The Weekly Wrap: NFT licensing frameworks, Euro zone inflation, Arbitrum Nitro

1. a16z announces licensing framework for NFTs

The Facts:

• On Wednesday, the crypto unit of a16z released six copyright licensing frameworks called “Can’t be evil” inspired by Creative Commons.
• The free set of licenses aims to help the NFT sector to unleash its “economic potential” by supporting NFT creators to protect and release their Intellectual Property (IP) rights and granting NFT holders enforceable and accessible rights.
• With that, a16z wants to “democratize access to high quality licenses and encourage standardization across the web3 industry”.
• The six different licensing options vary in degrees of freedom and can be integrated on the NFT smart contract level via the corresponding Github reference.

Why it’s important:

• With NFTs being a new asset class enabled by permissionless blockchain technology, it makes perfect sense to apply tailor-made licenses to map their unique properties and therefore open the door to an industry standard.
• Moreover, the new licensing framework brings relief for both creators and buyers after vague IP rights continuously caused confusion since every project uses a different approach licensing their NFTs.
• For instance, Moonbirds of PROOF Collective recently took the commercial rights of their holders by moving to a CC0 license.
• Currently, most of the available open source licenses are based on U.S. law related to copyright and do not automatically grant rights to reproduce, adapt or even publicly display the purchased artwork.

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)

Source: (Data as of September 1, 2022) Glassnode, (Chart) Bitcoin Suisse Research