Crypto && Coffee 062
- 7 minsTechnology Recap:
Bitcoin:
- A meeting was held yesterday, February 2nd, 2021 at 19:00 UTC to discuss possible revisions to BIP-8 and Taproot activation. Some have discussed the use of this BIP for Taproot activation, however there has been no decision yet.
Litecoin:
- David Burkett publishes the January 2021 progress update for Mimblewimble support in Litecoin! This latest update includes improvements to handling stealth addresses and additional wallet improvements.
Ethereum:
- Péter Szilágyi, Team Lead at Ethereum, shares his proposal for a persistent transaction pool for Ethereum’s Go client, Geth.
- As of February 2nd, 2021 there is ~$3.8B worth of ETH locked in the ETH2.0 Deposit Contract.
Other Chains:
- There are now three teams working on atomic, trustless Monero swaps! The teams include: Farcaster which is a Bitcoin <-> Monero atomic swap project, COMIT team, and finally THORChain working on adding Monero to their cross-chain decentralized liquidity network. Full January update on all three projects here.
- UNION is bringing cross-chain DeFi protection to Avalanche users by deploying collateral optimization (C-OP) instruments and bundled insurance coverage for DeFi applications on Avalanche.
- Jordi Baylina, of Iden3, publishes a CPU zkSNARK prover, which is compatible with both circom and snarkjs.
- UMA Protocol continues progressing forward with various UMIPs pushing users to borrow against $1B in Badger Vault tokens, approving the Dynamic Set Dollar project via OpenDAO and bringing Dogecoin to UMA. More in the full thread.
- The Graph Foundation is exploring providing support for additional layer-1 blockchains such as: Bitcoin, Polkadot, NEAR, Cosmos, Solana, Avalanche, Binance Smart Chain, and Celo to support Web3 development. These could join the currently supported chains and enable querying of subgraphs for data across chains.
- ParaSwap debuts their new UI and overall upgrade with V3.
- Ren announces that Dogecoin is now on Ethereum! Users can mint tokens via OpenDAO and provide liquidity on Uniswap.
- Bartek Kiepuszewski shares on Twitter some experiments with Optimistic Ethereum integrated into ethtx.info to show a deep dive of Optimism transaction batches on layer-1. Full deep-dive into what is actually happening here.
- xINCH has been audited and is now live on xtoken.market. This is a wrapper for 1INCH staking that both claims and compounds on behalf of holders.
- The 5th audit of Aave Protocol V2 by Sigma Prime has been completed.
- Cryptocurrency exchange, Kraken, is making their spot prices available to DeFi applications and developers via running their own Chainlink node.
- Alpha Homora v2 has officially launched! This starts the migration process for yield farmers, liquidity pools, and more to v2.
- Liquidity Protocol shares the results of their extensive audit by Trail of Bits.
- The MakerDAO Governance Facilitator has placed Governance Polls into the voting system on behalf of the MakerDAO mandated actors. These polls include: adding UNI-V2-DAI-USDC as a collateral type, UNI-V2-ETH-USDT as a collateral type, create multiple oracles for dYdX on StarkWare, and investigating implementations of an ETH-C vault-type with a higher liquidation ratio.
- Celo releases an update for ContractKit, allowing developers to interact with the Celo blockchain and easily integrate Celo smart contracts into their applications.
- 1inch publishes an upgrade to allow “quadro-farming” which allows users as many as four ways to collect rewards from an stETH-LDO pool.
- Ren announces that their development team will be joining Alameda. By joining Alameda, Ren will be prioritizing support for Solana and anticipates the bridging of assets to and from Solana in Q2.
- SnowSwap has integrated Chainlink Fast Gas Oracle on mainnet into all of their new rewards distribution geysers.
- Bitfrost shares their integration of Chainlink to enhance security and stability for their multichain DeFi platform, BiFi.
- Balancer Labs introduces Balance V2, a protocol for generalized AMMs. The core tenets of Balancer V2 are security, flexibility, capital efficiency and gas efficiency. These highlights focus on the Protocol Vault for all Balancer pool assets, customizable AMM logic and low gas costs through oracles.
