Crypto && Coffee 077
- 7 minsTechnology Recap:
Bitcoin:
- Outputs are slowly shifting to native SegWit. March 1st, 2021 showed ~12% of outputs as P2WPKH and 44% being P2PKH. As of May 15th, 2021 the SegWit outputs have increased to 15%.
- Lightning Labs releases the latest edition of The Lightning Lab touching on the release of Terminal Web, Strike’s Lightning payments app in El Salvador, Kollider exchange, and more!
BitcoinCash:
- On May 15th, 2021, BitcoinCash activated a new network upgrade highlighting the removal of the unconfirmed transaction chain limit as well as allowing multiple OP_RETURN outputs per transaction.
Ethereum:
- Core developers Péter Szilágyi and Martin Holst Swende disclose a severe threat against Ethereum, which was clear and present up until the recent Berlin hard fork.
- The Ethereum Foundation shares that in the coming months when it completes the transition to Proof-of-Stake, Ethereum will use at least ~99.95% less energy post Merge.
- Last week’s All Core Devs call focused on the status of Baikal, the London fork devnet, EIP-3541, and more!
- The Turbo-Geth project announced that it is changing its name to Erigon on May 17th, 2021. As Turbo-Geth has evolved away from Geth itself, the new name is to reduce confusion and allow the project to be more distinct.
- Dive into this Twitter thread for a further explanation of EIP-3074 and how it aims to replace meta-transactions with a much simpler version that reduces contract complexity and adds additional features.
Other Chains:
- ConsenSys now supports Polygon in their Infura and Truffle developer tools.
- Celo will activate it’s Donut upgrade at block 6774000 today, May 19th, 2021 at roughly 2pm EST. This will allow for the creation of bridges to Cosmos, Solana, and NEAR Protocol. This will also initiate full compatibility with Ethereum tooling and wallets such as MetaMask!
- Blockstream dives into the details between the comparisons and differences of Liquid Network vs. Lightning Network.
- Slingshot, a new decentralized trading platform, launches it’s open beta on Polygon!
- ParaSwap shares that Uniswap V3 is now live on ParaSwap!
- 1inch Network expands to Polygon. At the initial stages, aggregation will be available for Curve, SushiSwap, QuickSwap, Aave V2, and Cometh, while more protocols will gradually be added.
- Gavin Wood shares that the first parachain has been deployed on the Westend perma-testnet. The next stop for this is the canary network, Kusama, and then Polkadot!
- Althea Network publishes info on Cosmos’ Gravity Bridge which unlocks currently inaccessible capital on the Ethereum chain by providing a shared execution context on Ethereum, governed by the Cosmos Hub.
- Mina Foundation Board Member, Jill Carlson, shares her take on how Mina enables better privacy, transparency and participation.
- bZx is extending its integration with Chainlink onto Polygon, ensuring its Fulcrum and Torque margin trading, borrowing, and lending products have native access to tamper-proof data for powering DeFi markets on layer-2.
- Gelato and QuickSwap team up to bring limit orders to Polygon. At first, limit orders will be available via Sorbet Finance and routed through QuickSwap.
- Andrew Hong publishes The Importance of Composable Wallets for Users and Developers aiming to help users understand the history of Ethereum wallets, what Access Legos are, and the implications of both on the future of Dapp development.
- Ryan Watkins of Messari publishes an article diving into the Power and Wealth in Cryptoeconomics, detailing blockchains with concentrated insider ownership and the various shortfalls.
- Umee Network, a cross-chain DeFi protocol for connecting between different blockchains, is announced! Umee utilizes the IBC protocol from Cosmos as well as bridge technologies similar to the Gravity Bridge.
- Optimism shares how much Optimistic Ethereum can reduce gas! Check it out!
- SushiSwap published MISO (Minimal Initial SushiSwap Offering) which will allow users to participate in upcoming launches and token sales.
- BarnBridge announces that its SMART Yield product now supports Aave stablecoin markets, allowing users to better manage risk.
- DODO Governance is now live! DIP-2 and DIP-3 will focus solely on the discussion of burning a percentage of future vDODO exit fees and then the allocation of trading fees from DODO liquidity pools.
- The Maple Protocol has been deployed to mainnet! Maple is a decentralized corporate credit market. It aims to provide capital to institutional borrowers through globally accessible fixed-income yield opportunities.
