Crypto && Coffee 066
- 8 minsTechnology Recap:
Bitcoin:
- Further discussion took place over recent weeks on the activation parameters for Taproot. There still has been no decision on the exact timing of activation.
- The first Taproot script-path spend has been issued on signet!
- Lightning Terminal v0.4.1-alpha has been released. This upgrade includes a few bug fixes as well as the long awaited remote modes for Faraday, Loop, and Pool.
Litecoin:
- David Burkett shares his February update on MWEB for Litecoin. The team is aiming for a code complete date of March 15th, 2021.
Ethereum:
- Péter Szilágyi, Team Lead at Ethereum, shares that Geth v1.10.0 will be needed for the upcoming Berlin upgrade on all networks. The Ropsten testnet fork is eight days out.
- Vitalik Buterin publishes a PR which has been merged to remove gas refunds for SSTORE and SELFDESTRUCT.
- Prysmatic Labs releases ETH2.0 client Prysm v1.3.1. This release contains an important fix for an issue in v1.3.0 where some validator databases could not be upgraded.
- The EIP-1559 Mainnet Readiness Checklist has been published.
- The rough timeline for the London fork, which will occur after Berlin, has been published with notes on a potential July release.
- OpenEthereum has prepared a release candidate for the upcoming Berlin hard fork. The first testnet fork for Ropsten will take place on March 10th, 2021 with mainnet planned for April 14th, 2021.
Other Chains:
- Ren Protocol shares their February update focusing on RenBridge, RenVM, Lotan, Loki, and more.
- Compound Labs introduces Gateway, a cross-chain interest rate market that allows one to borrow assets native to one chain with collateral from another chain.
- Stellar USDC will soon be natively integrated into Wyre’s API, allowing customers to make payments and move money between the world’s leading digital dollar stablecoin and local fiat currencies.
- Camila Russo, author of The Infinite Machine shares the Definitive Guide to DeFi.
- Hermez, a trustless ZK-Rollup for Ethereum, has now made their testnet public and is supporting a full round of private testing ahead of its mainnet launch.
- Blocknative introduces the Blocknative Gas Platform, a new take on Ethereum gas price estimation.
- Monero opens up a second audit of Bulletproofs+ which will be conducted by well-known cryptographer JP Aumasson.
- Since the recent launch of Cosmos’ IBC, Kava Labs will expand its integration with Chainlink by using IBC to make Chainlink’s Price Feed data available within the Cosmos ecosystem.
- The Electric Coin Company published the v4.3.0 release of Zcash. This release includes various P2P changes, reduction of data downloaded by zcashd during the initial block download and more.
- Bancor community members proposed a design for gasless voting in Bancor governance.
- The Fantom layer-1 blockchain now uses The Graph’s indexing and querying which allows Fantom developers to now be eligible for The Graph Foundation grants.
- SushiSwap shares further updates to The Onsen. View this thread for new pairs and a changeup in allocation points.
- Within the past day, Bancor has attracted $6M in liquidity through their new UNI pool
- BadgerDAO announced an integration with RenVM to give users access to native Bitcoin.
- Yield Protocol shares a new USDC feature that allows users to receive funds as USDC when borrowing DAI at a fixed rate.
- Messari releases a primer on Polkadot and what it means for DOT.
- Curve Finance has been deployed on Fantom.
- Nym releases their whitepaper for their next generation decentralized privacy infrastructure for message-based applications.
- Loopring has now integrated WBTC vs. DAI, USDC, and USDT AMM pools and orderbook pairs.
- Stellar releases Horizon v2.0. This major release introduces an optimized Captive Stellar Core, reduction of disk space requirements, and no more database requirements.
- Injective is integrating with Avalanche to create a diverse array of interoperable derivative products.
- Saddle Finance shares that their pool has passed 1,000 BTC in TVL. The TVL has quadrupled since the guard was disabled 1 week ago.
- The Electric Coin Company releases a Security Announcement regarding ECC iOS SDK v0.9.2 for Zcash.
- Ultra Stellar announces a new tool to easily swap USDC on Ethereum to Stellar.
- The B Protocol and Compound integration is now live!
Mainstream Recap:
- On February 25th, 2021, Coinbase’s Form S-1 was officially published by the SEC. Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and JP Morgan Securities were among the banks chosen to aid in the listing process.
- MicroStrategy has purchased an additional ~328 bitcoins for ~$15M in cash at an average price of ~$45,710 per bitcoin. As of March 1st, 2021, MicroStrategy holds ~90,859 BTC acquired for ~2.186B.
