Crypto && Coffee 064
- 8 minsTechnology Recap:
Bitcoin:
- On Tuesday, February 16th, 2021 Bitcoin hit another ATH at $50,000. Here are articles from both The Wall Street Journal and Coinbase.
- Lightning Labs announces the preview release of the Lightning Pool UI. With this update, users can now buy access to Lightning liquidity and sell channels right in the Terminal dashboard. Take a deep dive into Lightning Pool here.
- Russel O’Connor and Andrew Poelstra published a post announcing the implementation of an algorithm that can speed up Bitcoin Core’s signature verification by 15% while also reducing the time it takes to generate signatures by 25%.
- Hugo Nguyen posted to the Bitcoin-Dev mailing list a draft BIP that describes how hardware wallets can securely exchange information necessary to become signers for multisig wallets.
Litecoin:
- On February 13th, 2021, Litecoin had it’s 2 millionth block mined. At the time of mining Litecoin continues to reach its YTD high of ~$220.
Ethereum:
- Danny Ryan of Ethereum Foundation, shares a quick update on ETH2.0 including sharding, Kate polynomial commitments, design of the executable Beacon Chain, and more.
- Ben Edgington shares what’s new in ETH2.0 in regard to scalability, Beacon Chain slashings, and future upgrades.
- As highlighted last week, 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. Since the announcement, hundreds of supporters have been posting information about their support for EIP-1559.
- Sigma Prime publishes the latest release for their ETH2.0 client, Lighthouse v1.1.1. This release contains important optimizations that reduce propagation times of new blocks on the network.
Other Chains:
- StarkWare announces that BadgerDAO is launching on StarkNet! This will be the first gas-free ZK-Rollup AMM dedicated to tokenized Bitcoin.
- Ren announces that RenBridge v2 is live! Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Zcash, and Dogecoin are now supported on Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain.
- mStable launches their second mAsset, mBTC. mBTC is a meta-stablecoin based on tokenized Bitcoin, with a weight-limited basket of assets and native interest rate. This means that users could also mint mBTC with renBTC.
- This Thursday, February 18th, 2021 at 06:00 UTC, Cosmos will stop producing blocks momentarily as the 125 validators across the globe activate Stargate. This historic upgrade will enable IBC (Inter-Blockchain Communication) which marks the completion of the original Cosmos whitepaper and ushers in the age of cross-chain communication.
- Bison Trails publishes Global Blockchain Sync (GBS), a new software to reduce the time it takes new nodes to be production-ready by over 100x. GBS is available for all cloud providers and regions supported by the Bison Trails platform with local blockchain image repositories that undergo multiple steps of verification.
- IC3 publishes an article on Using Universal Composability to Implement Off-Chain Payment Channels. As payment channels are one of the fundamental ways for scaling cryptocurrency networks, this post sheds light on that including a simple implementation that includes an executable security specification in the form of a UC ideal functionality.
- DeversiFi promotes their platform as gas fees continue to increase within Ethereum and the need for lower fees is rising.
- On February 12th, 2021, the 1inch Foundation provided another distribution of the 1INCH token to make sure that users who have not yet received their tokens will collect them. 3.56M tokens were sent to 1,308 participants in the second liquidity mining program, 4.8M to 9,094 users of Mooniswap, 310K to limit order users, and 375K to Argent, Authereum, Gnosis, and Pillar wallets with transaction relayers.
- Tezos underwent a successful activation of Edo last Saturday, marking the fifth and most ambitious Tezos upgrade over the past two years. In this thread, Tezos shares what comes with this significant upgrade.
- Aave goes through another governance vote, this time adding xSUSHI to the platform.
- Degenerative Finance announces uSTONKS. uSTONKS, which is designed by UMA Protocol, will be a synthetic that tracks an index of the ten most bullish Wall Street Bets stocks.
- Akash Network previews DeCloud, the first decentralized cloud marketplace aimed at being a faster, more efficient, and lower cost cloud build for DeFi.
- Fuse adds Kyber Network’s KNC token to their FuseSwap, rewarding Liquidity Providers on the KNC/USDC pair with 50,000 FUSE tokens over a 1-month period.
