Crypto && Coffee 057
- 5 minsTechnology Recap:
Bitcoin:
- All-time highs continue as we move into 2021!! Looking forward to the possibility of Taproot, Tapscript, MuSig2 and more in this coming year.
Litecoin:
- David Burkett publishes the PR for one-sided transactions through Litecoin’s Mimblewimble Extension Blocks! The code is aiming to be merged in Q1 of 2021 and then activation will be decided by the miners.
Ethereum:
- Vitalik Buterin shares his endnotes on 2020!
- Sigma Prime releases their latest upgrade to Lighthouse v1.0.5 with an important fix for subnet discovery and dependency updates.
Other Chains:
- DEX aggregator 1inch has issued its own governance token, 1INCH token.
- StarkWare publishes the Cairo toolchain: compiler, VM, IDE tools, documentation, and more!
- GUSD is now accepted by MakerDAO as collateral. Use GUSD to borrow DAI today via Maker Vaults on Oasis Borrow.
- OpenDAO has integrated RenVM! Bitcoin holders can now use their BTC as collateral for minting the yield dollar and eventually USDO.
- First major update from Monero <-> Bitcoin Atomic Swap project Farcaster has been published.
- The amount of BTC pegged to the Blockstream Liquid sidechain increased in 2020 from 96 BTC to 2,600 BTC.
- Paradigm announces the Paradigm CTF, an Ethereum focused security competition.
- The Bitcoin hash power that is merge mining the RSK sidechain increased from 57% to 62% in 2020. The amount of BTC pegged into Rootstock increased from roughly 162.4 BTC to 546.3 BTC.
- The number of OP_RETURNs in Bitcoin have dropped drastically throughout 2020 with around 1,504,277 in January 2020 with now roughly only 485,034 as of the beginning of December.
- The initial security audit report performed by Least Authority of the Loopring Protocol v.3.6 zkSNARK Circuits is out!
- Wasabi Wallet shares their year in review!
- Aave was selected as the next token to receive BNT liquidity mining! Once the AAVE pool receives $400K USD in liquidity, weekly BNT rewards will get activated as well as 1M BNT of impermanent loss insurance via Bancor.
- Paul Razvan Berg publishes MultiSol, a CLI written in Rust for making contract verification of Ethereum smart contracts easier.
- Velo Protocol will integrate Chainlink Price Feeds to obtain FOREX and crypto price data in its Federated Credit Exchange Network (FCX).
- Primitive is now live on Ethereum! Primitive is a new protocol that harnesses the power of simplicity to deliver tokenized options for any asset on Ethereum.
- Furucombo announces the COMBO token launch and overall distribution plan.
- OKEx officially released the second platform token, OKT on December 29th, 2020. The initial 10M tokens will be given to OKB holders. The tokens will mainly be used for an OK public blockchain in the future which is part of Cosmos.
- Code is now available for Monero’s Bulletproofs+, a zero-knowledge proving system that can be used in the Monero protocol in place of the existing Bulletproofs implementation.
- Bankless publishes tips on how to maximize one’s Argent wallet for all things DeFi.
- The Substrate IBC Pallet is currently being worked on to bring a bridge between DOT and Cosmos IBC.
- Opyn announces the launch of v2!
- The popular Ethereum-based game Dark Forest has launched its latest version v0.5!
- Curve Finance releases their latest update on tokenized Bitcoin support in pBTC, BBTC, and oBTC including Euro and USD pools.
- Binance must want to have some fun in DeFi too with this odd transaction where it looks like they are actually staking 12M SUSHI.
- Ren publishes their Ecosystem Update for 2020 including their recent integrations and availability within DeFi.
- Personal Bitcoin node software, Umbrel, releases their latest update with the Umbrel App Store which will allow users to install self-hosted Bitcoin applications.
- Deerfi money market is using Chainlink Price Feeds live on mainnet to price crypto-assets used in their lending and borrowing operations.
Mainstream Recap:
- Cover Protocol is exploited via depositing LP tokens to it’s shield mining, Blacksmith contract, withdrawing almost all tokens to inflate “accRewardsPerToken”, depositing LP tokens again, and then claiming the COVER rewards and tricking the contract to mint a quintillion tokens. The ~$3M in tokens were returned by Grap Finance with a lovely message. Cover stated they are exploring the option to release a new token through a snapshot before the exploit.
- Emiliano Bonassi summarized the exploit with a full test and published his results on GitHub.
- Bitwise 10 Crypto Index Fund, “The Fund”, has liquidated its position in XRP.
- Soona Amhaz of Token Daily shares their view on The 2021 Crypto Crystal Ball.
- Bitcoin holders can now sell their BTC from 16,000 Cashzone ATMs across the UK under a new agreement with London-based crypto company BitcoinPoint.
- The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, SEC, has accused the founder of hedge fund Virgil Capital of fraud.
- Grayscale Investments continues their increase of holdings per share now holding ~$18.8B in assets under management (AUM) with Bitcoin being their largest one.
- Bitstamp is halting XRP trading and deposits for all U.S. customers on January 8th, 2021 due to recent SEC filing against Ripple Labs.
- Coinbase is suspending trading of XRP on Tuesday, January 19th, 2021 at 10am PST.
- The Carolina Panthers OT Russel Okung will now receive half of his $13M salary in Bitcoin as part of a partnership with Strike!
- OKEx announces the launch of real-time settlement for all perpetual swaps, futures, and options contracts.
- CoinDesk reports that Israel-based payments processor Simplex has become a principal member of the Visa network.
- eToro is in possible talks with Goldman Sachs about possibly leading the offering of a $5B IPO.
- Crypto.com plans to delist XRP effective on January 19th, 2021 at 10am UTC.
- After Binance’s announcement last week regarding a $10M fund to support projects on Polkadot, the DOT token has risen more than 40%.
This Week’s Cup of Coffee:
This week, we are heading over to Denver, CO to grab a cup of coffee from Novo Coffee. Their Pinavete Natural is an amazing roast with notes of raspberry, peach, and molasses. This Central American roast is bursting with flavor and is sure to bring a nice change of pace to your coffee tastes! Enjoy and Happy New Year!
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