Mainstream Recap:
- Vitalik Buterin donated ~$1.5B to several non-profit organizations including $1B to the India COVID-Crypto Relief Fund on Ethereum after removing liquidity from the SHIB Pool. The transfer was over 50T SHIB (Shiba Inu) tokens.
- BlockFi messes up their promo with enormous Bitcoin reward payments and struggles with users to recover over-payments and threatens legal action.
- Microsoft announces that their Azure Blockchain will be retired as of September 10th, 2021. They are asking all users to migrate ledger data from Azure to an alternative offering.
- Multiple U.S. agencies, IRS, DOJ, and CFTC, are probing Binance for potential criminal violations.
- On Thursday, May 13th, 2021 MicroStrategy disclosed a $15M purchase, as it bought an additional 271 bitcoins at an average price of $55,387 per bitcoin. As of May 13th, 2021, MicroStrategy holds 91,850 BTC acquired for ~$2.24B at an average price of ~$24,403 per bitcoin.
- DeversiFi announces a $5M sale of DVF tokens. The 12.5% of DVF tokens which were sold with a lock-up to long term supporters will allow DeversiFi to keep expanding and prepare to onboard more users following the launch of DVF and liquidity mining. DeversiFi’s new strategic supporters include: Lightspeed Venture Partners, Defiance Capital, Fenbushi Capital, Longhash Ventures, Genblock, Spartan Group, Delphi Ventures, Blockchain.com Ventures, and OKEx BlockDream Fund.
- CoinDesk reports that Samsung is connecting its Galaxy smartphones crypto wallet to Ledger Nano storage devices.
- Following May 13th’s purchase of additional BTC, MicroStrategy disclosed an additional purchase of 229 bitcoins for $10M in cash at an average price of ~$43,663 on May 18th, 2021.
- Jack Mallers of Strike and Zap reveals The Bitcoin Car. This car will be racing at the 105th running of the Indianapolis 500. The driver, Ed Carpenter of Ed Carpenter Racing has forfeited all sponsors this year and together with Jack will be breaking the traditional sponsorship model by racing solely for Bitcoin awareness and open-source development.
- Coinbase adds support for Dfinity’s Internet Computer (ICP) on both Coinbase.com as well as Coinbase Android and iOS apps.
- As of May 18th, 2021, Moon users can pay with Zcash via their Coinbase account! This allows users to pay with Zcash wherever Visa debit cards are accepted.
- Anchorage Digital adds support for five more DeFi tokens including: 1inch, Bancor, Curve Finance, Ren, and SushiSwap. Anchorage continues to support DeFi from their governance and staking services for institutional clients.
- Kraken is now supporting three new assets including: Maker, Ren, and 0x. Trading for all will start on May 14th at approximately 15:30 UTC.
- With their native integration with THORChain, users of Shapeshift can now trade the following, native unwrapped assets, with no intermediary or KYC with zero commission fees. These assets include: Bitcoin, BitcoinCash, Ethereum, Tether, USDC, BinanceCoin, and other leading ERC-20s.
- DeFi dashboard, Zapper, raises $15M in a Series A round led by Framework Ventures. The round was joined by Ashton Kutcher’s Sound Ventures, Mark Cuban, Nascent, ParaFi Capital, and more.
- Kraken shares that on May 18th, 2021 they hit 700,000 ETH staked on ETH2.0.
- Current, a leading U.S. financial technology company, announced its partnership with Acala, a DeFi platform built on Polkadot. The partnership establishes a new category, what they are calling Hybrid Finance, HyFi, that combines both traditional and DeFi applications.
- Laura Shin announces her book, The Cryptopians, which is all about Ethereum and the 2017 ICO mania, which will be coming out on November 2nd, 2021!
- Digital asset bank Sygnum will offer custody and banking services for Internet Computer (ICP), becoming the first bank to do so.
- a16z releases all videos from their recent NFT Summit!
- Brian Armstrong of Coinbase shares via Twitter his recent meetings in DC to establish relationships and help answer questions about crypto.
This Week’s Cup of Coffee:
This week, we are heading up to Lake Tahoe, CA for a cup of Peru Rutas Del Inca at Drink Coffee Do Stuff! This roast yields bold flavors of brown sugar, chocolate, roasted nuts and hints of dried fruit. Sip up and enjoy!!
Jake Tarnow
Not Your Average Engineer