- StarkWare shares the Cairo Games, which will kick off on February 18th, 2021. The Cairo Games will feature various puzzles which involve developers completing a prover using Cairo. Each first solution to a puzzle will receive a prize.
- On February 15th, 2021, Uniswap became the first decentralized trading platform to process over $100B in volume.
- Instadapp shares DeFi Simulation, a gas free environment to try DeFi without spending any real money.
- Ribbon Finance is announced! Ribbon is a new company focused on creating crypto structured products on DeFi. They are focused on products to tackle four major categories: volatility, yield enhancement, principal protection and accumulation.
- XPeare, an AI and blockchain-powered content IP marketplace and acceleration platform, announces that they will be integrating Chainlink oracles into various aspects of their ecosystem.
- The SushiSwap LP Rewards pre-deposit window is now live! Users can now stake their governance token for Rari Capital, RGT, LP tokens to start earning RGT + SUSHI rewards in roughly 5 days.
Mainstream Recap:
- BNY Mellon, the nation’s oldest bank, announced last week that it will allow digital assets to pass through the same plumbing used by managers’ other, more traditional holdings, from Treasurys to technology stocks - using a platform that is now in prototype.
- CoinDesk reports that Deutsche Bank has joined the growing ranks of large financial institutions exploring crypto custody and possibilities to offer services to hedge funds.
- Bitso, Latin America’s leading crypto platform, announced on February 11th, 2021 that it has acquired Quedex, a regulated, Europe-based Crypto Derivatives Trading platform. This acquisition will integrate Quedex’s trading engine into Bitso as it continues to expand throughout Latin America and globally.
- Filed on February 10th, 2021, the Delaware corporate registry shows Grayscale is considering Yearn Finance’s YFI as a potential future offering.
- The Avalanche network suffered a major issue earlier last week when heavy load on the system triggered a non-deterministic bug related to state verification. This caused validations to accept some invalid mint transactions, with the rest of the network refusing to honor the transactions. Since then, the issue has been patched and services such as the Avalanche-Ethereum bridge are back online.
- Alpha Homora V2 published their post mortem on the recent exploit involving flash loans which allowed an attacker to get away with ~$38M.
- Kraken announces Kraken Ventures, a global investment operation with a presence in Austin, Berlin, Hong Kong, London, New York, and San Francisco. Kraken Ventures will provide the necessary resources and expertise to developers and respective technologies that will power the next wave of innovation.
- Jack Dorsey shares that he and Jay-Z will be giving 500 BTC to a new endowment named ₿trust, to fund Bitcoin development - initially focused on teams in Africa and India.
- BitPay announces that US cardholders of the BitPay Prepaid Mastercard can add their card to the Apple Wallet and spend via Apple Pay.
- Synthetix has raised $12M from venture capital firms Coinbase Ventures, Paradigm, and IOSG.
- Reflexer Labs announces a Series A round of $4.14M led by Pantera Capital and Lemniscap. Reflexer built out a crypto-native stable asset for the DeFi ecosystem, RAI, which launched today!
- The Ontario Securities Commission gave approval to Purpose Investment’s North American Bitcoin ETF last Thursday.
- Bloomberg shares that cryptocurrency holders in India will likely be given a 3-to-6 month period to close their positions.
- Showtime, the decentralized social network aimed around NFTs, announces a pre-seed round led by Dragonfly Capital, Robot Ventures, Bollinger Investment Group, and various angel investors.
- On Monday, February 15th, 2021, the French information security agency ANSSI published an advisory warning that hackers with links to Sandworm, a group within Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency, had breached several French organizations. The intrusions date back to late 2017 and have continued through 2020.
- Balancer Labs announces that Three Arrows Capital and DeFiance Capital have purchased $5M of BAL ahead of Balancer V2. They are joining the $12M Series A alongside Pantera Capital and Alameda Research.
This Week’s Cup of Coffee:
This week, we are hitting up Mother Tongue Coffee in Oakland, CA for a cup of Mugshots. This roast is a blend of Ethiopian and Central American coffees that yields flavors of peach, sweet chocolate, and hints of florals. I suggest brewing this roast via pour over or drip. Enjoy!!
Jake Tarnow
Not Your Average Engineer