The Great Dwebate: Polymarket bettors had an extra screen to keep an eye on during Tuesday's debate.

It was entertaining enough to tune into Tuesday night's U.S. presidential debate between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.

In this week's issue of The Procotol, we've got the crypto angle on Tuesday's presidential debate – just as weird and ridiculous as you might imagine.

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Ethereum Foundation's shrinking wallet.

Friend.Tech in low places.

Coinbase's Base relies on special formula to vault toward top of Ethereum layer-2 rankings. (Spoiler alert: It ain't the tech.)

Nearly $50 million of blockchain project fundraisings.

Tether, flush with cash, expands global empire.

Top picks from the past week's Protocol Village column: Livepeer, Polygon Labs, Tron, Tether, Snapshot Labs, Starknet, Fractal Bitcoin.

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Polymarket bettors had an extra screen to keep an eye on during Tuesday's debate. (Sam Reynolds)

GREAT DWEBATE: It was entertaining enough to tune into Tuesday night's U.S. presidential debate between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. But it was nearly as rollicking just monitoring the action on prediction-betting site Polymarket and all the memecoins popping up on the token launchpad Pump.fun. Over the course of the debate, the Polymarket odds clearly drifted toward the conclusion that Harris was winning the tête-à-tête. "Trump just getting destroyed," the crypto-friendly money manager and former Trump White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci wrote on X roughly 40 minutes into the face-off, attaching a Polymarket screenshot.

But there were also plenty of side bets at stake – and scads of memecoins launched including DWEBATE, DOMALA TRUMPIS, PEPEDENTIAL DEBATES and WW3, which sprung up to satirize the entire spectacle, or to document some of the more memorable zingers. (Many of the memecoin names were not remotely safe for a PG-rated blockchain tech newsletter.) Some Polymarket wagers paid off handsomely when Trump claimed – falsely, according to the Wall Street Journal – that migrants are "eating the dogs" in Springfield, Ohio. (That also sparked a few new memecoins, including EATING DOGS AND CATS.)

Anyone coming to the debate hungry for a crypto policy discussion went home hungry, for what it's worth: There wasn't a single mention of Bitcoin or digital assets. That didn't stop crypto twitterati from sounding off.

At least 12 memecoins named "Run spot run" sprung up on Pump.fun after a comment during Tuesday's debate by former President Donald Trump. (Pump.fun)

ALSO:

The Ethereum Foundation, the main non-profit organization supporting the Ethereum blockchain, is set to release an updated financial report “soon,” according to a top official who also revealed that the organization's main Ethereum wallet currently holds about $650 million. Justin Drake, a prominent researcher at the Ethereum Foundation (EF), wrote during a typed ask-me-anything – on an Ethereum subreddit under the handle "bobthesponge1" – that the EF spends roughly $100 million per year and currently has roughly a 10-year runway, depending on the price of ether (ETH), the blockchain’s native token. The last time the EF released insights on its financial holdings was in March 2022, at which point the EF treasury reported a balance of about $1.6 billion. That included $1.3 billion of ETH and about $11 million of "other crypto."

Friend.Tech, the Web3 social network that turned heads as a crypto sensation when it launched last year on Coinbase's Ethereum layer-2 network, Base, shared on Sept. 8 that it was transferring the ownership of its smart contracts to an Ethereum null address, permanently removing developers' control over them.

Coinbase Layer-2 Success Shows Power of Marketing Over Cutting-Edge Tech

A recent chart from on-chain data provider Token Terminal shows the network accelerating in recent months while other layer 2s were experiencing a dropoff. (Token Terminal)

Among the rapidly growing ranks of layer-2 blockchains built atop Ethereum, the U.S. crypto exchange Coinbase's own version, Base, hardly stands out as a technological pioneer. The entire project was built and launched last year using code borrowed from another team – Optimism, with its OP Stack framework for easily spinning up new layer-2 networks.

That's partly why it's so remarkable that Base has shot to the No. 2 spot on the key industry leaderboard L2Beat, with an 18% market share of 74 active layer-2 networks. Top-ranked Arbitrum's Arbitrum One dominates with a 40% share, but Base has shot past older, competing projects from teams with hard-fought reputations for cutting-edge development, including Starknet, Polygon, even Optimism itself.

But it turns out that the race for blockchain supremacy, just