Layer 1 and Layer 2s

• - NEAR Protocol launched Nightshade 2.0, a major upgrade to its sharding design, including stateless validation, improved single-shard performance, and capacity for more shards. NEAR currently has 6 shards and targets 10 by the end of 2024
• - Grayscale launched Grayscale Avalanche Trust for accredited investors. Franklin Templeton also launched its tokenized money market fund on Avalanche, its fourth chain after Stellar, Polygon and Arbitrum.
• - Optimism disabled permissionless fraud proof released a week ago after uncovering vulnerabilities. The community proposed a hard fork named "Granite", which is expected to be implemented on September 10th to address the issues.
• - Babylon launched Bitcoin Staking Mainnet Phase-1 and hit the 1,000 BTC staking cap in less than 4 hours with approximately $3.2 million spent on transaction fees.
• - Gravity launched Alpha Mainnet, a PoS chain abstraction Layer 1 with focus to fully integrate Galxe ecosystem, gas abstraction feature and secured by G token.
• - Status partnered with Linea to launch zkEVM L2 on top of Ethereum together with SNT staking to incentivise engagement and reward long-term commitment. The chain will be the backbone of the Status ecosystem, driving web3 SocialFi and GameFi initiatives.
• - Clearpool introduced Ozean, a new Ethereum L2 powered by Optimism and Caldera. The L2 will focus on RWA integration in a complaint and user-friendly manner. CPOOL will govern both Clearpool and Ozean, earning rewards from L2 sequencer, yield from staked USDX treasuries and earning enhanced yield on ozUSD.
• - Sonic Labs announced the Sonic Boom bounty program where Gems (points that entitle for up to 71 million S airdrop) will be given to 30 winning projects.
• - Tether's native USDT is live on Aptos blockchain.

  Dapps

• - MakerDAO announced upgrade of DAI to NewStable and MKR to NewGovToken will be optional and revertible.
• - Drift launched its prediction market, BET, on Solana. It features the U.S. Presidential election currently and plans to expand the market categories to economic data, sports, crypto and culture.
• - Fetch.ai launched The Innovation Lab in San Francisco to incubate and accelerate AI agent solutions leveraging Fetch.ai's tech stack.
• - Paraswap launched ParaSwap Delta, an intent-based trading protocol which has no gas fees and front-running attacks.
• - Jupiter introduced Jupiter Lock, an open source, zero fees and audited tool for projects to release their tokens over-time.