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The US Treasury is pushing for crypto regulation and a federal court has ruled that the CFTC can legally sue a DAO by posting on its governance forum. The crypto crackdown has officially begun.

Binance wants to train global law enforcement agencies on how to stop crypto crime, daily active users on Optimism are trending upwards, and our Research team looks into the Sei Network.

This is the Delphi Daily. Let’s dive in.

🚨 In Case You Missed It

Binance is launching a program to train global law enforcement agencies on how to stop crypto crime.
A regulatory panel by the US Treasury recommends that Congress pass legislation to address risks posed by crypto.
A federal court rules that the CFTC can legally sue Ooki DAO members by posting the complaint on its governance forum.
Mastercard is launching a tool to help banks assess the risk of crime associated with crypto merchants on its network.
Sushi community members vote to elect Jared Grey as the new CEO or Head Chef. Jared has previously worked at EONS and Bitfineon.

📊 Optimism Adoption And Stickiness On The Rise

Optimism, a layer-2 scaling solution for Ethereum, has seen more than a 51% increase in daily active users (DAU) since August. DAUs are measured as the number of unique addresses that interact with the network each day.
Optimism has also seen an increase in new users. The L2 saw an average of 1.9k new users per day over the first 20 days of September. This increased to an average of 4.1k new users per day over the final 10 days of September and the start of October.
This rise in DAUs and new users can most likely be attributed to the launch of Optimism Quests on Sept 20th.
The program rewards users with NFTs for completing tasks that involve interacting with the most popular apps on Optimism. Some users have speculated that earning enough NFTs will make them eligible for a future airdrop.
The Stickiness Ratio has also trended upward since late August, climbing from a low of 3.8% on Aug 22nd to 11.9% today.
The Stickiness Ratio is calculated as the ratio of DAUs to monthly active users. A higher Stickiness Ratio signifies consistent usage from users that frequently return to transact on the L2.
For more on Optimism, Delphi members can read our Delphi Pro report here.

⚡ Sei Network: DeFi-Optimized Cosmos Chain

When building blockchains, we generally try to bucket them into two distinct boxes: general purpose or app chain. General purpose chains are for permissionless innovation and app chains are for permissioned and specific use cases.
Sei is an upcoming Cosmos chain aiming to be a “DeFi-optimized” layer 1. What does that mean? It means making fundamental changes (and tradeoffs) to the base layer that will allow DeFi applications to thrive.
These include a built-in order matching engine, sub-second finality, parallelization of orders, single block order execution, and more. All of these customizations are done at the base layer.
To be clear, Sei is not a DEX, it is a layer 1 optimized for DeFi. It is not a “pure” app chain like THORChain that focuses solely on cross-chain swaps. But it is built for applications like DEXs, perps, and options to build on top.

To understand why you may want to make these changes at the base layer, we can look to Serum and Solana.
Solana is a general purpose layer 1 advertised as putting NASDAQ on-chain, targeting 400ms block times with extremely high throughput. The main thesis of Solana is that order book exchanges will eventually take over AMMs, and the on-chain metrics support it.
Serum, an order book application built on top of Solana, is the most used entity that accounts for ~1/3 of Solana program executions. Serum is the “order book layer” on Solana for projects like Mango Markets, Zeta, Atrix, and more to tap into.

However, there are some drawbacks to this architecture. Most notably, since Solana is a general-purpose chain, Serum (and the apps built on top) are constantly competing for resources with other apps.
Activities unrelated to Serum, like gaming and minting NFTs, can drive congestion on the chain and, as we have seen a few times, cause the chain to halt.
Sei “trims the fat” and strips out all non-DeFi activities from its chain. Sei is if Serum was its own L1; making specific tradeoffs so that the base layer is optimized for DeFi and giving these apps an “unfair advantage” vs. non-DeFi ones.
For more on Sei Network, Delphi members can read our Delphi Pro report here.

🐣 Notable Tweets

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— Viktor DeFi 🛡 (@ViktorDefi) Oct 3, 2022

Crypto Data Landscape

My take on the Crypto Data Landscape 2022
… progress, new products and my predictions, updated from my prev one 1y+ ago

A 🧵 👇 …

— ZK Zhao (@zk7hao) Oct 2, 2022