Crypto && Coffee 051
- 6 minsTechnology Recap:
Bitcoin:
- Nic Carter shares nine Bitcoin charts that are already at All-Time Highs.
BitcoinCash:
- On Sunday morning, November 15th, 2020 the BitcoinCash blockchain split as expected resulting in two new chains (BCHN and BCHA) at block height 661648. The BCHN chain quickly became the longest chain with BCHA taking a drastically long time to mine it’s first block.
Ethereum:
- On November 11th, 2020, a consensus issue was deliberately triggered on the Ethereum network. This issue was uncovered between different versions of Geth and various node operators (including Infura) were sadly not running recent versions, causing the network to split. Full Post Mortem on Geth v1.9.17.
- Following the consensus issue, Ethereum Foundation released Geth v.1.9.24 (Akantha) which is built with Go v1.15.5, fixing CVE-2020-28362 and the fix for the consensus issue.
- Prysmatic Labs announces the Prysm v1.0.0 release! Before November 24th, the team will release the code and it will be used for mainnet Ethereum Serenity.
- Ben Edgington, from ConsenSys, shares what’s new in ETH2.0 as of November 13th, 2020 including: Lighthouse, Prysm, Teku, and Nimbus client updates, Medalla testnet, and further work on tooling.
- Ethereum Foundation releases their updates on ETH2.0 including: staking community grants, testnets, and the ETH2.0 Deposit Contract.
- Nimbus releases their first binary release, v0.6-alpha and more in their latest update.
Other Chains:
- Zcash has just passed its fifth major network upgrade and the first halving of Zcash! At block height 1046400 the Canopy upgrade activated successfully.
- DARMA Capital announces LiquidStake, which will launch their crypto trading platform and allow Ether stakers to take out (USDC) stablecoin loans against their staked assets while earning rewards.
- Aave is now live on DODO! Users can trade for (AAVE) on the DODO DEX with 0.35% transaction fees. (DODO) rewards for the (AAVE) pool and the (USDC) pool are 0.25 (DODO)/block.
- This week, the Tezos blockchain successfully upgraded by adopting Delphi at block 1212417. Delphi is the fourth Tezos upgrade over the past two years.
- A new proposal has been submitted to create a Contributor Vesting Pool for long-term incentives on Yam Finance.
- Through Synthetix partnership with Chainlink, they have now published sOIL live on the Synthetix platform which will mirror the price movement of oil using the Chainlink oracle network. sOIL is available on Kwenta and Synthetix.Exchange.
- Lightning Labs releases their latest newsletter - diving into Bitcoin-native yield via Lightning Pool, gaming wallets, hosted nodes and more.
- The Monero Atomic Swap project entitled, Farcaster, has commenced!
- Raymond Yeh shares how zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP) can be used in CivicTech to create the next generation of public goods where government, businesses and citizens can better infrastructure to collaborate with one another.
- A proposal on MakerDAO has been published as MIP6 to onboarding WZEC (Wrapped Zcash).
- Ethereum Cat Herders announce their first Community Call on EIP-2938 (Account Abstraction) in partnership with The Ethereum Magicians.
- A proposal has been issued on Curve Finance to add a pool for Ren Protocol’s (renZEC) and (wZEC). This will allow Zcash to grow in the greater DeFi ecosystem.
- On November 16th, 2020 DeversiFi surpassed $50M in cumulative trading volume!
- PrimeDAO released their first liquidity mining program which was initiated on November 16th, 2020 and will last for roughly two weeks.
- Chainlink has published all Price Feed contract addresses which are updated on a regular basis. The addresses include those on Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, and Matic.
- Alexandria, a new protocol under development to provide a new P2P network that exposes the chain history for Ethereum publishes their first update.
- Umbra, the project behind stealth addresses on Ethereum shares their latest update on funding and the future.
- Metric DEX has shipped a new version which allows users to trade any 2 tokens wallet-to-wallet using a 0x relayer network.
- mStable shares the latest mStable Improvement Proposals as well as their 3 month roadmap.
- BeamX, the confidential DeFi platform from Beam launches tomorrow!
- At 4pm UTC, the Oasis blockchain enabled transfers of the (ROSE) token and kicked off the network staking reward schedule which is a major milestone for their mainnet launch.
- DODO shares how they are working with Chainlink to further optimize DODO’s on-chain liquidity platform.
Mainstream Recap:
- DeFi platform Akropolis suffered a ~$2M loss via a re-entrancy attack utilizing a flash loan from derivatives platform dYdX. This follows the same steps taken in the 2016 DAO hack, except now it includes DeFi liquidity pools.
- DeFi protocol Value DeFi was exploited for ~$6M due to a flash loan attack via an attacker borrowing 80,000 ETH via lending platform Aave.
- Origin Protocol sustained a re-entrancy attack on their Origin Dollar (OUSD) resulting in a loss of ~$7M. The attack was initiated via a flash loan, followed by a few stablecoin swaps and then the re-entrancy attack which was accompanied with the redeem and further token swaps.
- On November 13th, 2020, a domain name hosting provider that manages one of Liquid Exchange’s core domain names incorrectly transferred control of the account and domain to a malicious actor. This resulted in the actor having the ability to change DNS records and take control over internal email accounts. Full report from Liquid here.
- Dash objects to ShapeShift’s delisting of the coin stating that, “its currency is not truly a privacy coin”. Read the full article from CoinTelegraph here.
- UMA’s financial products will now operate under a new division called uLABs. This will include the Yield Dollar products that currently are live on mainnet.
- BitPay has launched a new service enabling businesses to pay employees, contractors, vendors, customers, and more with crypto. Full report from CoinDesk here.
- Reuters reports that the Bank of England (BoE) says that it’s role is not to protect banks against digital currencies.
- Crypto custody specialist, ShardX has claimed to be the first company to successfully run multi-party computation (MPC) on hardware security modules (HSM). Read their full whitepaper here.
- Harold (Ed) Edwards, a great mathematician who discovered Edwards curves, the basis of EdDSA has passed away at the age of 84 in New York City.
- Unstoppable Wallet has become the first multi-currency wallet to enable shielded Zcash addresses on both iOS and Android by integrating Electric Coin Company’s mobile wallet SDK!
- Mariner Wealth announced its 346 financial advisors will soon have access to the BTC markets through a separately managed account set up by crypto firm Eaglebrook Advisors.
- Dutch crypto exchange, Bitonic, issued a notice stating that the exchange will now ask users for additional information including: the purpose of purchasing Bitcoin, what type of wallet does the customer use, and more.
- Vietnam’s Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) has entered into an exclusive agreement with Singapore-based smart contract platform TomoChain. The two will work together to archive student records on-chain.
- TheBlock reports that Binance has begun to block U.S. users from accessing the exchange platform.
This Week’s Cup of Coffee:
This week, we are staying local and grabbing a cup of Colombia Huila from Sunset Roasters in San Francisco, CA. This dark roast yields flavors of dark chocolate, toffee, and slight hints of grapefruit. This roast makes for a soothing warm jolt to start those crisp mornings in the Bay Area!
Jake Tarnow
Not Your Average Engineer