Crypto && Coffee 014
- 5 minsTechnology Recap:
Bitcoin:
- Bitcoin hash rate is currently at an all-time high. Full metrics here.
Ethereum:
- This past weekend and week, developers gathered in London for ETHLondon and in Paris for ETHCC. Both entailed a major focus on scalability, privacy and the move towards ETH2.0.
- At ETHCC today, VacP2P presented an alternative to Whisper. Whisper was originally going to be part of the P2P messaging protocol within Ethereum. Vac’s Waku aims to improve upon Whisper with better usability and resources.
- StarkWare, the technology behind scaling Ethereum DEXes and more off-chain computation has announced the coming release of their open source prover and verifier this summer.
Litecoin:
- David Burkett, released his February Mimblewimble update including a Litecoin Improvement Proposal (LIP) on non-interactive transactions. He is aiming for an end of summer MW testnet launch which will include all block/transaction validation rules, basic P2P messaging, transaction pool, syncing, and the ability to mine blocks.
Other Chains:
- Lightning Network (LN) developer Joost Jager proposed a new scheme where up-front fees are paid from the receiver of a hash time locked contract (HTLC) back towards the sender of the payment.
- Discussion heats up on LN direct messages where nodes will route encrypted messages between peers without using LN payments mechanism.
- A proposal for an independent Zcash Ledger app that will support both unshielded and shielded addresses was posted to the ZF grants page.
- Decentralized exchange (DEX) DeversiFi states that with its integration of StarkWare they can see 9000 transactions per second (TPS) coming Q1 2020. Tests were performed on the Ropsten testnet where they conduct ZKP batch settlement which splits the proof into several chunks prior to submission on-chain.
- Singapore based Huobi has successfully deployed its proprietary network, Huobi Chain on its testnet.
- Electric Coin Company, who is behind Zcash, released their update on Layer-1 scaling research.
- Chainlink welcomes DeFi Money Market DAO (DMM) to their ecosystem. DMM is a blockchain-based money market backed by real-world assets and trusted off-chain data via Chainlink oracles. They currently hold $10M USD in tokenized car loans.
- Stellar Lumens backed SatoshiPay releases their 2020 outlook and work on their Solar Wallet. The Solar Wallet enables seamless purchasing, transferring and managing of assets on the Stellar network via their multi-signature design.
- Monero Outreach drops full details on Dandelion++ which aims at breaking the link to ones IP address via transactions.
- ConsenSys and EY announce formation of Baseline Protocol Initiative to make Ethereum mainnet safe and effective for enterprises.
- Steem’s Delegated Proof of Stake (DPOS) got taken over by big exchanges (Binance, Poloniex, Huobi) in collaboration with Tron - voting with users funds. The exchanges used these funds to vote in witnesses to take over governance. They powered up users funds, without consent, and now are trying to get back funds. Binance and Huobi have both backed out. More details to follow.
Mainstream Recap:
- SEC rejected the latest bid to create a bitcoin ETF from Wilshire Phoenix’s bitcoin and Treasury Bond proposal.
- Roughly half of Square’s CashApp revenue came from BTC. Full details released in their shareholder letter.
- A NSW District Court in Australia allowed Bitcoin to be used as a security.
- Researchers at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) released their new quarterly report where they focus on the future of payments infrastructure - diving into tokenized securities, central bank digital currencies (CBDC), cross-border payments and P2P innovations.
- Lloyd’s of London is backing a new policy from Coincover that protects cryptocurrency held in online wallets against theft from hacks. Full details here.
- Coinbase has now become a second-class member of the Japan Virtual Currency Exchange Association (JVCEA), which is the self-regulatory organization which was given the mandate to oversee the industry by the Financial Services Agency (FSA) in 2018.
- Messaging platform, LINE, announced its BITFRONT exchange will form the basis for a crypto trading ecosystem that will provide U.S. customers trading pairs against the U.S. dollar.
- Bitcoin and Lightning based node security company Casa, released integration with COLDCARD wallet. COLDCARD allows the private key to be stored in a secure element, air-gapped signing, and it supports the new Partially Signed Bitcoin Transactions (PSBT) which are part of BIP174.
- The U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) has added two individuals and 20 bitcoin addresses to its sanctions list.
- Bitfinex announces the removal of roughly 50 trading pairs due to low liquidity on the platform.
- Binance Global announces integration with Trukish bank Akbank. Moving forward users will be able to instantly deposit and withdraw Turkish Lira on Binance via desktop and iOS.
- Exchange Uphold is partnering with TaxBit to provide its customers with a tax liability dashboard on its user portal. Uphold and TaxBit intend to file 1099-B forms which are typically used for investments and report cost-basis rather than the 1099-K forms which most exchanges file.
- The Marshallese sovereign (SOV), which might become the first state-backed digital currency announces they will be using Algorand protocol.
- The Supreme Court of India has ruled against a decision imposed by the Reserve Bank of India to ban crypto.
This Week’s Cup of Coffee:
This week, we’re jumping up the Pacific Northwest to Portland, Oregon for Stumptown’s French Roast. This dark roast is big and smoky, but never holds a burnt flavor. With notes of nuts and malt this is a fresh cup to start the day.
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