Crypto && Coffee 091
- 8 minsTechnology Recap:
Bitcoin:
- The Lightning Network has surpassed 25,000 active nodes for the first time! The number of nodes with channels is 14,864 or about 58% of all nodes.
Ethereum:
- The Go Ethereum team releases a hotfix to address a security vulnerability in all live versions of Geth. All Geth users need to update.
- Pyrmont hard fork to Altair was a success!
- Erigon releases v2021.08.04-alpha which involves a breaking change in the data directory, fixes the RPC trace endpoint, aligns with the upgraded eth_feeHistory endpoint, includes the security vulnerability fix from Geth and more!
- Danny Ryan of Ethereum Research shares all things ETH2.0 with updates on Altair, the upcoming Prater upgrade on September 2nd at 12pm UTC, and more!
- Sigma Prime releases the latest version, v1.5.0 of Lighthouse! This release contains new features, performance improvements and fixes. This also signifies Altair support reaching Lighthouse’s stable branch.
- ETH Core Devs discuss in the latest All Core Devs call whether or not to have a feature “fork” in December. The team has agreed to not have one. This means they will likely push back the difficulty bomb, and perhaps other changes. No new EIPs will be included before The Merge.
- The Ethereum Gas Limit Project came alive and the first vote closed with balanced voting with 50% of core devs actively participating.
- EIP-4756 is published which will set an in-protocol cap for the gas limit of 30,000,000.
- Vitalik Buterin shares Alternatives to selling at below-market-clearing prices for achieving fairness.
- Vasily Shapovalov explains that the Beacon chain will have to face two problems that may clog the deposit/withdrawal queue in a recent post on ETH Research.
Other Chains:
- The Graph has partnered with Optimism and will be providing indexing and querying services to developers building on the Optimistic Ethereum layer-2 to help Ethereum scale.
- Wrapped and Kadena are bringing Wrapped BTC, kBTC, to the Kadenaswap Universal AMM infrastructure and the Kaddex DEX.
- Ren announces the RenVM and Arbitrum integration is fully live! While Arbitrum is still in a closed mainnet beta, RenBridge is fully integrated and is ready to be used by the public once launched.
- Acala shares how developers can now scale their DeFi project to Polkadot on the fully EVM-compatible Acala EVM+ for access to hundreds of thousands of new users and billions in new TVL.
- Loopring shares that they now support NFTs on layer-2! The zkRollup now supports NFT minting, trading, and transfers directly on layer-2.
- SushiSwap now works on Celo!
- Just 24hrs after the launch of Emeris beta, they are already at $10M+ in TVL. This is a major milestone for GravityDEX and the Cosmos ecosystem.
- With Optimism’s latest protocol changes running stably on mainnet, the team is now opening up the ability for others to launch on mainnet and applying to be whitelisted.
- Apoorv Lathey shares an ETH Calldata decoder which allows users to easily decode Ethereum calldata with the contract address or custom ABI.
- Clipper publishes their stats for the first 30 days since launch. With nearly 24K trades already having been made on Clipper, with an average size of $3K, Clipper has stayed in the top 5 ranks of DEXs on Dune Analytics.
- Mobius announces the first ever cross-chain DEX on Celo.
- Hardhat, a development environment to compile, deploy, and test Ethereum software releases v2.6.1 which fixes issues with the debug_traceTransaction call and provides new advanced samples for realistic project boilerplates.
- InterBTC is coming to Cosmos by building an IBC bridge to enable any IBC compatible chain to access trustless Bitcoin.
- BurnBoys is published which allows users to mint an NFT that represents the EIP-1559 baseFee at any time for 0.01559 ETH.
- Tempus introduces the TempusAMM, a custom AMM designed for assets with progressively increasing price correlation and decreasing volatility.
- Figment congratulates Althea Network on their work on the Cosmos Gravity Bridge and the overall SDK community with a neutral bridge to Etherum and eventually all major EVM-enabled chains.
- ARCx introduces the DeFi Passport, in its first iteration of their product, users will be able to claim their DeFi Passport, and then participate in exclusive farms hosted on the ARCx.money app.
- Emeris releases a step-by-step guide to their cross-chain DeFi protocol on Cosmos.
