Crypto && Coffee 076
- 9 minsTechnology Recap:
Bitcoin:
- The mempool depth yesterday dropped to only 26 blocks with the lowest priority for transactions only being 2 sat/vB. The next difficulty adjustment is only a day away which will have difficulty go up by ~21.8%.
- Antoine Riard posted to the Bitcoin-Dev mailing list regarding a defect in Bitcoin Core BIP-125 logic with minor security and operational implications for downstream projects. BIP-125 deals with opt-in Replace-by-Fee (RBF) signaling.
- Paolo Guasoni, Gur Huberman, and Clara Shikhelman release a new paper entitled Lightning Network Economics: Channels. The paper aims to address common questions such as how much a Lightning Channel costs, and the optimal amount to lock in.
- Anthony Ronning publishes an article on the Current State of Lightning Network Privacy, which explores public and private channels, mixed UTXOs, and more!
Ethereum:
- Ethereum set another new ATH on May 9th, 2021 at $4K USD!
- Aya Miyaguchi of Ethereum Foundation announces the EF Fellowship Program, a pilot project that has been launched by Next Billion, a team at EF that focuses on seeking opportunities in emerging economies.
- Ben Edgington shares what’s new in ETH2.0 highlighting the upcoming Altair Beacon Chain update aimed to have a spec freeze on May 21st, 2021, as well as The Merge.
- Ethereum Cat Herders release their latest update diving into all the EIPs touched on in last week’s All Core Devs meeting.
- Georgios Konstantopoulos shared his recent discussion on layer-2 and Miner Extractable Value (MEV) from ETHGlobal’s MEV Roast last week.
- OpenEthereum releases their v3.2.5 upgrade which includes tons of enhancements around AuRa multi-block rewards, further Nethermind support, ability to freeze pruning while creating a snapshot, and more!
- Nethermind releases their latest implementation of Rayonism and testnet for The Merge.
Other Chains:
- Uniswap v3 is now live! This upgrade offers improvements on execution for traders, concentrated liquidity which gives more control over LPs and multiple fee tiers. Full list of deployment addresses are here.
- Dfinity is now live after five years of development! On May 10th, at 10:00 CEST, Dfinity open-sourced the Internet Computer - a fully adaptive blockchain. Dfinity aims to compete against AWS and GCP as a decentralized infrastructure which will self-direct.
- Tezo’s sixth upgrade is now live at block height 1,466,369. This recent upgrade, Florence, doubles the maximum smart contract size, reduces gas costs, and makes it easier for developers to write complicated systems via smart contracts.
- Ren announces that RenVM v0.4 is now live! This upgrade activates Greycore testnet, fee improvements for Darknode operators, and streamlining support for new chains which will be ramping up throughout the month of May, and more!
- Ubeswap, a DEX and automated liquidity provision on Celo, updated their pool rewards with a new UBE/CELO pair, increased rewards and removal of the old UBE-mcUSD/UBE-mcEUR rewards.
- Cover Protocol’s V2 mainnet and BSC launch will happen today which will launch four pools: 1 Ruler CDS pool for selected Ruler Pairs, 1 BoringDAO pool, 1 YearnV2 pool for larger vaults, and 1 stablecoin pool.
- Wirex is migrating 20% of the total supply of WXT from the Stellar Network to Ethereum, making WXT their first multi-blockchain token. As of now, the token is only available on 1inch Network.
- Celo, a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) EVM compatible blockchain with native stablecoin and mobile support, shares that the Donut hard fork is set to activate at block height 6774000, which will be on May 19th, 2021. The upgrade includes a Blake2s precompile, BLS Curve operations, Ed25519 precompile, and MetaMask support!
- Balancer V2 is now live! Balancer V2 offers a generalized protocol for AMMs and upgrades the interface for trading and liquidity.
- A new Governance poll has been posted for Aave to extend the existing Aave Liquidity Mining program to include Chainlink’s LINK as an asset eligible for stkAAVE rewards.
- Gelato Network announces the upcoming Gelato token, GEL. GEL will serve as the central focal point in governance, staking and slashing, in the hopes to ensures Dapp developers, executor bot operators and core developers all work and grow together.
- BSC NFT Exchange and infrastructure provider, Juggernaut, integrates Chainlink Price Feeds to create dynamic NFTs that evolve according to changing market conditions.
- dYdX shares that they have had $868M in total volume on layer-2 since launch, 151K total trades settled, 9.4K unique users by deposit and $28M in total value locked. All with zero gas fees.
- Alchemix is advancing their self-paying loan protocols by integrating Chainlink Price Feeds which will be referenced during minting, liquidation, and/or payback processes.
- With Mirror’s recent introduction of Splits, a native feature that lets one route funds continuously to an unlimited number of Ethereum addresses, they have now shared the full technical details of the production of their smart contracts.
- The Relevant Oracle Module has now been open-sourced and is to be used with the Cosmos SDK. Developers can use this module to easily build oracles and off-chain worker processes to incorporate them within their Dapps.
- Kadena announces that their KDA token will be listed on KuCoin!
- Mercurial Finance shared their litepaper which describes how their dynamic vaults for stable assets work on Solana! Their team is working in collaboration with Kyber Network which will help drive innovation and adoption among Ethereum and DeFi users.
