In this week’s issue of The Protocol, our newsletter on blockchain tech, we’re covering the Optimism’s $42.5M token pledge to Kraken, crypto VC funding, grants for Bitcoin open-source developers, and Polymarket’s (negligible) impact on Polygon’s bottom line.

Chainlink hopes the new programming environment, under the acronym “CRE,” will be as important for Web3 as Cobol and JavaScript languages, which were important for automating finance and bringing it to the internet.