Crypto && Coffee 067
- 10 minsTechnology Recap:
Bitcoin:
- Glassnode shares the 60-day SOPR (Spend Outputs Profit Ratio) reset without falling below one. This indicates a high HODLing conviction from new investors as coins that were bought in 2021 did not really move at a loss during the last dip. View their full market summary here.
- The Lightning Loop reference client has been upgraded to include a new all-inclusive fee rate setting for AutoLoop. This allows users to choose any routing node to peer with and set a max percentage for inbound liquidity in conjunction with a limit on how much one will buy.
- With the actual activation timeline for Taproot still up in the air, BitMex published a post from Jeremy Rubin on how smart contracts can be used to verifiably commit to losing coins if Taproot does not activate by a certain date.
Litecoin:
- In one week, Litecoin’s MWEB (Mimblewimble Extension Blocks) will be code complete! Review the full integration and use-case here.
Ethereum:
- The Go Ethereum team has shipped the v1.10.1 release which will support the upcoming Berlin hard fork scheduled for April 14th, 2021 at block height 12,244,000.
- EIP-1559, the EIP regarding fee market improvements, was accepted last week to be included into the upcoming London hard fork! London is expected to occur shortly after the Berlin fork.
- Vitalik Buterin shares a cross-L2 (layer-2) DEX solution that only requires one side of the equation to be smart contract-capable. The other side can just be a simple coin-spending-only rollup or something similar to Plasma, aka Optimism.
- Bison Trail’s Elias Simos interviews key contributors from ETH2.0’s client teams to explore their involvement and vision for the future.
- Mousse, an ETH2.0 emulator, is announced! This ETH2.0 emulator is for local testing of applications on ETH2.0 data sharding and Rollups. The solution is similar to ETH1.0’s Ganache from Truffle Suite.
- As of March 7th, 2021, roughly 3% of the total ETH supply is locked up in the ETH2.0 Deposit Contract. 107,105 validators with 3,442,946 ETH deposited.
Other Chains:
- SushiSwap’s CTO, Joseph Delong, shares that SushiSwap is now live on the following chains: Fantom, Polygon, xDAI, Binance Smart Chain, and Moonbeam.
- The Cosmos governance proposal to add the Gravity DEX onto Cosmos Hub is now live until March 15th, 2021. It currently has a majority approval of 81.52%.
- dYdX shares that since announcing their layer-2 Perpetuals with StarkWare, 83,580 users have signed up for the waitlist!
- MakerDAO announces the Optimism Dai Bridge with Fast Withdrawals - a bridge which will allow locking up layer-1 DAI to mint layer-2 oDAI as well as allowing oDAI to be burned in exchange for near-instant access to layer-1 DAI.
- DeversiFi introduces fast withdrawals. Users can now swap, send, or lend tokens quickly and easily without paying Ethereum network fees.
- The Electric Coin Company published their Zcash Improvement Proposals (ZIPs) for the upcoming network upgrade (NU5), projected to activate on mainnet in August 2021. The ZIPs include: Orchard shielded protocol, which is the first phase of deployment for Halo2, the version 5 transaction format, and more.
- Yam Finance presents DAO House, the first treasury management solution solely designed for DAOs.
- Yield Credit, the fixed-rate lending and incentivized borrowing platform is now live!
- Cover Protocol announces the first set of Credit Default Swaps (CDS) in DeFi. This will give users the option of hedging the default risk from the borrower side. The first venture into CSD, will be a partnership with Ruler Protocol.
- StarkWare shares their API for Cairo’s SHARP (Shared Prover) service which is now available on Ethereum’s Ropsten testnet.
- Nomadic Labs releases the latest Florence protocol proposals including major improvements for baking accounts, increased maximum operation size, gas optimizations and more. Florence is the next release on the Tezos blockchain.
- Comit Network publishes the first release for public XMR<->BTC atomic swaps. People can now participate in the demo via the open-source codebase.
- Yearn Finance announces Yearn Partners, allowing any protocol that integrates Yearn vaults to earn up to a 50% profit share from their contributed TVL.
- Synthetix adds debt hedging into their Staking application with the ability to view the global debt pool as well as comparison to one’s portfolio.
- OrbitLens introduces Refractor, an aggregator for multi-sig and pending transactions storage on Stellar.
- Vac, a modular, P2P messaging stack for private, secure, and censorship resistant communication releases an overview on spam protection. This protection can be achieved in their Waku Relay v2 protocol through Rate-Limiting Nullifiers (RLN). The article dives into how this can be used within PoW-based systems or peer scoring.
- Polygon, previously Matic, announces Polygon Improvement Proposals (PIPs). This will allow users to propose new features, discuss technical and design decisions, and more.
- Yam Finance releases an update on Degenerative Finance including information on uSTONKs, uGAS, and Rewards Bonus.
- Gaia, the first implementation of Cosmos Hub, has suffered a critical security vulnerability which has been identified in v4.0.x for all non-Cosmos Hub chains that do not use the default Cosmos Bech32 prefix.
