Crypto && Coffee 063
- 6 minsTechnology Recap:
Bitcoin:
- The Taproot support for btcdeb has been merged! In addition, there is now documentation on doing Tapscript manually, and how to use the new “tap” command.
Ethereum:
- Ethereum Foundation shares the grantees selected for the recent staking community grants round.
- The Ethereum Cat Herders will be hosting a community call on EIP-1559: Fee Market Change for ETH1.0 on February 26, 2021 at 14:00 UTC.
- Status’ ETH2.0 client, Nimbus, announces their v1.0.7 release. This release includes significant performance improvements across the board as well as additional protections against accidental slashings.
Other Chains:
- Kyber Network has launched a new KyberDAO Governance Forum, where both Kyber and the DeFi community can discuss Kyber v3.0, and the upcoming KNC migration.
- Synthetix made it possible for users to now borrow sUSD, sETH, or sBTC with their Bitcoin via depositing renBTC to Synthetix using synthetix.surge.sh.
- Aave AIP-9 posted for activation and has successfully passed. This vote will activate the Aave Balancer Pool Liquidity Staking. Since approval, the proposal will start the Safety Incentives for ABPT stakers with SI set at 550 AAVE/day.
- In January 2021, a record of 607,989 transactions were processed on the Monero network. This is the most transactions in one month ever recorded on Monero. The average number of transactions per day was 19.6K.
- StarkWare shares that Cairo proofs are now on Ropsten testnet. Read through their post to send code to the Generic Proving Service (GPS).
- Georgios Konstantopoulos of Paradigm Research shares how Optimism’s Rollup really works.
- 1inch announces that it is prolonging their liquidity mining program for another 4 weeks starting on February 6th, 2021. The following pools will participate in this liquidity mining program: ETH-1INHC, ETH-DAI, ETH-USDC, ETH-USDT, ETH-WBTC, and newly created ETH-TORN.
- The Tezos, Edo, upgrade will go live this upcoming weekend, on February 13th, 2021. Bakers must upgrade their shell to version v8.1 before then.
- Status shares their Q4 2020 report which features 601,800 new Status installs, Vitalik’s AMA, $165M in total treasury assets, and more.
- AvalancheGo v1.1.4 is now live! This patch includes CLI upgrades, API bug fixes, stability improvements with the AVM’s API methods and ability to specify custom genesis configurations.
- OpenDeFi welcomes BarnBridge, which is the first risk-tokenizing blockchain protocol to allow hedging risk sensitivity and price volatility.
- Secret Network’s Secret Auctions are now live on mainnet. Users can bid for any secret token, with any secret token. Creating OTC trading markets for large transactions.
- Velox brings its algorithmic trading system for decentralized exchanges to Avalanche, further expanding their DeFi offerings. In addition, Velox plans to complete the integration of its trading bot on Pangolin, by Q1 of 2021.
- As Yield inches closer and closer to mainnet launch with their contracts being reviewed, they stated that only the ETH liquidity pool of YLD will be incentivized via the Garden. They have also announced that future Garden programs will use Sushiswap LP tokens instead of Uniswap.
- The Celo network validated its 5,000,000th block this past weekend!
- 1inch has listed the TORN token from Tornado Cash. TORN is the native token of Tornado Cash, which is a decentralized, non-custodial privacy solution built on Ethereum.
- BarnBridge announces that the BarnBridge DAO has been activated! The community is now 100% in charge of the protocol.
- THORChain announces the launch of their multi-chain testnet. Already, the testnet has BNB, BTC, BCH, LTC, and ETH bridges activated with their native RUNE token which will soon be upgraded from BEP-2.
- Ren announces that Linkswap has integrated RenVM via RenJS. With this integration, Linkswap users can easily convert, trade, and earn fees by providing liquidity with native DOGE, BTC, BCH, and ZEC.
- Avalanche shares that within 4 hours, ~$1M has moved from Ethereum to Avalanche using the Avalanche-Ethereum Bridge (AEB).
- finance.vote announces that they have integrated Chainlink as their go-to oracle solution for their prediction market DApp, markets.vote.
- Over $17M in trades hit mStable Swap via 0x and Matcha yesterday, February 8th, 2021. This pushed the Save APY beyond 40%.
- StablyCoin has launched USDS, a USD-backed stablecoin built on the FA2 token standard via Tezos. USDS also integrates Permit (TZIP-17), which allows for meta-transactions and gas-less sends.
- Fei Protocol shares their plans for the TRIBE governance token distribution as their official launch is a few weeks away.
- Rari Capital announces that they have successfully integrated Alpha Finance into the Rari Capital ETH Pool.
Mainstream Recap:
- Tesla announces that it has invested an aggregate $1.5B into bitcoin via their recent annual report filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
- The CME Group launched its long-awaited ETH futures product on February 8th, 2021 at 18:00 EST.
- Yearn Finance suffered an exploit on February 4th, 2021 on their yDAI vault. As of February 6th, Yearn is evaluating options to make the exploited yDAI vault whole. The current path involves creating a Maker CDP with YFI and drawing the deficit, which will be repaid with protocol fees.
- River Financial introduces their iOS app which allows users to buy, sell, and track their bitcoin investments.
- BitMEX has published a framework of principles for how best to store additional batches of transactional provenance data, a requirement looming over exchanges via FATF’s new Travel Rule aimed to go live in June 2021.
- Jack Dorsey of Twitter and Square, shares that he is now running his own Bitcoin node.
- Opyn has closed a $6.7M Series A funding round, led by Paradigm. Follow-on backers include Kain Warick of Synthetix and Stani Kulechov of Aave.
- Ocean Protocol and Injective Protocol partner to create innovative data derivative products. This will enable users to both create and trade on new derivative markets that utilize the data products deployed on Ocean.
- Coinbase shares information on their January 29th, 2021 outage via their API.
- 0x Labs has raised $15M in a Series A round led by Pantera Capital with participation from Jump Capital, Nima Capital, Blockchain.com Ventures, Nascent Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, IOSG Ventures, DeFi Alliance, and a host of operators, market makers, and builders across DeFi.
- Matic Network announces that they are expanding their mission and technology scope - thus becoming Polygon, Ethereum’s Internet of Blockchains.
- AnchorUSD, a U.S. based firm has listed Monero. This new asset in addition to Zcash, Tron, Filecoin, and more is instantly available for trading including instant purchases from one’s bank account.
- COINQVEST announced on February 9th, 2021 the approval of their application for the European Union Virtual Currency Service Provider License from the Estonian Government. This allows COINQVEST to operate compliantly and provide custodial wallet solutions to their clients as well as crypto and fiat exchange for cross-border remittance.
- Origin and Amazon have partnered to bring Dshop to the AWS marketplace. Kevin Goodson on the Amazon Blockchain and Emerging Technologies team details how Dshop works with AWS here.
This Week’s Cup of Coffee:
This week, we are staying local and hitting up Saint Frank Coffee Roasting Company in San Francisco, CA for a cup of Little Brother Espresso. This uncommon balance between bright and sweet stone fruits with a lower cut of milk chocolate and caramel makes for a jolt of flavor to start your day.
Jake Tarnow
Not Your Average Engineer