The Block: Three of the biggest crypto stories to look out for this week: Neon Labs, the Fed and more

Several key events are happening this week, all of which could be the start of important crypto trends to keep an eye on as they continue to develop heading into 2023.

Crypto markets have seen a tight correlation to traditional markets, which has the Federal Reserve in focus this week.

Decentralized finance (DeFi) is seeing a new trend pop up in revenue sharing, a controversial topic pertaining to token security classification. Solana also has a new protocol going live that could open up its ecosystem to a host of new protocols, users, and applications.

Macro events It’s an extremely busy week of the year for financial markets after a couple of weeks off from any major news from the Fed.

The most important event this week is the U.S. Federal Reserve's interest rate decision, which is projected at a 50bps increase. Selini Capital CIO Jordi Alexander tweeted in November that a 50bps increase is almost a lock. There’s still a lot of contagion to work through in crypto, but the macro environment has improved since mid-year, Jordi said in a separate tweet.

The main Fed press conference occurs on Wednesday at 2:30 p.m. EST. FOMC economic projections and the interest rate decision will come out 30 minutes prior to the conference.

Uniswap fee switch governance voting begins The largest decentralized exchange (DEX) by fees Uniswap is opening up voting to turn on its “fee switch” this week.

The goal of the fee switch is to increase Uniswap’s trading volume, liquidity and ecosystem sustainability via fee generation. The additional accrued fees will go to the Uniswap treasury, and not be distributed to users. The initial pilot program would be live for 120 days.

If passed, Uniswap will begin the pilot program and will implement a 10% fee on three of its largest trading pools.

Serious discussions around the fee switch proposal began in July. Uniswap’s decision on this proposal “will set precedent for the whole industry,” it wrote in its initial proposal. Rival DEXs such as Sushiswap began discussions around a new proposal to direct fees to users who stake sushi.

The pilot program will be used to evaluate the impact of turning on the fee switch and how it impacts trade execution for the DEX.

Neon Labs mainnet is going live Developer tooling platform Neon Labs is launching its mainnet on Monday, which will allow Ethereum applications to start building on Solana.

Neon Labs is the first Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) for Solana and will have its own native token neon. The neon token will be used to pay transactions and participate in governance. Users will be able to use Neon with the popular crypto wallet Metamask.

Neon Labs claims Ethereum-based applications will have access to use Solana for scalability and tap into its liquidity without changing any code. Neon Labs is also developing full compatibility between Ethereum and Solana applications, but a date for this release has not been announced. For now, Ethereum-based developers will be able to build on the network, but not compose with native Solana applications.

Notable protocols such as Aave and Curve will launch on Neon’s EVM post-mainnet launch.

“Neon EVM unites the best of two worlds, Ethereum and Solana, and puts to rest the Ethereum killer narrative once and for all,” said Neon Labs CEO and Founder Marina Guryeva.

EVM is the most popular crypto software that allows developers to build and run decentralized applications. EVM-compatibility allows applications to build or port over to different chains. This has been a barrier to entry between Ethereum and Solana developers and ecosystems.

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