- Trail of Bits releases Echidna v1.6.1 with new features that uses compiler metadata to more effectively test smart contracts.
- Yearn Finance’s YIP-57 has passed with 83.46% of the eligible vote in favor. This means that Yearn will mint an additional 6,666 YFI to safeguard their future development with ⅓ of the minted YFI going to key contributors and ⅔ to YFI Treasury.
- Goldfinch is announced! Goldfinch is a decentralized credit platform that empowers anyone to be a lender, not just banks. Since launching in December, the protocol has already deployed ~$1M in capital to thousands of borrowers across Mexico, Nigeria, and Southeast Asia.
- zkSync shares that they have passed 1M transactions!
- StarkWare announces the Polaris Prover License which relies on the immutability of permissionless blockchains. The license, which was collaborated on with Aztec and developers of PLONK, is intended to be used for Prover source code made available to the ecosystem.
- KeeperDAO releases the Hiding Game, which is a cooperation between users and keepers (arbitrage bots) to hide MEV (on-chain profit) by wrapping trades/debt in specialized on-chain contracts.
Mainstream Recap:
- Reddit announces partnership with Ethereum Foundation to establish Reddit’s first-ever blockchain partnership.
- OKEx announces the integration of the Lightning Network in the coming quarter with help from Lightning Labs. This will dramatically decrease transaction fees and times, improving user experience on the exchange.
- Blockstream announces their $25M purchase of WhatsMiner Bitcoin miners from Shenzhen-based MicroBT. The equipment will be deployed across their mining facilities in the USA and Canada.
- Bitwise Bitcoin Fund files for approval to publicly trade on OTCQX. If approved, shares of the fund would be available for trading in traditional brokerage accounts and for custody with many traditional custodians.
- On January 27th, 2021 according to SlowMist Zone Intelligence, SushiSwap was attacked again. The attack was due to a problem within the SushiMaker contract handling of fees for the DIGG-WBTC trading pair.
- CoinDesk shares how Cosmos might be set to take lead in blockchain interoperability with their upcoming February 18th, 2021 mainnet launch of Stargate.
- Poloniex Futures lists Monero and opens for trading with 50x leverage.
- Ray Dalio, Founder of Bridgewater Associates shares his thoughts on Bitcoin.
- The Block Crypto reports that Celo aims for a launch of a Euro-pegged stablecoin on their network.
- Kraken deploys system upgrades after a surge in usage in January 2021. For the month alone, Kraken saw $56B in trades for the month of January which surpassed the entire year of 2019.
- Circle and the Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) announced on February 2nd, 2021 that USDC is now live on the Stellar network. With this launch, Stellar USDC is now available on Stellar’s decentralized exchange, and via any Stellar integrated wallet including: Lobstr, Solar, StellarPort, StellarX, and StellarTerm.
- The Block Crypto shares that Visa dedicated a section to crypto during its Q1 2021 earnings call last week.
- Bitcoin security startup, Casa, has raised $4M in a seed round led by Fidelity Investments’ blockchain focused Avon Ventures.
- Visa announced a partnership with First Boulevard, a digitally native neobank focused on building generational wealth for the Black community. First Boulevard will be first to pilot Visa’s new suite of crypto APIs, which will enable customers to purchase, custody, and trade digital assets held by Anchorage.
- NFT marketplace, Rarible, raises a $1.75M seed round led by 1kx and joined by ParaFi Capital, Coinbase Ventures, pre-seed investor CoinFund, MetaCartel Ventures, and Bollinger Investment Group.
This Week’s Cup of Coffee:
This week, we are heading up to Seattle, Washington for a cup of Colombia Matituy from Kuma Coffee. This Narino coffee was sourced from Azahar Coffee in the hills of La Florida, from the municipality of Matituy. It yields sweet and structured flavors of walnuts, cloves, spices and sweet dark chocolate. Sip up and enjoy!!
Jake Tarnow
Not Your Average Engineer