeks to return $50m to custody clients (via CoinDesk)
• Michael Saylor accused of tax evasion (via Financial Times)
• Crypto casino Stake.com sued for $400m (via Bitcoinist)
• Decentralized NFT marketplace Sudoswap confims airdrop (via Twitter)
• Crypto.com backs out of $495m UEFA CL sponsorship (via SportBusiness)
• Mt. Gox claims approaches final steps before repaying creditors (Cointelegraph)
• Iran approves crypto for imports and trade (via Bitcoin.com)