Crypto && Coffee 069
- 9 minsTechnology Recap:
Bitcoin:
- Mempool, previously Mempool.Space, adds a new feature called “the effective fee rate”. This new fee rate is calculated and displayed when a CPFP (Child-pays-for-parent) is detected. In short, CPFP is a fee bumping technique where a user spends an output from a low-feerate unconfirmed transaction in a child transaction with a high feerate in order to encourage miners to include both transactions in a block.
- Anton, the Lightning developer behind, BLW, is now focused on building a new implementation called Immortan - which would be the first Lightning routing mobile wallet.
- In the past week the Lightning Network has increased with 190 nodes, 1,129 channels, and >20 BTC. The network now holds a capacity of 1,161.6 BTC.
- Olaoluwa Osuntokun, aka roasbeff, kicked off a series of PRs to implement BIP-8 and eventually Taproot for btcd.
Ethereum:
- Ethereum Foundation announces a Request For Proposals (RFP) for general security and testing engagements related to the beacon chain and the upcoming merge of Ethereum to the beacon chain.
- Six days ago there was a PR issued on Ethereum’s PM repo regarding Vitalik’s merge proposal to become the main focus after the London and Altair forks.
- Bison Trails releases their latest update on ETH2.0 and the discussions around the eth1<>eth2 merge.
- The Goerli testnet successfully activated the Berlin upgrade on March 18th, 2021.
- The Rinkeby testnet successfully activated the Berlin upgrade, today March 24th, 2021.
- Sigma Prime releases their latest version, v1.2.1 of the ETH2.0 client, Lighthouse. This release contains an optimization that significantly reduces the likelihood of locally-produced blocks being orphaned.
- Ethereum Foundation releases their list of Q4 funded projects and full update from the Ethereum Support Program team.
- Trail of Bits fuzzed the Ethereum Solidity compiler for an entire year. Check out their lessons they learned and five interesting bugs that were uncovered.
Other Chains:
- 1inch announces integration of the Binance Chain Wallet into 1inch. With the Binance Chain Wallet, users can send/receive funds on Binance Chain, Binance Smart Chain, Ethereum, and provide cross-chain transfers.
- Uniswap V3 is almost here!! Uniswap has revealed the detailed overview of V3 with a mainnet launch scheduled for May 5th, 2021 and a scalable Optimism Layer-2 deployment shortly after.
- Mina launched their mainnet yesterday, March 23rd, 2021! Unlike other blockchains, Mina can interact privately with any website on the web. This allows developers to leverage real world data into computing and decision-making. Thanks to zk-SNARKs, the entire Mina blockchain is about 22kb.
- Elastic finance aggregator, Polkalastic, will integrate Chainlink’s Price Feed oracles to securely track the performance of rebase tokens, algorithmic stablecoins, and other elastic assets.
- Nethermind’s layer-2 StarkNet, Nubia, has been deployed to Ropsten testnet for their E2E tests! It is a simple smart contract that verifies Sharp facts built out of the Cairo language.
- Aleo, the module and toolkit for building private, zero-knowledge applications and deploying them to a blockchain, releases information on their core components for any private, programmable application for the Web3 ecosystem.
- Immutable’s CTO delivers a full thread on their design decisions within Ethereum, their choices on scaling, and various options between layer-1 and layer-2.
- Zapper announces that they are now multi-chain! This includes support for portfolio tracking on Polygon, support for Quickswap DEX on Polygon, support for Optimism, and portfolio tracking for Binance Smart Chain.
- Terra, an algorithmically-governed, seigniorage share style stablecoin platform based on Tendermint, updates their oracle feeder costs to keep fees low - allowing oracle messages to only be submitted from the active validator set.
- As Aztek launched zk.money last week, enabling efficient, completely private transactions on the Ethereum blockchain - dive deeper into private ZK-rollups and more in their latest post!
- Novi Financial, the digital wallet behind Facebook’s Diem payment system, releases SMTree - their Rust Merkle tree accumulator to the public.
- StarkWare shares that layer-2 minting is here! 600,000 NFTs were minted on layer-2 in a single STARK proof. Minting an NFT costs less than 10 gas, and with Immutable and Alpha on mainnet soon, the ecosystem will scale drastically with StarkEx.
- Hop Protocol announces their plans for launch in April 2021. Hop allows users to quickly and easily transfer tokens directly between layer-2s, sidechains, and layer-1 Ethereum.
- uForex, a decentralized foreign exchange market based on UMA protocol, is now live! uForex is offering synthetic Chinese Yuan and synthetic Euros.
- Perpetual Protocol launches the REN/USDC trading pair!
- SportMonks shares that they will be launching their own Chainlink node to bring their sports data directly to blockchain applications across leading networks.
- TQ Tezos discusses creating NFTs on Tezos with Sandeep Sangli and Harsha Bakku, the core team behind Kalamint, a public marketplace for NFTs on Tezos.
- The wallet registration stage on DeversiFi has been removed, allowing users to now move to layer-2 in a single transaction.
- Rari Capital launches Fuse! Fuse is a protocol that supports isolated interest rate markets. This allows pool creators to choose all parameters and allow users to enter and exit positions as they wish in a trustless manner.
