Circle To Let Merchants Pay For Customers’ Gas Fees With Web3 Wallet Upgrade
The Web3 programmable crypto wallet from USDC stablecoin issuer Circle Internet Financial was updated on Thursday to enable businesses to assume responsibility for covering their clients’ transaction costs.
The press release states that the new feature, Gas Station, uses the ERC-4337 paymaster to enable businesses to sponsor users’ gas costs, or the price associated with money transactions on blockchains.
The feature initially became live on the Ethereum (ETH) testnet and the Polygon (MATIC) mainnet and testnet. Later, more blockchains will be added, according to Circle.
Super-app in Southeast Asia For instance, Grab is presently testing the Gas Station feature, which allows Singaporean customers to earn rewards without using gas by using non-fungible token (NFT) vouchers from Grab’s Web3 wallet, according to a press release.
The company also introduced Thursday its Smart Contract Platform, which aims to help developers build applications faster by offering a “one-stop shop to import, explore, deploy, and manage smart contracts.” The product’s APIs are currently available on Avalanche (AVAX), Ethereum and Polygon.
Polygon Names 13 Member ‘Decentralized Governance’ Council
Polygon, a scaling solution to the Ethereum blockchain, released a proposal to create a “Polygon Protocol Council” in a push toward a more decentralized governance style, and named 13 inaugural members including officials from Coinbase and the Ethereum Foundation.
The proposal, known as PIP 29, will be “responsible for the narrow-in-scope, timelock-limited changes to system smart contracts implemented on Ethereum for existing and future Polygon protocols,” Polygon said in a press release.
According to the announcement, the council will “execute the community-led process to initiate future upgrades, including those proposed in the Frontier phase of Polygon 2.0.”
The committee will consist of members from the wider blockchain community. If these members want to execute changes to the Polygon blockchain, they will have to do so through a Gnosis Safe contract.
The latest announcement is part of the Polygon 2.0 roadmap, a series of proposals and upgrades released in June that will change the blueprint of the blockchain.
Tether Freezes 32 Addresses Connected To Terrorist Groups In Israel And Ukraine
Tether, the world’s largest stablecoin issuer, has announced a freeze on 32 blockchain addresses with connections to terrorist groups in both Israel and Ukraine.
The company said it has been combatting crypto-funded crime in collaboration with Israel’s National Bureau for Counter Terror Financing (NBCTF). In total, the frozen addresses hold $873,118.34 worth of assets.
Unlike more traditional cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH), stablecoins—such as Tether’s USDT—are directly issued by centralized entities, and backed by centralized reserves of real-world assets. In practice, that means users holding stablecoins can be programmatically frozen out of their money at government request, much like traditional bank deposits.
Tether has previously used its powers to freeze millions of dollars lost to both DeFi hackers and phishing scammers.
Altogether, Tether has complied with 31 different agencies across the world from nations like the United States, Canada, Brazil, South Korea, and others to freeze over $835 million in criminal-connected crypto to date.
Following deadly attacks from Hamas against Israel earlier this month, Israeli authorities froze crypto accounts suspected of being connected to Hamas, including those on crypto exchanges like Binance.
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