Crypto && Coffee 038
- 6 minsTechnology Recap:
Bitcoin:
- A recent Bitcoin Core PR (Pull Request) includes checks for non-standard inputs for future versions containing witness data such as Taproot, which may be released in an upcoming soft fork.
- View a full survey on Bitcoin transaction types and the most popular ones to date via QuantaBytes.
Litecoin:
- SegWit usage on Litecoin has reached ~80% as reported by Charlie Lee. SegWit usage on Bitcoin however is only around 50%. One thing to note is that most wallets still have not implemented SegWit support.
- From the recent Litecoin MimbleWimble update that was shared in the beginning of August 2020, development heats up as they aim for a September release of a MimbleWimble enabled testnet.
Ethereum:
- Full postmortem on the ETH2.0 Medalla testnet incident which caused various cascading failures this past weekend and exposed several vulnerabilities and process faults in clients.
- Prysmatic Labs publishes the latest release, v1.0.0-alpha.23, of the Prysm client for the Medalla ETH2.0 testnet. This release includes multiple fixes for both stage 1 and stage 2 sync.
- Sigma Prime shares their latest update for their Lighthouse client and the Medalla ETH2.0 testnet.
- EIP-2878 proposes a block reward reduction. If accepted, it would be the 3rd time Ethereum has undergone a block reward reduction. The reduction will bring the block reward to 0.5 ETH.
Other Chains:
- Eclair, the Scala implementation of the Lightning Network added a new “signmessage” and “verifymessage” command in a recent PR (Pull Request) to allow one to sign messages using their LN node’s public key and verify messages using known node public keys respectively.
- dYdX announces a partnership with StarkWare. Their Perpetual Contracts will be powered by StarkEx Rollup by Q4.
- Chainlink is hosting SmartCon on August 28th and 29th as a virtual Smart Contract summit bringing together DeFi’s brightest.
- YAM?! Yam Finance was surfacing through the Ethereum ecosystem as they both launched and had a temporary demise within a day. Then they had an interesting launch of (CRV). Catch up on all things YAM from The Daily Gwei.
- Staked joins Chainlink as a node operator to further decentralize Chainlink’s Price Reference Data.
- mStable releases a public dataset that outlines weekly Meta token distributions over the next 4 years for both the mStable team and investors.
- Golem takes a step forward towards the adoption of layer-2 scalability solutions on Ethereum with integrating zkSync into the new Golem.
- Due to the problematic gas prices on Ethereum, DeversiFi trials a NEC-based GAS-rebate program. Full thread here.
- At block 1,248,328 on August 21st, 2020 at 16:40 UTC the DOT token on the Polkadot blockchain will undergo a redonomination from its original sale. The new DOT will be 100x smaller than the “old” one.
- Aave announces a new version of the Aave Protocol, V2. Improvements in V2 include: repay with collateral, debt tokenization, fixed rate deposit, improved stable borrow rate, private markets, and improved aTokens.
- Set releases a full recap of what to expect in Set V2 including yield farming, multi-asset support and flexible trading execution.
- Nervos integrates Chainlink’s oracles to secure off-chain connectivity.
- mStable releases an update on how (BAL) rewards will be distributed to those who contribute to their EARN pools.
- bZx announces the re-launch of their platform including staking for late August 2020 as well as a deep-dive in all things staking.
- Hxro integrates Chainlink price oracles live on mainet to begin decentralizing it’s BTC and ETH indices.
- CosmWasm, a multi-chain smart contract platform for the Cosmos ecosystem, has launched its governance-permissioned public testnet GaiaFlex on August 18th, 2020.
- Dokia Capital joins Mission Control, The Graph’s incentivized testnet. Dokia Capital will participate in the testnet as taking the role of an Indexer for the first five phases of the network.
- DODO, a next-generation algorithmic market maker which is capable of responding to changing markets and liquidity in real-time launches.
- Nick Johnson from ENS posts a proposal for an optimistic-type rollup system that will reduce gas costs for claiming DNS domains.
- The final proof-of-work strategy has been released for Tari Labs. Tari will employ a hybrid mining approach. It will comprise two mining algorithms (CPU-friendly which is merged-mined using RandomX, and GPU-friendly via SHA-3). Both are aiming to target an average block time of 120s to match Monero’s block interval.
Mainstream Recap:
- Federal Reserve Board releases statement on the observations from their FooWire Project. This project was meant to experiment with distributed ledger technology (DLT) for payments.
- Coinbase to offer U.S. retail customers to borrow fiat loans against as much as 30% of their BTC holdings in the fall. View all the info on Coinbase itself as well as the article from CoinDesk.
- Token funded startup cLabs acquires Summa. Summa, best known for their development of wrapped tokens as well as interoperability solutions are planning to be at the forefront of Celo as the CTO of cLabs calls out.
- Binance lists Curve (CRV) during the craziness of Yam Finance. Users can now start depositing CRV in preparation for trading.
- The Pantera Venture Fund III has received $164.7M in private placements from a little under 200 investors, according to a Form D filing with the SEC.
- Binance lists Ocean Protocol (OCEAN) and opened trading for OCEAN/BTC, OCEAN/BNB, and OCEAN/BUSD on 08/17/2020 at 8:00AM UTC.
- Poloniex gives a recap for the last week in DeFi with their 10 new listings.
- Coinbase releases an article on how to pass their platform’s security guidelines to get an ERC-20 token listed on the Coinbase platform.
- Binance Charity is donating $20,000 to help the victims of the recent explosion in Lebanon’s capital Beirut.
- Gemini announces trading support for Hong Kong dollar (HKD), Australian dollar (AUD), and Canadian dollar (CAD) on the Gemini platform. With this announcement, users can now seamlessly transfer funds into their Gemini Exchange to buy and sell crypto to their native currencies.
- On November 16, 2020 MetaMask will stop injecting “window.web3” and will make a limited number of breaking changes to their Ethereum Provider API. Full summary of changes here.
This Week’s Cup of Coffee:
This week, we are grabbing a cup of Phantom Limb Blend from Huckleberry Roasters in Denver, CO. This East African showcase of a coffee brings out notes of jam, lemonade, and fruity sweetness. Definitely an atypical roast for most but definitely something to try if you want to dive down the rabbit hole of specialty coffee. Cheers!
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