Crypto && Coffee 025
- 7 minsTechnology Recap:
Bitcoin:
- Bitcoin and it’s community is keeping us all happy and sane during these times. J.K. Rowling stirred things up this week on “Crypto Twitter” with a simple question about Bitcoin.
Litecoin:
- The Litecoin Foundation announces a new partnership with Atari. The partnership will extend into multiple areas including: gaming platforms, the Atari ecosystem, Atari Token, and future ventures.
Ethereum:
- Vitalik Buterin in a Twitter thread states that his “biggest regrets are not launching eth1 in Jul 2015 instead of Sep 2014. They are about all the deficiencies in eth1 that we now have to spend years painfully fixing. Hex tree, RLP, gas costs, no account abstraction….”. Full thread here. In addition, Vitalik posted about what he would do if he was designing a new chain to live alongside Bitcoin.
- Hudson Jameson from the Ethereum Foundation shares his adventure through hardware and software to become an ETH2.0 validator on the Topaz testnet.
- Ethereum Foundation releases their 2020 Spring Update.
- In addition, the Ethereum Cat Herders release a community update to recap on the latest Ethereum developments.
Other Chains:
- Donner Lab released an early alpha version of Bitcoin Bounty Hunt. This online FPS is centered around fighting other players to collect their bounty. Bounty will be converted to bitcoin, using the Lightning Network.
- Meichain, an ATOM backed stablecoin built with Cosmos IBC and BAND protocol oracle have launched the first version of their testnet. MEI value will be pegged at 1 USD, using MakerDAO style incentives.
- Cryptoraves, a crypto-portal and crypto-bot on Twitter announced an integration with Chainlink. This will remove a layer of centralization from it’s platform by employing Chainlink’s secure and reliable oracles to validate Twitter data.
- Ten days ago the OpenEthereum client, part of the OpenEthereum project which divested from Parity Technologies, launched its first release v3.0.0. Since then, ethernodes.org displays it as representing roughly 2% of the Ethereum network.
- On May 15th, 2020 tBTC from Thesis and the Keep Network launched on Ethereum. Two days later, the plug was pulled. Deposits have been paused for the next ten days and Keep is helping users recover funds. Read the full thread from Matt Luongo, Founder of Thesis to stay up to date and learn more.
- For developers new to Web3 or Ethereum, check out ETH.BUILD! This educational sandbox is open source and involves drag-and-drop programming to get familiar. Here is a fun video diving into the application.
- In early May, Synthetix and Optimism announced a new demo of the Synthetix.Exchange on OVM (Optimistic Virtual Machine), a layer-2 scaling solution. With this, they launched a L2 testnet trading competition!
- Klaytn, the public blockchain project of Korea’s Internet giant Kakao, announced a partnership with Chainlink.
- The Electric Coin Company presented updates on 2020 priorities including Flyclient, viewing keys, wallets and more on their livestream yesterday.
- Uniswap V2, the second iteration of the Uniswap protocol has been deployed on Ethereum mainnet!
- Gnosis announced two new features for Gnosis Safe Multisig users. These features include: a desktop application to remove web host dependency, and now users can interact with any smart contract in the UI.
- Ethereum mixer, Tornado Cash, announces the completion of their trusted setup which triggers setting the operator address to 0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000 so that nobody will ever be able to modify it. This will make Tornado Cash fully trustless, unstoppable and decentralized.
- Kadena, a scalable layer-1 PoW public network, announced their collaboration with Chainlink to integrate Chainlink’s oracle network to Kadena’s blockchain.
- Celo has officially launched mainnet! Their next steps will include: bringing off-chain prices for Celo Gold on-chain through oracles, Celo Dollars going live, and the mainnet release of Celo Wallet.
- Stephen Tse, Founder of Harmony, shared on May 15th, 2020 that open staking for Harmony sharding mainnet has launched. Full data for harmony validators is already available.
- The Zcash Foundation releases a statement on bringing privacy to the Cosmos ecosystem.
Mainstream Recap:
- Bloomberg releases an article on how the cryptocurrency market is becoming more concentrated with focus on Bitcoin, Tether and Ether.
- Reddit is beta testing Ethereum based tokens for users to earn rewards for contributing content via their “Community Points”. Full details here.
- Andreessen Horowitz, a16z, is starting to release their course videos from the a16z Crypto Startup School.
- Binance has frozen funds linked to the Upbit breach/hack last year. View the full Twitter thread between Whale Alert and CZ.
- On May 14th, 2020, Kyber Network announced that they have crossed $1B USD worth of trades and almost 1M transactions performed entirely on-chain.
- Visa has filed a patent application for a process for turning physical fiat currency into a digitized version. The patent images show diagrams of Ethereum.
- BitGo is now providing its custody services to India’s largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume, CoinDCX. The funds will be protected by BitGo’s $100M USD insurance policy provided by Lloyd’s Insurance syndicates through Lloyd’s market place, including users’ crypto held on mutlti-sig wallets on DCXLend. Full post from CoinDCX here.
- Andreessen Horowitz posts an exciting article on The Crypto Price-Innovation Cycle.
- Bakkt releases a post diving into how they will be bringing digital assets mainstream by making airline miles, loyalty points, and crypto more accessible.
- Crypto trading service, FalconX raises $17M to power it’s service. The company is backed by Fidelity-affiliated Avon Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Lightspeed, Flybridge, Accel, Fenbushi, Accomplice, and more. Full article from TechCrunch here.
- BitMEX went down on Tuesday at 12:13 UTC by reporting a major outage and took the trading engine offline. One can view these previous incidents at BitMEX’s status page. The platform was brought back online at 13:40 UTC on May 19th, 2020.
- The Crypto Assets Opportunity Fund (CAOD) in addition with investor Johnny Hong has accused Block.one and EOS’ leaders of a fraudulent scheme. The suit has six counts ranging from marketing it’s token sale in the U.S. without registering with the SEC - all the way to misleading statements on decentralization of the project. Read the full article from CoinDesk here.
- The crypto exchange, Phemex, has rolled out a Premium membership program that allows spot trading with zero fees which went live on May 15th, 2020. As reported by Yahoo Finance, Phemex is the first derivatives and spot exchange to offer its users zero-fee trading on demand. Phemex is now listed as a top 10 exchange via Nomics.
- The Libra Association announces the appointment of Robert Werner as its General Counsel. Previously Mr. Werner served as the Director of the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), Director of the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), Senior Counsel to the Under Secretary of the Treasury, Terrorism and Finanical Intelligence, and Assistant General Counsel for Enforcement and Intelligence in the Office of the General Counsel.
- BlockFi released a statement regarding a data breach that occurred on May 14th, 2020.
- In a recent CoinDesk article, multiple supercomputers across the European Union were remotely hijacked and used for mining Monero.
This Week’s Cup of Coffee:
This week, we are grabbing a cup of coffee from Necessary Coffee in Lancaster, PA. Their Blend is a creamy rich blend that has become a staple in many homes. With beans from Latin America and East Africa this roast brings notes of brown sugar and that ever so good chocolaty nature. Drink up!
Jake Tarnow
Not Your Average Engineer