Crypto && Coffee 023
- 5 minsTechnology Recap:
Bitcoin:
- We are now only 5 days away from the block reward halving! On the day of the halving, the number of bitcoins awarded to miners per block will drop from 12.5 to 6.25BTC.
Litecoin:
- The Litecoin Core v0.18.1 release candidate has been released. This is a new major version release which includes new features for RPC, wallet changes, various bug fixes, and performance enhancements.
Ethereum:
- Ethereum surpasses 10,000,000 blocks!
- Ethereum Foundation’s Research and Development arm releases an article on the effort on Stateless Ethereum. This article aims at providing a primer on the formal Witness Specification.
- Discussion has been heating up around EIP-1559 which is a proposal to reform the Ethereum fee market.
Other Chains:
- Bancor announced Bancor Protocol’s second major version release. This new version is planned for release in Q2 of 2020 and contains an integration with Chainlink price oracles to eliminate the risk of impermanent loss for both stable and volatile tokens.
- Matt Corallo posts on both Lightning-dev and Bitcoin-dev mailing lists about the ability for a user to use Replace-by-fee (RBF) Pinning to steal in-flight hash time locked contracts (HTLCs) which are being enforced on-chain.
- Tari, an open-source digital asset protocol that is rooted in privacy has launched their testnet. Learn more here.
- As mentioned in a previous post, Monero merged in a PR that adds Dandelion++ support. This new feature changes the way transactions are propagated to the network, making it much harder to link a transaction to an IP address. The feature will be included in the next release.
- StarkWare published the StarkEx audit report by PeckShield Inc.. This is in preparation for going live with DeversiFi on Ethereum mainnet within the month.
- Tezos teams, SmartPy and Cryptonomic, are making Chainlink natively available to all developers building on Tezos.
- MobileCoin has their first tech talk on the subject of transactions within the MobileCoin blockchain. Watch the discussion here.
- Instadapp releases full documentation on developing on their DeFi Smart Account (DSA) Platform.
- Cosmos’ Game of Zones is live! Participants are competing to win 100,000 ATOMs by building and running Cosmos Zones. This series of adversarial testnet challenges are designed to prepare the Cosmos ecosystem for the upcoming launch of the IBC module.
- The first Compound Governance Proposal is aiming to add support for Tether (USDT) to Compound.
- The Grin v4.0.0 network upgrade (HF3) is expected on July 15, 2020. In addition, further details on Cuckarooz, the last ASIC-resistant Proof-of-Work (PoW) tweak to Grin has been released. Full details on all things Grin here.
- Kyber Network and StakeWith.Us partner together with the upcoming Katalyst Upgrade going live at the end of Q2 2020. StakeWith.Us will be actively participating as a Pool Master, taking part in KyberDAO votes on behalf of delegators.
- NEAR Protocol mainnet has launched and the network has already surpassed a million blocks. This comes in stride with their recent funding round of $21.6M from a16z, Libertus, Blockchange, Animal Venture, Pantera, and Electric. Full TechCrunch article on NEAR here.
- Tendermint Core is looking for feedback from wallet providers and users on the addition of events to the results hash. View the GitHub issue here.
- Ethereum based Nethermind, releases v1.8.30 with mainnet beam sync. With this release, users can query the chain and trace transactions 3 minutes after starting.
- Liquity, a new decentralized borrowing protocol designed to generate unprecedented liquidity against Ether as collateral has launched.
- Olaoluwa Osuntokun, the CTO of Lightning Labs, posted on the Lightning-dev mailing list on the scalability issues of onboarding millions of LN mobile clients.
- Foundation launches Foundation Devices, a new Bitcoin hardware company aiming to release a new hardware wallet that provides the same level of security as Coldcard.
- Totle announces an integration with Chainlink. By leveraging Chainlink’s external adapter technology, Totle’s aggregated data API will become accessible to DApps through Chainlink oracles.
Mainstream Recap:
- Nasdaq has entered into a long-term, non-exclusive, collaboration agreement with R3 on institutional grade offerings for digital asset marketplaces by leveraging R3’s enterprise blockchain software, Corda.
- Stellar Lumens, XLM, the native currency of the Stellar Network is now supported directly in Ledger Live.
- On Thursday, April 30th, 2020 - Coinbase Pro enabled support for BAT-USD, DAI-USD, and ZEC-USD order books.
- Boerse Stuttgart’s Digital Exchange, BSDEX, introduces stop orders as a new order type. Full details in their April 28th, 2020 press release.
- Skew, a real-time analytics platform for crypto derivatives has launched skewTrading. This new trade execution and electronic brokerage platform connects investors with liquidity providers across listed and OTC products. This is all on top of their recent $5M funding round.
- Bitcoin security company, Casa, releases a free 30-day trial for Casa Gold.
- Andreessen Horowitz, a16z, announces a new $515M fund that will be used to invest in crypto networks and businesses. This Crypto Fund II is focusing on the areas of in-app payments, modern store of value, decentralized finance, and web3.
- Gemini announces that Orchid (OXT), Basic Attention Token (BAT), Chainlink (LINK), and Dai (DAI) are now available for trading on the Gemini platform.
- Binance launches Binance Pool, which will offer Proof-of-Work (PoW) and Proof-of-Stake (PoS) services for various coins and tokens. The first offering will be Bitcoin mining using a FPPS payment method.
- IBM, KPMG, Merck, and Walmart release the U.S. Drug Supply Chain Security Act (DSCSA) Blockchain Interoperability Pilot Report to the FDA.
- The Electric Coin Company releases a statement on the state of Zcash adoption.
- An article from Coindesk states that iMiner, a Turkey-based company, has been granted a license to mine crypto in Iran.
- TokenAnalyst will no longer be supporting the TokenAnalyst platform and API with some of it’s team joining Coinbase. Full details here.
- De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB) is acting fast on enforcing firms to register as per the Fourth Anti-Money Laundering Directive laws. Firms must apply for registration with DNB by May 18th, 2020.
This Week’s Cup of Coffee:
This week, we are jumping up to Portland, ME to grab a cup of West End Blues from Tandem Coffee Roasters. This take on a traditional Brazil based espresso has notes of baking spices and tea. Drink up and feel the vibe!
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