Crypto && Coffee 078
- 6 minsTechnology Recap:
Bitcoin:
- 100x Group grantee Calvin Kim announced the success in speeding up Bitcoin’s Initial Block Download (IBD) using the Utreexo client. The results are claiming a 62% improvement to Bitcoin Core’s IBD.
- Mark Erhardt (Murch) and Clara Shikhelman propose an improvement to the block building algorithm currently used by Bitcoin Core.
- For this current signaling period, we have ~79.7% of blocks signaling for Taproot! This is a solid increase over the past couple periods, with the next period starting in ~3 days.
Ethereum:
- Danny Ryan of Ethereum Foundation shares an update on the upcoming upgrade for the Beacon Chain, Altair, as well as the wrap up of the Rayonism hackathon from last week. The hackathon completed with the Nocturne testnet, a multi-client Merge testnet consisting of four consensus engines and three execution engines for a total of 12 unique client pairs.
- Ben Edgington publishes the latest in regards to staking, slashing events, Altair upgrade, and The Merge!
- Baikal’s block explorer now shows full EIP-1559 transaction data!
- Optimism unveils their collaboration with Etherscan allowing users to monitor deposits and withdrawals, view when layer-2 transactions are pre-confirmed by the sequencer and posted/finalized in batches via layer-1, and verify OVM-compiled smart contracts.
- StarkWare proposes Adamantium to Ethereum Research, a protocol for Autonomous Data Availability, which retains the scaling benefits of off-chain data availability, while removing all trust assumptions for any willing user.
Other Chains:
- Sorare, an NFT platform for global fantasy football, announces that they are partnering with StarkWare to further build on Ethereum with ZKP technology. They plan to launch on StarkEx in July, 2021.
- Georgios Konstantopoulos shares a proposal in Ethereum Research regarding a simple withdrawal credential using BLS keys that can be used for ETH2.0 validators.
- After Polkadot released v0.9.2, which was a high priority upgrade, blocks stopped producing for ~7 hours and Gavin Wood announced that all network validators needed to downgrade their nodes to v0.8.30.
- Chris Blec submits a letter on behalf of DeFi Watch to Jaynti Kanani of Polygon with specific questions about its staking contract multisig. This comes as more and more people are wanting full transparency throughout DeFi.
- OpenGSN team announces that v2 of GSN, the Ethereum Gas Station Network, has been launched as a community governed public good.
- Avalanche releases AvalancheGo v1.4.4. This update includes final preparations for their database upgrade, optimizes memory usage, and much more!
- 1INCH is now listed on DeversiFi against USDT!
- With AVAX, the native token to Avalanche, growing - the team released a page displaying the total fees burned. AVAX is a hard-capped, scarce asset, which is used to pay for fees. In addition, all fees on Avalanche are burned.
- Eli Ben-Sasson of StarkWare shares slides from his Miner Extractable Value (MEV) discussion a few weeks ago.
- Matter Labs announces that the zkSync 1.x testnet is now live! The testnet enables both swaps and full use of NFTs on both their Rinkeby-beta and Ropsten testnets.
- Opium and UMA combine their efforts and tools to show how off-chain data can be brought to Ethereum to grow the DeFi ecosystem.
- Sparrow Wallet v1.4.1 has been released including the ability to remote broadcast transactions over a new Tor circuit via Mempool.Space or Blockstream.
- Tether Operations Limited, the company behind Tether - the largest stablecoin by market capitalization, will launch USDT on Avalanche, an open-source platform for launching highly decentralized applications, new financial primitives and interoperable blockchains.
- MakerDAO shares how to replace one’s Ethereum address with a user-friendly name from the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) and how this will empower the ease of use through many web3-enabled applications.
- Matter Labs shares the zkSync Security Council which aims to approach security by isolation, redundancy, trust-minimized upgradability, and more.
- Monero GUI v0.17.2.2 has been released! This minor point release includes menubar support on macOS and various minor bug fixes and UI enhancements.
- Zero Knowledge Validator announces support for zkSync in their mainnet launch through their membership of the Security Council.
- Kris Kaczor dives into the differences and similarities of Ethereum Optimism and Arbitrum - both Optimistic Rollup solutions.
- Celo developers open-sourced their bridge software, Optic, which stands for OPTimistic Interchain Communication.
- Mina Protocol shares their litepaper to go over all the problems that Mina looks to solve and how their technology works.
- Ribbon Finance announces RBN, the governance token of Ribbon.
- Gitcoin introduces the GTC token and their DAO that will govern Gitcoin moving forward.
- A proposal within Yearn Finance’s Governance has been published that aims for the treasury to invest in accumulating Ether.
- CRV-USD Perpetual Markets are now live and open for trading on layer-2 via dYdX. dYdX now supports 13 Perpetual markets on layer-2 with more coming!
Mainstream Recap:
- The Block reports that the U.S. Federal Reserve plans to publish a discussion paper on the potential issuance of a CBDC.
- CNBC reports that former Microsoft executive, Kevin Turner, steps down as CEO of crypto mining company Core Scientific.
- Fred Ehrsam, co-founder of Paradigm, shares How to Survive a Crypto Cycle.
- Chainlink Labs furthers their enterprise focus by joining the Hedera Governing Council. The Hedera Governing Council oversees distributed governance of the Hedera network.
- Australian federal minister, Senator Jane Hume, said that the government has no objection to people investing in crypto assets.
- De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB) revokes wallet-verification requirements with Bitonic after Bitconic filed a complaint against the original court order.
- MCDEX, a decentralized perpetual contract platform, successfully closes a $6M investment led by Delphi Ventures and Alameda Research in addition to $1M from the community.
- Prior to Coinbase’s direct listing, they partnered with Pledge 1% to build a corporate giving program that would commit 1% of Coinbase profits, equity and employee time toward charitable activities that leverage the power of crypto to help people around the globe.
- CoinDesk reports that crypto trading platform, Apifiny, has hired a Goldman Sachs and BlackRock veteran, Jason Jiang, to lead its technology division.
- The Wall Street Journal publishes a full piece on Uniswap and how decentralized markets are giving centralized exchanges a run for their money.
- Coinbase announces that former Goldman Sachs Global Co-Head of Government Affairs and former White House Deputy National Security Advisor, Faryar Shirzad, has joined Coinbase as Chief Policy Officer.
- The Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) has made a $15M investment in AirTM, a digital wallet and P2P exchange platform based in Mexico.
- Gemini announces a strategic partnership with WisdomTree Investments and Onramp Invest to facilitate financial advisors’ investment into cryptocurrency.
- CoinDesk reports that Mark Cuban has made an investment in Polygon and now displays the company on his portfolio’s website.
- Coinbase announces the launch of their beta version of Coinbase Prime, their fully integrated prime brokerage solution that provides custody, advanced trading, data analytics, and prime services.
This Week’s Cup of Coffee:
This week, we are staying local and grabbing a cup of Vietnam Robusta from Orbit Coffee Company in Oakland, CA to make a Vietnamese Iced Coffee!! This is a great choice as the days are getting warmer and longer, sip up and enjoy!
Jake Tarnow
Not Your Average Engineer