Crypto && Coffee 073
- 7 minsTechnology Recap:
Bitcoin:
- Bitcoin Core v0.21.1rc1 has been published which includes Taproot activation! This is set in place to activate, based on what is currently proposed, at earliest at block height 709,632, which would be roughly November 12th, 2021. As normal, this release candidate will go through the normal review and signing process.
- For the past few days, we have seen fee rates soar and stay above 250 sat/vB. Some are claiming that the mining outage over the weekend is the cause for these rates. The best option to mitigate fees currently is to migrate to layer-2 solutions like Lightning Network or Liquid.
Ethereum:
- After the Berlin hard fork last week on April 15th, 2021, OpenEthereum’s client had a consensus error at height 12,244,294 which occurred due to OpenEthereum nodes handling gas discounts differently, thus invalidating transactions and blocks. The teams resolved the issue within 5 hours.
- Tim Beiko shares that London now has a devnet up with EIP-1559, the core devs prototype of Rayonism with The Merge running smoothly and more!
- Ethereum Cat Herders publish their latest update on all things post-Berlin, Aleut devnet, EIP-3403, client upgrades and more!
- Barnabé Monnot goes in depth on the Road to Ethereum and what Ethereum will be like once we are at a synthesis of eth2 and sharding.
Other Chains:
- The Chainlink 2.0 Whitepaper has been released. It presents an ambitious vision to bring off-chain computation to Decentralized Oracle Networks (DONs) to enable highly scalable and privacy-preserving hybrid smart contracts.
- Balancer v2 smart contracts are now live on mainnet. This is the largest upgrade for Balancer and will enable a single vault that provides flexibility to support different types of AMM logic.
- DEX aggregator, 1inch, has integrated Kyber Network’s Dynamic Market Maker (DMM) protocol as a key liquidity source. Kyber DMM provides high capital efficiency and optimized fees for liquidity providers (LPs), enabling better liquidity and slippage for aggregators and dApps.
- StarkWare provides a deep dive into Oracle Price Feeds and how they are used on StarkEx which is powering platforms such as dYdX.
- Kyber Network’s Krystal is now live to the world. Krystal, an iOS and Android dApp, empowers users to swap any ERC-20 token on any protocol of one’s choosing. At launch Krystal is directly integrated with Kyber Network and Uniswap, with plans to add support for SushiSwap, Kyber DMM, and more.
- Users of Synthetix can now borrow Synths against ETH and renBTC within the Staking dApp.
- Monero releases GUI v0.17.2.1 which includes minor bug fixes and Mac serialization compatibility issues.
- KeeperDAO introduces the second phase of their Hiding Game, kCompound, a new kind of DeFi borrowing experience. This wrapper for the Compound lending platforms lets users deposit collateral and borrow assets all while KeeperDAO monitors and protects borrowers from liquidation.
- InstaDapp launches the first ever L1->L2 refinancing bridge between Ethereum and Polygon. Users can migrate their layer-1 debt positions to Aave on Polygon in a single click and enjoy powerful DeFi functionality.
- zkSync explains zkPorter, a system that scales to 20,000+ transactions per second with more security than optimistic rollups, at ETHGlobal last week.
- dYdX’s StarkEx had 1,000 liquidations in less than 1 hour when prices dropped hard over the weekend. Each liquidation was executed at ~6K gas on layer-2, compared to 280K gas previously on layer-1. That is claiming ~0.15% on layer-2 vs. 10% on layer-1 of total ETH gas budget during the crucial times.
- Ellipsis, a secure low-slippage swapping service on BSC, announces their first Bitcoin pool allowing for the deposit and staking of renBTC and BTCB.
- Yearn Finance shares a potential YIP establishing Governance 2.0 that aims to fully formalize Yearn’s operational governance and creates new autonomous contributor teams, yTeams.
- Gelato v2 goes live enabling a wide variety of operations ranging form limit orders to dollar-cost averaging. These operations can be built via smart contracts that act as “executors” or bots in the Gelato network.
- Monero celebrated it’s 7th birthday on April 18th, 2021!
- Stabilize Protocol shares that BTC strategy is coming to Stabilize BSC soon. This will allow users to earn arbitrage interest on deposits of BTCB, renBTC, and DBTC.
- StakeWise announces trustless staking and the end of their bootstrapping campaign.
- Storj highlights the production availability of their new cloud-hosted S3-compatible gateway service for developers along with a host of new architectural improvements.
- Blocknative introduces the Simulation Platform which computes and summarizes the likely results of every marketable pending transaction against the current state of the chain.
Mainstream Recap:
- OKEx now fully supports Lightning Network for faster and cheaper BTC transactions. OKEx users are now able to use the Lightning Network for both BTC deposits and withdrawals.
- River Financial shares that clients can now interact with both Lightning Network and Bitcoin. Allowing users to deposit BTC using Lightning and immediately withdraw on-chain.
- Venmo users can now buy and sell bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
- Former acting Comptroller of the Currency, Brian P. Brooks is to join Binance.US as CEO.
- Chicago-based Rothschild Investment Corporation recently bought 265,302 shares of the Grayscale Ethereum Trust, its first investment in ETH Trust.
- Brink, the open source Bitcoin development firm that supports developers, receives a $210K donation from BtcTurk. Some existing work such as FROST from Jesse Posner can be viewed here.
- a16z announces that they are leading Aleo’s Series A to aid in building a blockchain that addresses privacy and scalability concerns in an elegant and pragmatic way.
- Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced a new HM Treasury and Bank of England Task Force to explore a UK CBDC.
- Cosmos’ ATOM is being considered as one of the viable tech solutions for the introduction of the digital Euro.
- Lamassu ATM customers can now receive ZEC to their wallets using shielded Z-addresses!
- Gemini shares that Ether ETFs are now approved on Canada’s Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX), giving investors an efficient and secure access to ETH. Gemini Fund Solutions is providing custody, clearing, execution, and capital market services to each BTC ETF and each ETH ETF in North America.
- Coinbase begins allowing ETH2.0 staking! Customers who were previously on the waitlist can now earn up to 6% APR on their ETH holdings.
- TIME partners with Crypto.com and begins accepting cryptocurrency as a form of payment for digital subscriptions.
- Celsius Network discovered a breach of its third-party email distribution system. Users have since been receiving phishing emails and text messages.
- CoinDesk reports that Sotheby’s first NFT sale of works by pseudonymous artist Pak, fetched $16.8M over the three-day drop on Nifty Gateway.
- Morgan Stanley confirms that it is offering its wealth management clients exposure to BTC by way of a pair of external crypto funds.
- Dharma shares that users can now go from USD to DeFi in all 50 US states. Users can deposit up to $25K per week directly from their bank account into Uniswap, Compound, Aave, Yearn, and PoolTogether.
- EasyFi released a post mortem on their security incident on April 19th, 2021 where a hacker managed to get access to admin keys and remove existing liquidity of ~$6M from USD/DAI/USDT pools and transfer 2.98M EASY tokens to their wallet.
- Gemini shares that they have surpassed more than $25B in crypto under custody!
- LVMH has joined forces with two other major luxury names, Prada and Cartier, to develop Aura Blockchain Consortium, the world’s first global luxury blockchain.
- Deutsche Telekom has invested in Celo, the mobile phone focused blockchain payments platform.
This Week’s Cup of Coffee:
This week, we are heading to New York, New York for a cup of single origin _Guatemala Antigua _roast from Orens Coffee. This roast offers notes of chocolate, caramel, and hints of orange. Sip up and enjoy as we move more into some Spring weather!
Jake Tarnow
Not Your Average Engineer