
Welcome to Issue 20 of Popular Crypto, a newsletter about the mainstream products and services taking crypto to the masses.
In this issue:
- Zap lets merchants take USD over the Lightning Network
- Handshake goes live allowing top-level decentralized domain ownership (and enabling decentralized income)
- How to stream social money using Roll & Sablier
- PoolTogether announces a daily no-loss USDC prize
We also cover Maple Loans, a protocol taking a community-based approach to undercollateralized crypto loans.
All that and more in this week’s issue. But first, here’s some…
🚀 Updates From Nomics
- #1 Upgrades for Bit-Z, EXX, KKCoin, BKex, Digifinex & CoinAll: This week, crypto exchange Bit-Z was upgraded to include derivatives markets, and EXX, KKCoin, BKex, Digifinex, and CoinAll were all upgraded to “C” Transparency Ratings. This means that each now provides us with recent candle data, which we’ve made available on Nomics.com and via our market data API. To learn more about our crypto exchange rating system, check out the following essay.
- #2 Ethereum’s Untold History & Defying Future: Flippening episode #69, Ethereum’s Untold History & Defying Future, is live on our blog. This time, we’re joined by Camila Russo, founder of The Defiant, a daily newsletter focused on decentralized finance or DeFi. We discuss her upcoming book on the history of Ethereum (ETH) and how DeFi has become the network’s most promising use case.

- #3 HitBTC IOU Markets Removed From Tezos Trade History at the Request of Reddit Community: In response to user feedback that HitBTC IOUs were skewing historical price data for Tezos (XTZ), Nomics decided to exclude HitBTC markets from XTZ pricing. For more on the decision – and why excluding these markets was the “clearest and cleanest approach” – read the Reddit post by Nomics CTO Nick Gauthier.
Meanwhile, if you have feedback for Nomics, visit any page on our site and click the Feedback tab, located on the right-hand side.

- #4 Nomics CEO Clay Collins Moderates the Traditional Asset Tokenization Panel at 0xpo: At 2:05pm PST today (February 7th) Nomics CEO Clay Collins will be moderating the Tokenizing Traditional Assets panel at 0xpo, a San Francisco conference hosted by the 0x (ZRX) Core team. The panel will feature Hart Lambur (UMA), Josh Stein (Harbor), and Michael Oved (Airswap). To learn more about security tokens, check out our 3-part documentary, Tokenize the World.
And now, let’s see what the cryptocurrency world has brought us this week.
Clay Collins
Nomics Co-Founder
