Crypto && Coffee 040
- 7 minsTechnology Recap:
Bitcoin:
- The PR for BIP-340 (Schnorr Signatures) in libsecp256k1 is getting closer to being merged!
- The CoinJoin algorithm used within Wasabi Wallet is looking to be replaced by WabiSabi. WabiSabi utilizes keyed-verification anonymous credentials, homomorphic value commitments, and zero-knowledge proofs to achieve privacy and flexibility.
- Pieter Wuille, Yannick Seurin, Tim Ruffling and Jonas Nick release their paper on MuSig-DN: Schnorr Multi-Signatures with Verifiably Deterministic Nonces.
Litecoin:
- David Burkett, who is working on Mimblewimble integration into Litecoin sits down and discusses Mimblewimble, BLS sigs, Lightning Network and more.
Ethereum:
- The Ethereum Foundation announces a Request for Proposals for a security review of ethdo. Ethdo is a tool to carry out common operations on ETH2.0. This includes creating wallets, accounts, generating data for deposits, and sending exit transactions.
- Prysmatic Labs shares the alpha.24 release of their Prysm client for the Medalla ETH2.0 testnet. The main updates in this release include: account v2 improvements, bug fixes, and the Fast SSZ implementation for HashTreeRoot.
- Sigma Prime announces, The President of the Miniverse, release for Lighthouse client for the Medalla ETH2.0 testnet. This release contains a fix to a known issue with the database which causes excessive database usage and missing beacon state errors while syncing.
- Nasty little bug was found in Truffle’s Ganache Core repo which would return a bad value for the Istanbul chainID opcode.
Other Chains:
- On August 29th, 2020 ETC underwent another 51% attack which caused a reorganization of over 7,000 blocks which corresponds to roughly 2 days of mining. Bitfly announces that all lost blocks will be removed from the immature balance and will check all payouts for dropped transactions.
- Secret Network announces the introduction of secret contracts to the Secret Network mainnet. The proposal to introduce secret contracts to mainnet will be made on September 8th, 2020. If passed by the community, the network upgrade will take place on September 15th, 2020. This upgrade would make Secret Network the first layer-1 blockchain to enable general purpose private computation across a distributed system of nodes equipped with secure enclaves.
- StarkWare announces Cairo, the first production-grade platform for generating STARK proofs for general computation. It is Turing Complete and highly efficient. All things that StarkWare has built including their upcoming deployments for DeversiFi, Immutable, and dYdX are all written in Cairo.
- Torus Labs introduces tKey, a modular key management system that allows fully non-custodial OAuth logins. tKey is going to be available to all Torus customers and in all Torus products. Binance Smart Chain is the first developer to integrate tKey.
- On August 26, 2020 the first block with a shielded coinbase, block 949,496 was mined on Zcash. This falls inline with the recent Heartwood network upgrade.
- DeFi platform DeFiner is now consuming five Chainlink Price Reference Data feeds live on mainet to power its digital asset savings accounts.
- Uniswap Protocol announces Token Lists, a new standard for creating lists of ERC-20 tokens. This community initiative aims to improve discoverability and trust within ERC-20 token lists.
- 0x announces a new Request for Quote (RFQ) system that allows professional market makers to bring CEX liquidity directly to DEX users to support great pricing for medium and large trades.
- Filecoin network has reached 25PiB of total raw storage power generated by 300 miners across the globe. Full leaderboard here.
- Monero Research Lab announces the acceptance of Triptych to the ESORICS CBT 2020 workshop for presentation and publication. Triptych is a zero-knowledge proving system for confidential transactions.
- Snowfork announces that they will be building a bridge between Polkadot and Ethereum. The bridge will be completed in three stages with Phase 1 expected to be completed by mid-September.
- Oasis Network integrates with Chainlink. Oasis Network’s privacy-preserving components will be able to leverage Chainlink to collect and aggregate data from multiple sources and use it as validated data input for privacy-preserving computation on Oasis.
- Yearn Finance has developed a new kind of tooling for decentralized finance, Delegated Funding DAO Vaults. This is based on the organic governance of Yearn Finance combined with delegated credit with Aave and yVaults.
- REN has published their MPC code after one address was found to control 9,000 BTC.
- Aave governance proposal that was recently submitted looks to add support for Gemini’s GUSD stablecoin as a collateral asset to the MakerDAO protocol.
- Stellar share’s the most recent Dev Digest diving into SDF’s three-part key management content series and the new partnership between Interstellar and Velo Labs.
- A new version of Starport has been released! Starport is an open-source prototyping tool to quickly build blockchain apps using Tendermint and the Cosmos SDK.
- Synthetix announced the Pollux release on August 31st, 2020 which upgraded several protocol improvements and migrated all Synth price feeds to use Chainlink’s decentralized oracles.
- YAM Finance releases their YAMv2 Interim Governance Summary.
- The Electric Coin Company opened the source code of the Halo 2 development to the public. Halo 2 is an updated and more efficient version of ECC’s recursive proof composition that eliminates the need for a trusted setup in Zcash.
Mainstream Recap:
- Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss share their thoughts on why they believe Bitcoin could reach $500K USD.
- New Zealand’s stock exchange underwent cyber attacks for multiple days in a row last week. The market lost an hour of trading on Tuesday, August 25th 2020 and three hours on Wednesday, August 26, 2020. Full report from Bloomberg.
- Shakepay, a Montreal-based crypto exchange, engaged with CipherBlade to conduct a Proof of Reserves and Security Review and acquired an insurance policy onits cold wallets through Aon, underwritten by insurers with Lloyd’s of London. Read the full article from CoinDesk.
- Blue Wallet releases their Desktop app on the Apple App Store. This is the first Bitcoin-only wallet available on the App Store.
- LVC Corporation, operator of LINE’s crypto asset and blockchain business, and LINE Tech Plus PTE. LTD. announces the launch of LINE Blockchain Developers. This developer platform will focus on allowing companies to build blockchain services and give aid to BITMAX Wallet Service.
- Coinbase Custody and Bison Trails enable secure staking of Solana (SOL) tokens. Bison Trails extended their integration with Coinbase Custody to enable Coinbase Custody clients to seamlessly stake (SOL) tokens to enterprise-grade validators on the Bison Trails platform.
- On Wednesday, August 26 2020, the SEC approved the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) to amend Chapter One of the Listed Company Manual to allow firms to hold direct listings. This move will allow companies to now launch a direct listening on the NYSE as an alternative to an initial public offering (IPO).
- The Libra Association has hired Stevan Bunnel, a veteran of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, as its general counsel just three months after announcing his predecessor. Full release from Bloomberg Law here.
- Japanese financial firm SBI Holdings is launching trading for a type of crypto derivative called Contracts for Difference (CFD). There are currently a few CFD choices of mapping BTC, ETH, or XRP with either USD or JPY.
- Circle shares the news that the Centre Consortium unveiled a major upgrade to USD Coin (USDC) that significantly improves usability and security. The first change for USDC 2.0 introduces “gasless sends”, which will enable wallet developers to remove complexity from their UX and either pay for fees on behalf of the customers or present/deduct these fees in USDC instead of ETH. The second change will be a new set of on-chain multi-signature contracts including new consensus mechanisms.
- CoinDesk shares that users of China Construction Bank (CCB), one of the major state-owned commercial banks, started to notice a digital currency wallet feature inside the bank’s mobile app.
- Coinbase adds Marc Andreessen, co-founder and operating partner of Andreessen Horowitz, as a Board Observer.
- Square Crypto awards their next designer grant to Daniel Nordh who is bringing structure to the Bitcoin Design Community.
- Binance lists (SUSHI) and DFI.Money (YFII). DeFi is getting weird. 😕
This Week’s Cup of Coffee:
This week, we are grabbing some Double Dog Espresso from Buddy Brew Coffee in Tampa Bay, FL. This roast brings out a hint of fruitiness and berries at the start but then follows up by the dark chocolate and bold flavor that we are used to with most espressos. Grab a cup and enjoy!
Jake Tarnow
Not Your Average Engineer