Crypto && Coffee 037
- 8 minsTechnology Recap:
Bitcoin:
- Nadav Ivgi released Minsc, a high level scripting language for expressing Bitcoin Script spending conditions which is based off of the Miniscript Policy language.
- Jeremy Rubin introduced Sapio at Reckless VR earlier last month. Sapio is a high level programming language designed for building stateful smart contracts with the OP_CHECKTEMPLATEVERIFY opcode within Bitcoin.
- As mentioned last week, Bitcoin Core has now released Bitcoin Core v0.20.1. This maintenance release includes various bug fixes, RPC behavior changes and compatibility with recent versions of HWI and support for hardware wallet firmware in a step to protect against the fee overpayment attack.
- Coinbase publishes a report in regard to their use of Bitcoin transaction batching.
BitcoinCash:
- In November 2020, two improvements will be made to BitcoinABC node software. These include implementing the aserti3-2d (ASERT) algorithm and a new coinbase rule that will help fund BitcoinCash infrastructure.
Litecoin:
- The Litecoin Foundation announces the Litecoin Card which allows users to easily spend crypto in everyday life via Apple and Google Pay.
Ethereum:
- Ethereum Foundation publishes a development updated on ethereum.org and what’s next over the next few months.
- Ethereum released Geth v1.9.19 (Red Janey) which is a maintenance release with the addition of deterministic transaction sort order (FIFO) during mining. The goal of this is to reduce front-runner spam which abused miner randomness for transactions at the same price level.
- The Ethereum Foundation is now paying up to $15K for critical exploits to the new mc-attack-0 attacknet on ETH2.0. Since the launch of the initial beta attacknets, there have been four awarded bounties totaling $11K.
- Prysmatic Labs shares their ETH2.0 Dev Update on the Medalla testnet.
- The ETH2.0 attacknet for Prysm uncovered a security issue in the Go standard library (CVE-2020-16845), thus Go v1.14.6 and Go v1.13.15 have been released.
- Tim Beiko of PegaSys explains the ETH supply discrepancy via a Twitter thread.
Other Chains:
- Another 51% attack occurred on ETC last week which caused a reorganization of over 4,000 blocks. Bitfly and others encouraged miners to switch to an ETH pool while ETC core devs work through the issues.
- Beam has released the initial versions of two complementary products: Beam Web Wallet which is accessible as a Chrome extension and a non-custodial wallet service that is built to enable third party integrations.
- PeckShield concluded their code audit of StarkWare’s ethSTARK, an open-source STARK library. There were a total of 11 findings with none being critical.
- AdEx is integrating Chainlink oracles for validator uptime verification and publisher staking.
- Uniswap sold $11M in securities on June 5th, 2020 as reported in their SEC Form D filing.
- yDAO is a new DAO for the yEarn platform created by DAOhaus. It will be used to fund value-added contributions to the yEarn ecosystem.
- CoinGecko kicks off their monthly reports with a July 2020 recap of all things crypto.
- Yield Protocol announces a “yToken” for the Dai stablecoin which will be dubbed “yDai”. This new class of tokens will enable fully collateralized fixed-rate borrowing and lending in Dai.
- Aave Protocol announces their first Credit Delegation to DeversiFi. DeversiFi was the first one to experiment with Credit Delegation by drawing a credit line from a Credit Delegation Vault. Kraken and DeversiFi have used OpenLaw in the past.
- Bullionix announces their planned integration with Chainlink VRF to power the latest upgrade to the distribution platform of their gold-backed NFTs.
- Ethereum developer releases a Gas Saver Gnosis Safe Module aiming to save GAS on Ethereum in a Gnosis Safe Wallet leveraging GST2 or CHI tokens.
- Our Network publishes a report on lending rates and review of Aave, Balancer, Compound, and Set Protocol.
- Set Protocol introduces Set v2.0. This new update will provide multi-asset support, yield farming support, gas cost savings and more.
- The next reset of the Filecoin testnet will include an implementation of EIP-1559.
- DeFi Pulse releases the first newsletter of DeFi Pulse Farmer for all things “yield farming”. This week’s newsletter includes info on Set Protocol, mStable, dYDX perpetual contracts, and Akropolis update.
- Gregory Markou published Ethereum EIP-2831 which provides a way of communicating a transaction replacement through a new message type. This will enable providers and DApp developers to track transaction replacements.
- Opyn shares a full post-mortem analysis on the Opyn ETH Put Exploit and the steps they are taking to learn and grow from this.
