Crypto && Coffee 093
- 8 minsTechnology Recap:
Bitcoin:
- Bitcoin has surpassed block 700,000!! We are now less than 9,000 blocks away from Taproot activation!
- Flexa announces that it will be enabling Flexa merchants to seamlessly receive payments via the Lightning Network in stores, mobile apps, and online.
- Paxful shares that they are bringing the Lightning Network to all users which will seamlessly blend into the Paxful platform and wallet.
Litecoin:
- The Litecoin Foundation announced the launch of OmniLite, a decentralized token creation platform which introduces smart contracts, DAOs, and tokenized assets with NFT functionality onto Litecoin.
Ethereum:
- Tim Beiko publishes the latest from the recent All Core Devs update. The update includes The Merge and the three phases of utilizing the main chain, beacon chain, shard chain, and more.
- Ben Edgington shares what’s new in eth2 with focus on the Beacon Chain, Altair, The Merge, and more!!
- A fun thread was started on Ethereum Research diving into parallelizing EVM through end-of-the-block virtual transactions.
- Vitalik Buterin shares the need to move NFTs to the layer-2 ecosystem to cut fees. With this, he published a cross-rollup portability proposal that would enable users to utilize NFTs across any rollup.
- Ethereum’s Geth client is contemplating removing archive node support.
Other Chains:
- OpenZeppelin is joining the effort to build StarkNet with StarkWare! Their experience in creating standard contracts for the Ethereum ecosystem will benefit the StarkNet community greatly.
- Arbitrum One is now live for everyone!
- Origin Protocol, the platform that hosted record-breaking NFT sales, has integrated with Polygon.
- Bored Ape Yacht Club, BAYC, integrated Chainlink VRF to distribute verifiably random NFTs in its platform, helping ensure that all participants received randomly generated Mutant Serums in a fair manner.
- The Geth exploit that occurred on Ethereum mainnet was exploited on Ethereum Classic and split the chain. The ETC network ended up recovering in 48hrs after the exploit.
- OpenZeppelin shares that due to a potential vulnerability, all projects using the UUPS proxy pattern must initialize their implementation contracts. This comes soon after recent exploits.
- The Alonzo upgrade on Cardano is now live and has brought with it smart contract capabilities.
- Yearn Finance shares their recent newsletter which includes the YIP-63 approval, product survey, new yVaults, and more!
- