Crypto && Coffee 047
- 7 minsTechnology Recap:
Bitcoin:
- Bitcoin Core has finally merged BIP-340, 341, and 342! This is a major milestone for Bitcoin development as now Schnorr and Taproot have been merged into the core codebase. All that is needed now is an activation!
- Pieter Wuille updates libsecp256k1 which includes enabling the GLV (Gallant-Lambert-Vanstone) endomorphism optimization by default and removing support for the non-GLV EC multiplication.
- October 15th, 2020 was the Feature freeze for the Bitcoin v0.21.0 release. The following made it into the freeze: Taproot implementation, libsecp256k1 endomorphism, Tor v3 support, BIP-155, 157, 158, Descriptor wallets, and initial C++17 migration work.
BitcoinCash:
- The next network upgrade for BitcoinCash is scheduled for November 15th!
Ethereum:
- Ethereum Foundation releases Geth v1.9.23, Tupari. This bi-weekly maintenance release contains a few security fixes, addition of Node Discovery Protocol v5.1, updates to TxPool, P2P protocol and more.
- Ben Edgington, from ConsenSys, shares what is new in ETH2.0 as of October 18th, 2020.
Other Chains:
- Lightning Labs published full disclosure on the two recent LND CVEs. CVE-2020-26895 dives into the LND Low-S Tx-Relay Standardness where a malicious peer could force a LND node to accept a high-S ECDSA signature. CVE-2020-26896 dives into how an LND node could be coerced into revealing an invoice preimage for a forwarded HTLC with a colliding payment hash.
- In addition to activating the new ring signature algorithm CLSAG, the latest Monero fork that occurred last weekend also introduced deterministic unlock times. Various exploits were found and shared here.
- There was a bug over the past weekend after the latest Monero upgrade where various nodes were getting stuck on block 2210720 and halting to sync. A new release was pushed to fix the bug.
- Nomic Labs eradicates node-gyp from Ethereum and has built ethereum-cryptography as a better alternative with cryptographic primitives that are needed to build Ethereum software, through pure-JavaScript dependencies.
- Celsius shares how to use (ZEC) to earn weekly compounding crypto rewards or borrow cash against your coins for as low as 1% APR.
- COVER Protocol shares their view of COVER Tokenomics. This includes full details on COVER token allocation, governance, migration to new contracts and more.
- NEAR has entered Phase 2 of its mainnet launch and announced that the ZKValidator is one of the first validators to be live securing the network. This brings the number of networks ZKValidator validates to four: Cosmos for the last 11 months, Kusama for 9 months, and Polkadot for the past 2 months.
- R3 Corda Network is set to go DeFi with the release of XDC on Corda. The full project has been posted on GitLab, going into detail on its decentralized services and steps in operating a Cordite node.
- James Prestwich, founder of Summa - now acquired by Celo, shared a memory access utility to give easy access to Solidity’s memory and lets users build parsers and string manipulation with minimal work.
- Gnosis published their Dune Analytics project for users to view various Dashboards and analytics on the Gnosis Protocol, Conditional Tokens Framework, and more.
- The HOPR Säntis testnet wrapped up on October 6th, 2020 with more than 500 people running nodes. Now, the latest testnet Basòdino has launched introducing multi-hop messaging and the first hands-on experience of the payment channels and reward tickets that power HOPR’s proof-of-relay system.
- Immutable announces Immutable X, their first ZK rollup engine for minting and exchanging NFTs on Ethereum. Full thread on the announcement here.
- Delphi Daily shares how Barnbridge brings structured finance to DeFi. Barnbridge is a new project bringing collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) to DeFi.
- Maker Foundation announces the new Maker Voting Portal!
- Fe, a new smart contract language for the Ethereum ecosystem has been announced! The language was originally born as a rewrite of the Vyper Compiler in Rust to address issues that were highlighted in the Vyper Security Review.
Mainstream Recap:
- PayPal launches a new service enabling users to buy, hold, and sell cryptocurrency directly from their PayPal account. It has additionally signaled its plans to significantly increase cryptocurrency’s utility by making it available as a funding source of purchases at its 26 million merchants worldwide.
- On October 19th, 2020 the International Monetary Fund held a seminar on Cross-Border Payments and their visions on CBDCs, policy coordination and more. View the full seminar stream here.
- On October 15th, 2020 at 20:54, OKEx announced that it would be suspending digital asset/cryptocurrency withdrawals for a period of time due to being “out of touch with a concerned private key holder”.
- CoinDesk reports that Binance stated all deposits to the local platform, Binance Jersey will be disabled on October 30th, 2020 with all trading and other services ceasing on November 9th. The official hard shutdown of all accounts will take place on November 30th, 2020.
- Coinbase Pro on October 19th, 2020 announced that the WBTC-USD and WBTC-BTC order books would enter transfer-only mode, accepting inbound transfers of WBTC in supported regions. Overall trading will commence on October 20th, 2020.
- CoinDesk reports token investment platform, CoinList, minted a total of $57.1M worth of wrapped bitcoin (4,997 WBTC) in back-to-back mints for its customers on Wednesday, October 14th, 2020 setting an all-time record for most wrapped BTC in a single day.
- Coinbase announces it will sponsor two Bitcoin Core developers with it’s first Crypto Community Fund grants.
- River Financial introduces River Learn. River Learn will be a resource to learn about Bitcoin, crypto, and overall updates from River Financial.
- The Bank of Spain is fast-tracking research on digital currency’s design and the economic implications of a central bank digital currency (CBDC). Read the full four-year strategic plan here.
- Forbes shares the origin story of Paradigm and their constant push for cryptocurrency.
- The U.S. Department of Justice has named and charged six men, known as the Russian hacker group Sandworm, for allegedly carrying out many of the most costly cyberattacks in history.
- The National Stock Exchange of Australia (NSX) said its DLT-based Digital Exchange Subregister System (DESS), part of the ClearPay platform, was approved by the Australian Council of Financial Regulation and is now finalizing the date at which it can go live.
- Signature Bank CEO Joseph DePaolo, stated on a third-quarter earnings call that a $1B in deposit growth from digital asset banking at Signature Bank was driven in part by the bank holding the dollars backing various stablecoins. Full report here.
- Mode Global Holdings PLC, a London Stock Exchange-listed company shares that it’s the first UK publicly traded company to announce a significant purchase of Bitcoin as part of its treasury investment strategy. The allocation is part of a long-term strategy to protect investors’ assets from currency debasement.
- The Central Bank of the Bahamas has officially launched its national digital currency, the Sand Dollar.
- Ketsal releases their Open Standards project aiming to measure blockchain network centralization and various data points used to determine if a network is truly decentralized or not.
- Coinbase shares that they received 1,914 requests from governments and law enforcement between January 1st, 2020 and June 30th. Full Transparency Report here.
- The Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) is planning to issue a tax reporting framework for cryptocurrency assets in 2021.
- Boardroom announces it has raised $2.2M in funding to build a comprehensive platform aimed at reducing the complexities of crypto governance. The investment was led by Standard Crypto with participation from Variant, CoinFund, IDEO CoLab Ventures, Framework Ventures and Slow Ventures.
- Crypto-driven marketplace Zora raises $2M seed round to build a sustainable creator economy. The investment was led by Kindred Ventures with participation from Trevor McFedries of Brud, Alice Lloyd George, Jeff Staple, Coinbase Ventures and more.
This Week’s Cup of Coffee:
This week, we are jumping over to Miami, FL for a cup of Panther Coffee’s Guatemala roast from Finca El Limonar. This darker roast brings notes of milk chocolate, nougat, honeycrisp apple and the balanced flavor of sweet and bold. All beans from Panther Coffee are sourced, roasted and prepared from various parts of the world ranging from Guatemala, Bolivia, Colombia, Mexico, Ethiopia, Brasil, and Nicaragua. Enjoy!
Jake Tarnow
Not Your Average Engineer