- 1inch releases their Automated Market Maker (AMM), Mooniswap, which redistributes earnings to liquidity pools, capitalized on user slippages and protects traders from front-running attacks. Their aim is to substantially change the way users swap cryptocurrencies and allow liquidity pools to let users switch between tokens in a fully decentralized and non-custodial way.
- The League of Entropy launched drand v1.0 to become the Internet’s first production-grade, publicly verifiable randomness beacon.
- CosmWasm delivers on their milestones from the Cosmos Hub Proposal 25. This adds further governance control to all aspects of the CosmWasm contract lifecycle and ability to upgrade contracts along with migrations.
- LCX is collaborating with Chainlink allowing them to provide secure, reliable, transparent, and compliant reference prices to the DeFi ecosystem.
- mStable completes their full-scale smart contract audit with ConsenSys Diligence.
- Matter Labs introduces zkSync!
- Alchemy opens their blockchain developer platform after two years of development.
Mainstream Recap:
- CNBC reports Goldman Sachs is exploring “the commercial viability of creating our own fiat digital token” as noted by Mathew McDermott, who is now the new global head of digital assets.
- MicroStrategy, the largest independent publicly-traded business intelligence company announced on August 11th, 2020 that they have purchased 212,454 bitcoins at an aggregate purchase price of $250M. The purchase of BTC was part of their two-pronged capital allocation strategy.
- MobileCoin welcomes Alex Feerst, who is currently General Counsel at Neuralink, as the newest member of the MobileCoin Foundation board.
- Coinbase Pro listed Band Protocol (BAND) on August 11th, 2020. As per usual - there will be four stages to this new listing and it will only include the ERC-20 BAND token.
- Dapper Labs has closed a $12M funding round led by NBA stars Spencer Dinwiddie, Andre Iguodala, JaVale McGee, Aaron Gordon and Garrett Temple. The funds will be used for further development of blockchain based gaming including the launch of NBA Top Shot which runs on the dev’s custom Flow blockchain. Full report from CoinDesk here.
- All recordings from the recent IC3 Blockchain Camp are now available! I would recommend “De-Anonymizing Cryptocurrencies” from Sarah Meiklejohn of UCL.
- In an interview with CoinDesk, Kyber Network’s CEO Loi Louu stated that they have passed $1B in volume in 2020 so far and are looking to cross $3B before the end of the year.
- DeversiFi welcomes ParaFi Capital and D1 Ventures to the (NEC) ecosystem through their purchase of $450K of NEC tokens and staking them into the necDAO. ParaFi has a comprehensive proven track record through being early stage in Aave, Curve, MakerDAO, Compound, Synthetix, and Kyber.
- Interchain Foundation introduces the inaugural Technical Advisory Board, whose task is to review and comment on funding recommendations made by the ICF Board of Management to the ICF Foundation Council.
- Australia’s National Rugby League (NRL) is working with the Morrison Government to combat counterfeit merchandise with the trial of a blockchain-based app called “Smart Trademark” which allows the legal owners of a trademark to link online stores and their supply chains to a government registry. Full report from both the NRL and CoinDesk.
- Binance adds support for yearn.finance (YFI) and opens trading for YFI/BNB, YFI/BTC, YFI/BUSD, and YFI/USDT on August 10th, 2020.
- Coinbase welcomes Manish Gupta, Executive Vice President of Engineering, to their team. Gupta previously served as VP of Engineering at Lyft as well as VP of Engineering for Google’s Ad Platform.
- Brokerage firm, Interactive Brokers LLC has agreed to pay $38M in penalties to settle charges related to AML requirements and failure to flag suspicious transactions. Full announcement from the SEC here.
- 1inch closes their first investment round, where they raised $2.8M from top investors including Binance Labs, Galaxy Digital, Greenfield One, Libertus Capital, Dragonfly Capital, FTX, IOSG, LAUNCHub Ventures, Divergence Ventures, Loi Luu of Kyber Network, and Illia Polosukhin of NEAR Protocol.
- Australian news outlet, Information Age, reports a 25-year-old has been sentenced to a maximum of two years and three months in jail for stealing 100,000 XRP in January of 2018. This amount of XRP is equivalent to $400K.
- ZDNet reports a mysterious group has hijacked Tor exit nodes to perform SSL stripping attacks to replace Bitcoin addresses inside HTTP traffic going to mixing services.
This Week’s Cup of Coffee:
This week, we are jumping over to Lancaster, PA for a cup of Mario Salazar Cabrera from Passenger Coffee. This Colombian roast is a light and subtle cup of coffee with notes of berries, guava and brown sugar. Nice lil jolt for a summer brew - enjoy!!
Jake Tarnow
Not Your Average Engineer