Crypto && Coffee 089
- 6 minsTechnology Recap:
Bitcoin:
- We are now only 14,320 blocks away from Taproot activation!! During this time, there is a major push for all services, exchanges, and wallet providers to allow sends to bech32m addresses and creation of Taproot outputs. View this wiki for full bech32 support across providers.
- Jason Lau, COO of OKCoin shares that their Lightning Network node capacity is up 90% over the past 2 months to 26.6BTC.
- On August 9th, 2021 the Lightning Network total capacity crossed $100M!! Dig into this awesome thread from Ryan Gentry on what is driving Lightning’s latest exponential growth phase.
Ethereum:
- The London hard fork successfully activated on August 5th, 2021 at block height 12965000. With this upgrade, the highly anticipated EIP-1559 activated as well as several other EIPs.
- Since the London fork, we have already burned ~28,811 ETH which is equivalent to $93M at today’s prices, with the burn leaderboard showing OpenSea, Uniswap V2, and Tether in the top spots.
- MetaMask initiated their EIP-1559 rollout status shortly after the fork, but only to a small percentage of users. For others to upgrade, just update your Chrome extensions and you should be good to go!
- Since the fork, there has been much discussion about Ether becoming a deflationary asset or various blocks that burn more Ether than is mined. Review the full monetary policy here.
- The Altair network upgrade for the Pyrmont testnet is now officially scheduled for epoch 6150 which should occur on August 19th, 2021!
Other Chains:
- After the London hard fork, Hayden from Uniswap stated that at current rates, Uniswap alone will burn ~350K ETH, which is close to $1B per year.
- Ren announces that Railgun now supports renBTC and renZEC. This will allow users to take advantage of Railgun’s privacy attributes and combine it with interoperability.
- bZx announces that they are launching on Optimism in the coming weeks. bZx will be the first margin trading, lending, and borrowing platform to launch on Optimism.
- StarkWare shares how to transfer funds between sidechains and StarkEx trustlessly, securely, and inexpensively. As layer-2s are in a growing need, StarkWare proposes a new way to send via sidechain to StarkEx bridge which relies on Ethereum’s underlying security.
- Injective shares their rebranding which marks an evolution in Injective’s mission, product, and brand. Injective will focus on creating the DeFi hub for web3.
- dYdX shares that after announcing the launch of dYdX Foundation, they have hit several new records including: $1.1B in weekly volume, $220M in daily volume, $124M in OI, $170M in TVL, 5K new depositors, and 9K weekly active traders.
- Azteco shares that as of August 5th, 2021, users can use Azteco Vouchers on Lightning Network.
- Check out Smock! An optimistic tool for mocking Solidity smart contracts that is partnered with Optimism.
- Arbitrum, another optimistic layer-2 scaling solution for Ethereum, shares their latest updates with the upcoming launch of Arbitrum One for mainnet access and more!
- The Electric Coin Company plans to release the Halo Arc for Zcash product suite later this year! With it, they will be introducing “auto-shielding” in their mobile wallet SDKs and unified addresses at the Zcash protocol level.
- Dash Core v0.17 is fully active on mainnet following a successful hard fork activation at block 1516032. This upgrade enables various new opcodes along with a new quorum type to support the Dash Platform.
- Optimism shares that USDC deposits are now live!
- L2Beat shares the full spectrum of layer-2 based projects and their total value locked (TVL) in addition to total market share, technology, and overall purpose.
- Aave is exploring Solana, Avalanche, and various layer-2 technologies as they continue to expand their outreach to users in the DeFi ecosystem.
- Fun Ethereum transaction to see the power of DeFi. In this transaction, Set Protocol rebalances ~$3M on top of Uniswap V3.
- As of August 8th, 2021, WalletConnect users can use Encrypted Ink to sign Optimism and Polygon transactions!
- Perpetual Protocol introduces the Perpetual Ecosystem Fund! This fund is backed by 3M PERP tokens and will allow token swaps with projects that integrate with or build on top of the protocol.
- The Ethermint network is going live on a public testnet soon and their team is looking for early supporters to run validators on the testnet with the aim of launching mainnet in Q4 of 2021.
- The Ren and ICHI communities have formed a strategic partnership to launch community governed stablecoins for each asset supported by RenVM.
Mainstream Recap:
- Poly Network was hacked through exploiting their EthCrossChainManager smart contract and suffered a loss of ~$600M. The hacker is now in contact with Poly Network through on-chain transactions and has initiated returning some funds while also holding a fun on-chain Q/A session!
- Coinbase announced a new integration with linked debit cards to Apply Pay and Google Pay, with instant cashouts up to $100,000 per transaction available 24/7.
- Fidelity Investments has acquired a 7.4% stake in crypto miner Marathon Digital Holdings for ~$20M.
- CoinDesk reports that JPMorgan Chase began pitching an in-house Bitcoin fund to its private bank clients for the first time last week.
- BitMEX confirmed that it has reached a resolution of $100M with both the United States Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) in relation to investigations by both agencies.
- Brian Brooks resigns as CEO of BinanceUS.
- Chainlink collaboration with Google Cloud sparks connecting Google’s weather and climate datasets to smart contracts within Chainlink. This will expand the overall capability of Chainlink and hybrid blockchain/cloud applications.
- Kraken announces support for four new assets: Band Protocol (BAND), Injective Protocol (INJ), Mirror Protocol (MIR) and 1inch Network (1INCH).
- The Electronic Frontier Foundation published their views of the cryptocurrency surveillance provision within the U.S. Infrastructure Bill and the recent debate over the past week.
- Coinbase posted $1.9B in transaction revenue in the second quarter, in their recent earnings report. The exchange grew to 8.8M monthly transacting users and 68M total users in the quarter.
- The Washington Post shares how cryptocurrency became a powerful force in Washington.
- Indonesia-based cryptocurrency exchange Pintu raised $35M in an extended Series A funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners.
- Liquality announces their $7M funding round with support from Hashed, Galaxy Digital, White Star Capital, Accomplices, Coinbase Ventures, as well as Alameda Research.
- Gemini announces the acquisition of Guesser, a real-time predictions market platform. The Guesser platform will sunset and the team will transition their focus to various DeFi based projects within Gemini.
- a16z leads a $111M token sale of Helium. The Helium network uses LoRaWAN technology to connect devices through web3.
- ShapeShift appoints Willy Ogorzaly as the Foundation’s Head of Decentralization!
This Week’s Cup of Coffee:
This week, we are staying local and grabbing a cup of Kenya Gura Peaberry from Four Barrel Coffee in San Francisco, CA. One of my favorite cups, this roast yields flavors of brown sugar, caramel, with hints of fruit such as grapefruit or lemon. Sip up and enjoy!!
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