- The Diem blockchain, formerly Libra from Facebook, published a paper entitled Proof of Assets in the Diem Blockchain.
- 1inch Network has successfully surpassed 200K in total users!
- Bancor is using Chainlink VRF to securely award limited edition trophy NFTs to top users for the network’s new incentive program.
Mainstream Recap:
- Galaxy Digital Holding Ltd. has agreed to buy BitGo Inc. for $1.2B in cash and stock.
- Tala, a leading digital financial services provider in emerging markets, has partnered with Visa, with support from Circle and Stellar to make it easier to store and transfer value in USDC.
- Crypto exchange Bitso wrapped up a $250M Series C funding round, led by Tiger Global and Coatue Management.
- John Dalby, recent CFO of Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund, has left and has been appointed CFO of NYDIG, a leading provider of investment and technology solutions for Bitcoin.
- Marathon Digital Holdings becomes the first North American enterprise miner to produce, as they say, an OFAC compliant block in Bitcoin. MARA apparently doesn’t include certain transactions into their block to ensure “clean coins”. In their first block, they added in the “MARA Pool - OFAC Compliant Block” coinbase message. The block excluded 8 transactions.
- In Square’s most recent shareholder letter, the firm shared that CashApp generated ~$3.51B of bitcoin revenue and $75M of bitcoin gross profit during the first quarter of 2021.
- Gemini has now surpassed ~$30B in crypto under custody.
- The Financial Times reports that Citibank is considering launching crypto services after the recent surge in client interest.
- Bloomberg reports that UBS Group AG is in the early stages of planning to offer wealthy customers digital currency investments.
- The Bank of Israel has accelerated its learning on the issue of a central bank digital currency (CBDC).
- Kraken now supports staking of Cardano’s ADA as of May 4th, 2021 at 21:00 UTC. Staking is available as well for six other assets!
- Nuvei Corporation, the global payment technology partner of thriving brands, announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire crypto payments startup, SimplexCC Ltd. The acquisition will be worth $250M in paid cash.
- Revolut finally supports BTC withdrawals! During their beta phase, UK customers can add a maximum of three external addresses and withdraw up to £1,000 a month or £500 per day.
- Latin America giant, MercadoLibre, disclosed a $7.8M purchase of bitcoin on May 5th, 2021. CoinDesk reports that the Argentina-based company said the purchase took place last quarter and was part of its treasury strategy.
- VanEck filed an Ether-based ETF with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the VanEck Ethereum Trust, last week that would allow retail and institutional traders to gain exposure to Ethereum. VanEck intends to work with Cboe BZX Exchange on the offering.
- vSwap AMM from ValueDeFi on BSC suffered a ~$17M exploit on May 7th, 2021 with $11M being stolen from a non-50/50 pool and ~$6M lost as a result of contract re-initialization. Nine pools were attacked which stole funds in those currencies and swapped to ~3.24K anyETH which were withdrawn to Ethereum.
- Alpha Finance Lab, the team behind AlphaHomora, were notified of the recent exploit on Rari Capital that was due to the incorrect assumption when using HomoraBank contract to setup an ibETH pool. The exploit resulted in ~$14M and researchers are linking the hacker to the ValueDeFi hack the day before. The hackers obtained funds to attack Rari from vSafe yield farm on BSC. 5,346 BNB were swapped to 1K ETH.
- The NFT social network, Showtime, had a $7.6M funding round recently with investments from Paradigm and DJ 3LAU.
- Sharon Edelson of Forbes writes how Blockchain Could Transform Retail, From Supply Chain And Inventory Management To Product Provenance.
- Hong Kong-based cryptocurrency exchange Crypto.com is now the official sponsor and NFT sponsor of Italy’s Coppa Italia which will take place on May 19th, 2021 between Atalanta and Juventus.
- Metromile, Inc., a leading digital insurance platform and pay-per-mil auto issuer, announced it will soon allow policyholders the option to pay for insurance and receive payment for eligible and approved insured claims in bitcoin.
- As of May 6th, 2021, Coinbase now supports Cartest (CTSI), iExec (RLC), Mirror Protocol (MIR), and Tellor (TRB).
- Gemini shares that users can now earn 2.25% APY on DOGE with Gemini Earn.
- Ledger now fully supports Avalanche (AVAX) on its Nano S and Nano X hardware wallets. The integration enables users to securely store and access their AVAX tokens on X-Chain, P-Chain, and C-Chain addresses using Ledger.
- CoinDesk reports that DARMA is leading a $3M seed round in NiiFi, a DEX being built on Nahmii, a layer-2 system for Ethereum.
- The DeFi Alliance welcomes the Solana Foundation to their Ecosystem Partnership Program to enable Solana-specific programming for the next cohort in their Accelerator program.
This Week’s Cup of Coffee:
This week, we are heading to Washington, D.C. for a cup of Arboretum from Small Planes Coffee. This roast is imported from Osito Coffee and yields flavors of milk chocolate, toasted nuts, and hints of fruit. I prefer to brew this roast for espresso drinks such as a flat white or macchiato. Cheers!!
Jake Tarnow
Not Your Average Engineer