Mainstream Recap:
- Coinbase has launched in Japan! Coinbase is committed to increasing the use of crypto in Japan by bringing a best-in-class product offering to Japanese customers.
- Visa enters the NFT game by acquiring CryptoPunk #7610 to their collection!
- Effective immediately, Binance announces that all users are required to complete Intermediate Verification to access Binance products and service offerings, including crypto deposits, trades, and withdrawals.
- OpenNode, an industry-leading Bitcoin payment processor, announced on August 23rd, 2021 that Substack, an online publishing platform with over 500K paying subscribers, has integrated their Bitcoin API to offer Bitcoin payments via Lightning Network.
- MetaMask addresses various falsehoods about MetaMask, possible acquisitions, and the accessibility of their codebase.
- Andreessen Horowitz announces leading a round in YieldGuild. YGG is at the center of the play to earn movement and build an incredibly powerful community.
- Ethereum reports that six crypto entities including Kraken, Uniswap, and The Graph have donated $250K each to efforts around upgrading the Ethereum blockchain.
- Blockstream announces that they have raised $210M as part of their Series B financing on a valuation of $3.2B. The round was led by Baillie Gifford and iFinex, the operator of Bitfinex. This new investment will help further their mission of building financial infrastructure on Bitcoin.
- MicroStrategy files again with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regarding spending $177M on its latest BTC purchase of 3,907 bitcoins at an average price of ~$45,294 per bitcoin. The company holds roughly 108,992 bitcoins that were acquired at an aggregate purchase price of $2.918B and an average purchase price of approximately $26,769 per bitcoin.
- The Swedish government has been forced to return over $1.5M in BTC to a drug dealer after its value surged while he was in custody.
- On August 24th, 2021 Nasdaq executed a regulatory filing to “list and trade shares” of the Valkyrie XBTO Bitcoin Futures Fund which revealed the existence of the previously undisclosed ETF proposal.
- There is a potential vulnerability in the Phrock NFT on OpenSea. The contact has an internal exchange built into it. Thus, it is possible for a user to list it using the contracts exchange function and sell it on OpenSea for a higher price.
- On August 4th, 2021 Ashiq Amien, a security researcher at iosiro, identified a critical vulnerability affecting Polygon’s StakeManager and StakeManagerProxy smart contracts. An attacker could exploit the vulnerability to DoS any of the contract’s assets as well as temporarily affect dependent contracts. The bug was remediated on August 17th, 2021.
- At 12:40 UTC on August, 19th, 2021, an attacker attempted to exploit the Solend smart contract on Solana. The attacker subverted an insecure authentication check on an UpdateReserveConfig function which made all accounts liquidable and set the borrow APY to 250%. The attempt was detected and stopped by the Solend team. Full incident report is here. In addition, here are various common pitfalls within Solana smart contracts.
- Huobi Global cooperates with Arbitrum to provide layer-2 deposits and withdrawals via their Optimistic Rollup.
- Sentinel announced on August 20th, 2021 that HitBTC has exposed their mnemonic phrase resulting in 40M DVPN being stolen from its users. This is the first public “hack” of the Cosmos IBC era. HitBTC had delayed the distribution of funds to users and compromised their own mnemonic.
- Coinbase announces that they are seeking applications for their 2021 developer grants focused on blockchain developers who contribute directly to a blockchain codebase, or researchers producing white papers addressing various themes.
- Binance suspended the trading of futures contracts on its Brazilian platform last Friday.
- CoinDesk reports that PayPal is extending its crypto service to the U.K., allowing customers to buy, sell, and hold either BTC, ETH, LTC, or BCH.
- XREX Inc., a Taiwanese blockchain TradeTech firm, has closed a $17M funding round led by investment firm CDIB Capital Group and others.
- Shapeshift shares their steps forward towards a DAO and how they are embracing this new future and various proposals.
- CoinDesk reports that Facebook is considering using its Novi digital wallet to support NFTs.
This Week’s Cup of Coffee:
This week, we are heading down to Santa Barbara, CA for a cup of Dune Coffee Roasters’ House Blend. This roast yields flavors of hazelnut, fruit, and hints of brown sugar. With summer still sticking around for a while longer, I’d suggest using this roast for some cold brew!! Sip up and enjoy!
Jake Tarnow
Not Your Average Engineer