- Alameda Research is leading a $40M investment round in Oxygen, which aims to do for DeFi what Robinhood enables for stocks.
- In a report with Express UK, Paolo Ardoino, CTO of Bitfinex, shares that Bitfinex processed 12K transactions on the Lightning Network in February.
- Ethereum layer-2 scaling startup Optimism raises $25M in a Series A investment from Andreesen Horowitz.
- Square Inc. announces its industrial bank, Square Financial Services, has begun operations after completing the charter approval process with the FDIC and Utah Department of Financial Institutions.
- Grayscale Investments, the world’s largest digital currency asset manager, is announcing its consideration of several new digital assets including: AAVE, BAT, ADA, LINK, COMP, ATOM, MANA, EOS, FIL, FLOW, LPT, MKR, XMR, NMR, DOT, RSR, STX, SUSHI, SNX, XTZ, GRT, UNI, and YFI.
- AWS announces general availability of Ethereum on Amazon Managed Blockchain.
- MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative has revealed a new Bitcoin Software and Security Effort that is intended to foster research into bolstering the Bitcoin network defenses. This initiative has support from Gemini’s Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, MicroStrategy’s Michael Saylor, and Square’s Jack Dorsey.
- CI Global Asset Management (CI GAM) announced that it has filed and obtained a receipt for a preliminary prospectus for CI Galaxy Ethereum ETF. When launched, it is expected to be the first ETF in the world to invest directly in ETH.
- Evolve Funds Group Inc., Evolve, announces that it has filed a preliminary prospectus with the Canadian securities regulators for the Ether ETF.
- In last week’s FEDS Notes, Federal Reserve Senior Counsel Jess Cheng, Payments Specialist Angela N. Lawson, and Technology Lab Manager Paul Wong stated that they are looking at engaging the public regarding the pros and cons of a U.S. Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC).
- FTX CEO and founder of Alameda Research, Sam Bankman-Fried, shares that users can now get instant fiat deposits on FTX via PayPal. Full report here.
- Crypto ATM, CoinFlip, announces that DOGE can now be purchased with cash across its network.
- On February 27th, 2021 at 16:47 UTC, the Furucombo proxy was compromised by an attacker. The attacker used a fake contract to make Furucombo think that Aave V2 had a new implementation. Thus all transfers were sent to an arbitrary address. Furucombo has deauthorized the relevant components and later released a full post-mortem.
- 1inch announces a strategic partnership with Bitquery, a blockchain data provider which will grant 1inch access to compliance and on-chain intelligence tools.
- Alexander Leishman, CEO and CTO of River Financial shares that they have sold more BTC in 2021 as they have in all of 2020.
- CoinShares, Europe’s largest digital asset investment house with ~$4B in assets under management, announced the launch of a new physically-backed ETP, CoinShares Physical Ethereum.
- German fintech firm, Solarisbank, launches a licensed crypto brokerage.
- Anchorage announces a $80M Series C led by GIC, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, with participation from a16z, Blockchain Capital, Lux Capital, and Indico Capital.
- CoinDesk reports that Kraken is reportedly in talks to raise new capital in a move that could see the company’s valuation jump to ~$10B.
- Chorus One announces that they will acquire Cryptium Labs’ validators on Tezos, NEAR Protocol, Polkadot, and Kusama Network. This will enable over 2K delegators with more than $125M assets staked to continue earning rewards.
- Canada-based crypto exchange CoinSmart has announced the closing of a $4.5M CAD seed funding round.
- zkSNACKs, the company behind Wasabi Wallet, and Canadian Bitcoin exchange Bull Bitcoin have teamed up to finance a $40K grant awarded to Bitcoin developer Luke Jr. This grant is in support of the further development of Bitcoin Knots.
- The Human Rights Foundation announces $70K in Bitcoin development grants. The grants are being awarded to Jesse Posner, who is working on adapter signatures and DLCs, Muun Wallet, and the non-profit Blockchain Commons.
- Binance has listed BADGER.
- Kraken announces Ocean Protocol (OCEAN) and Energy Web Token (EWT) will start trading on March 3rd, 2021 at 15:30 UTC.
This Week’s Cup of Coffee:
This week, we are heading down to Greenville, South Carolina for a cup of Belly Warmer from Methodical Coffee. This dark blend of Costa Rica La Pastora and Brazil Dulce Signature yields flavors of dark chocolate, almond butter, and gives you that solid jolt to get your day going! Sip up and enjoy!!
Jake Tarnow
Not Your Average Engineer