Mainstream Recap:
- Lightning Network has now arrived at OKCoin, providing up to 99% lower fees and instant transactions!
- MicroStrategy purchases an additional ~205 bitcoins for ~$10M in cash at an average price of ~$48,888 per bitcoin. As of March 5th, 2021, MicroStrategy holds ~91,064 bitcoins acquired for ~2.196B.
- The CI Galaxy Bitcoin ETF is now live on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX) as of March 9th, 2021 following the receipt of the final prospectus by the Canadian securities regulator.
- Hong Kong listed beauty app, Meitu, announced on March 5th, 2021 that the company has bought 15,000 ETH and 379.1214267 BTC in open market transactions at an aggregate consideration of ~$22.1M and $17.9< USD respectively.
- BitGo receives a New York Trust licence to operate as an independent, regulated qualified custodian under the New York State Banking Law. The charter was issued by the New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS).
- Leading digital payment platform, Wirex, has launched its highly anticipated multi-currency Mastercard debit card in the UK and EEA. In addition, it has launched its new rewards program, X-tras, across the globe.
- Ethereum 2.0 staking protocol, Stakewise, closes a $2M private funding round with the launch of their public mainnet on March 8th, 2021.
- Aker ASA (Aker), announced that it has established Seetee AS, a new company dedicated to investing in projects and companies throughout the Bitcoin ecosystem and which will keep all its liquid investable assets in BTC.
- Ethereum ETP from ETC Group is planning to be listed on Deutsche Borse’s Xetra market.
- Eco, an application that allows users to have one simple balance that lets one spend, send, save, and make money at the same time - raises $26M in new funding led by a16z Crypto.
- The Giving Block shares that 1inch users can now seamlessly donate a variety of cryptocurrencies to any of the 150+ charities working with The Giving Block.
- Jack Dorsey put his first tweet up for sale on March 5th, 2021 via an NFT on Valuables by Cent. He has announced that the sale will end on March 21st and all proceeds will be sent to the Give Directly Africa Response.
- With the current craze around NFTs, Rolling Stone shares that Kings of Leon is looking to release their latest album as an NFT in conjunction with YellowHeart.
- The Mempool Open Source Project has decided to join the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA) together with MicroStrategy, Square, and Blockstream.
- BlockTower Capital raises $25M for decentralized finance.
- MetaMask releases their new Custom Networks API to seamlessly allow cross-chain user experiences in MetaMask including layer-2 networks.
- Ledger announces support for Polkadot! Users can now interact with the network and stake DOT from within the Ledger Live application using their hardware device to sign transactions.
- Atari, the gaming company behind the iconic Pacman, Asteroids, and Pong is set to develop a crypto casino in partnership with Decentral Games.
- OKEx announced support for the ALPHA token on their platform with deposits and trading initiating on March 4th, 2021.
- TapJets, a private jet instant booking platform, now accepts Monero (XMR) as a payment form and stops accepting Ripple (XRP).
- OKCoin announces that Bitcoin Core and Rust Lightning developer Antoine Riard is the latest recipient of the OKCoin Open-Source Bitcoin Developer Grant.
- TQ Tezos announces that they are exploring a new Tezos-based platform for municipal art that enables citizens and art collectors in local communities to engage in innovative ways. The platform is aiming to launch a pilot with the city of Reno, Nevada in conjunction with Mayor Hillary Schieve.
- The Block reports a claim that Meerkat Finance had ~$31M drained in crypto assets after launching on Binance Smart Chain (BSC). Researchers claim that this is not a traditional rug pull, as it looks like they burned LP tokens and team tokens. Both burns occurred after the vaults were deployed and upgraded which enabled these to pass. Here is the address holding the funds now.
- Curve Finance shares that their deprecated pool factory v1 on crv.finance was affected by a recently discovered bug. Anyone in v1 factory pools, should immediately withdraw funds using crv.finance. Pools on Curve.fi and v2 factory pools are unaffected. Curve Finance will release a full post-mortem soon.
- Paid Network was exploited on March 5th, 2021 through the smart contract’s token minting feature. The attacker compromised the private key to the original deployer contract which was able to upgrade a new smart contract which could burn and mint tokens. The attacker minted ~59,471,745.571 PAID tokens and then initiated selling through Uniswap.
- Consensys Security Engineer, Shayan Eskandari, confirmed concerns that Cent, the platform being used for Jack Dorsey’s NFT, has some interesting built in admin features. These features include: being able to halt the contract and steal all the money, and change their fees to any amount up to 100%.
- DODO releases a PSA regarding the recent exploit which took place on March 8th, 2021 where several DODO v2 crowd pools were attacked. WSZO, WCRES, ETHA, and FUSI pools were impacted, while AC pool funds have been fully recovered.
This Week’s Cup of Coffee:
This week, we are heading out to Grand Rapids, MI for a cup of Galeras from Madcap Coffee Company. This Colombian roast yields rich notes of brown sugar, honey, and hints of lemon. This is guaranteed to keep you warm in those brisk mornings as we move into Spring next week.
Jake Tarnow
Not Your Average Engineer