- Grin++ nearly suffered an attack on March 18th, when the Grin Rust node included an invalid bulletproof in a block. Fortunately, Grin++ did not accept the block, so the incident was identified and avoided quickly. This attack could have inflated the supply drastically. In any case, make sure to upgrade your node to v5.0.4.
- On March 19th, 2021 an executive vote was added to MakerDAO’s voting portal to increase the ETH-A Maximum Debt Ceiling from 2.5B DAI to 15B DAI as well as increase WBTC-A Maximum Debt Ceiling from 350M DAI to 750M.
- Fei Labs pushes back their mainnet launch until March 31st, 2021 to allow further feedback and engage with the community.
- Loopring listed four new tokens within Loopring L2 including four new AMM pools.
- ICHI, the first stablecoin infrastructure built to power other communities, is partnering with 1inch to introduce a joint liquidity farming program.
- Saddle Finance releases a refreshed swap page along with a new pool architecture and stablecoin pool!
- Yield activates YLD’s Utilities including buy-back and burning. YLD is a burnable token with 100% of the fees charged on the platform being used to buy-back YLD from the market and burn it.
- Jack Zampolin shares that Sommelier’s team is focused on Ethereum currently, but their bridge technology will work with Binance Smart Chain, Fantom, and pretty much any EVM compatible chain out there.
- MakerDAO releases a deep dive into blockchain bridges and their importance within DeFi.
- DApp framework, useDApp, has been introduced allowing for rapid DApp development with a focus on UX and developer experience.
- TVL Snacks is now live on UMA. TVL Snacks provides an alternative that decouples the pump and dump craziness from otherwise respectable projects through synthetic derivative tokens based on a project’s actual use.
- UniLend announces that Flash Loans and UFT staking are launching on mainnet on March 30th, 2021.
- The second Monero Bulletproofs+ audit by JP Aumasson, has successfully completed. The full audit report is here.
- Harmony launches the Binance Smart Chain bridge allowing support for BNB and BEP-20 assets over on Harmony.
- Comit Network announces the successful completion of their recent project bringing Liquid Network atomic swaps to the browser!
Mainstream Recap:
- CNBC reports that Morgan Stanley is the first major U.S. bank to offer bitcoin to its wealth management clients. Last Wednesday, they notified their financial advisors that they are launching access to three funds that enable ownership of bitcoin.
- Coinbase will pay $6.5M in a settlement with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) over allegations the exchange “self-traded” digital assets.
- Jack Mallers hints at the latest update to Strike allowing users the ability to get a portion of their paychecks in Bitcoin.
- BitMEX announces they are going to issue Bech32 addresses to all new BitMEX users and migrate current users to new addresses in various phases. This will result in them slowly moving to full SegWit support, finally.
- Atlanta-based Bitcoin Depot is launching more than 100 new crypto ATMs across the U.S.
- ConsenSys releases the latest update on MetaMask Mobile, which now allows users to seamlessly swap tokens from inside their mobile wallet.
- Canadian startup, MintGreen, closes their seed financing round led by CoinShares Ventures. MintGreen recovers waste heat from cryptocurrency mining and sells it via heat offtake agreements with industrial clients.
- Gemini shares a security brief on how users can protect themselves from account takeovers on the Nifty Gateway platform.
- Bitcoin security company, Casa, details their full Sovereign Recovery process.
- Fred Ehrsam, co-founder of Paradigm, announces their investment in Zora through an NFT.
- Travala announces that Monero (XMR) is now accepted on the platform through the Binance Pay payment system.
- OpenSea, a marketplace for NFTs, shares their $23M fundraise, with an incredible set of partners including Andreessen Horowitz, Naval Ravikant, Mark Cuban, Tim Ferris, Belinda Johnson, Ben Silbermann, Alexis Ohanian, Balaji Srinivasan, Standard Crypto, Linda Xie, Avichal Garg, and Flamingo DAO.
- Bounce Finance announced that it has raised a new funding round. Investors include Pantera, Coinbase Ventures, Hashed, Fundamental Labs, DHVC, Blockchain Capital, and SNZ capital. The raised funds will be used to build an NFT marketplace and ecommerce platform.
- Nick Grossman shares a post entitled Bitcoin as Battery, which dives into Bitcoin’s relationship to energy consumption.
- Gemini announces support for new DeFi, gaming, NFT, and infrastructure tokens including: Bancor (BNT), 1inch (1INCH), Loopring (LRC), The Sandbox (SAND), Skale (SKL), The Graph (GRT), and Enjin (ENJ). Trading is now available for all seven tokens.
- Ethereum-based interoperability project Connext has raised $2.2M in seed funding, led by Polychain Capital.
This Week’s Cup of Coffee:
This week, we are traveling to Canton, GA for a cup of Essence from Alma Coffee. This espresso roast is a perfect balance of sweetness, acidity, and slight bitterness. Even if you don’t have an espresso machine, this roast is awesome as a drip or french press. Enjoy!!
Jake Tarnow
Not Your Average Engineer