Crypto && Coffee 024
- 4 minsTechnology Recap:
Bitcoin:
- The Bitcoin block halving took place at block height 630,000 on Monday, May 11th, 2020. The block reward has now dropped to 6.25BTC.
- At one of the recent Socratic Seminars from London BitDevs regarding Bitcoin Privacy, they touched on the features and basics of Bitcoin privacy and Payjoin/P2EP. Full transcript here.
Litecoin:
- May 10th, 2020 marked the 3rd anniversary of SegWit activation on Litecoin!
Ethereum:
- At the kick off of the Consensus: Distributed event on Monday, May 11th, 2020 Vitalik Buterin said that the ETH2.0 protocol upgrade is still on path to launch sometime in July.
- Prysmatic Labs has released v1.0.0-alpha.7 for the Topaz testnet. This release has an overall 10% reduction in CPU and more.
Other Chains:
- StarkWare announces the collaboration with Immutable, the creators of Gods Unchained, to bring StarkEx into the blockchain gaming and NFT space via Immutable X. The scheduled launch of Immutable X is slated for this summer.
- The Electric Coin Company has released zcashd v2.1.2-3 which is a hotfix for a couple issues that were identified in the Zcash Heartwood activation on testnet.
- Exodus releases a list of the best Monero mining pools.
- Grin++ releases v1.0.2 as goes into detail on all the new updates and announcements in the Grin forums.
- Gnosis shares the first update on OpenEthereum, a project that is aimed at continuing development on the formerly known Parity Ethereum client.
- A Grin developer shares possible ways to obfuscate transactions before they are broadcasted.
- An Ethereum developer posted to ETHResearch a proposal for the Beacon Chain to contain fully decentralized oracles that produce a price feed for every tracked asset at every epoch boundary.
- Chainlink announces Chainlink VRF, which will utilize verifiable random functions to generate randomness that is verifiable on-chain. This development will help accelerate the development of smart contracts focused on gaming, security, layer-2 protocols, and more.
- PoolTogether announces that they will be using Chainlink’s VRF to improve the decentralization and trustworthiness of winner selection by the PoolTogether Protocol.
- dydx has pushed their BTC-USDC Perpetual Contract Market live out to the public.
Mainstream Recap:
- Bitfinex announces an update to their Derivatives Product Description to now include the BTCDOMF0:USTFO (Bitcoin Dominance) product. The Bitcoin Dominance product will track the changes in price of BTC relative to seven digital currencies including: ETH, EOS, LTC, XRP, BCH, XTZ and XLM.
- In December of 2019, BitMEX mentioned that their priorities lie on upgrading their wallets to use SegWit. They estimated that around 65% in transaction weight savings for an average withdrawal transaction. A recent blog post from a freelance developer dives into detail on BitMEX’s transactions.
- The Electric Coin Company announced the Zcash Developer Alliance (ZDA), which is an invite-only working group to advance Zcash development and interoperability. Six additional organizations are part of the initial ZDA group including: Agoric, Bolt Labs, ConsenSys, Iqlusion, Kyber and Thesis.
- Lolli, the e-commerce startup where users earn bitcoin when shopping online has closed a $3M Seed II funding round. The funding round was led by Pathfinder, Founders Fund’s early-stage investment vehicle as well as: Michelle Phan, Sound Ventures, Craft Ventures, Company Ventures, Adam Leber and Chapter One Ventures.
- ErisX has introduced Ether physically settled futures contracts. As of May 11, 2020 both institutional and individual investors can access Ether physically delivered futures on the ErisX platform.
- Binance.US launched their over-the-counter (OTC) trading portal. This will allow users to trade larger amounts of crypto with all transactions being settled via their Binance.US accounts.
- JPMorgan extends its banking services to Bitcoin exchanges: Gemini and Coinbase, to become the bank’s first clients from the crypto industry.
- Last quarter, the IBM Blockchain Platform v2.1.3 was released with a host of features including: multi-cloud options, distributed Raft consensus, Java smart contract support, and more. In a recent announcement, IBM will be launching new capabilities around Hyperledger Fabric 2.0 with integrations with Red Hat.
- R3 co-founder Todd McDonald and Kaleido’s founder Steve Cerveny announced the companies will be partnering to offer R3’s Corda Enterprise software on Kaleido’s digital platform.
- According to a post from Coindesk, Ripple was selected to help the UAE’s ninth largest bank provide quick cross-border payments in a new Bangladeshi corridor.
This Week’s Cup of Coffee:
This week, we are surfing down the California coast to San Diego for a cup of Morning Dove Blend from Lofty Coffee Company. This blend of beans from Guatemala and Costa Rica is an easy drinking coffee with crisp flavors of lemon and caramel. Happy Wednesday!
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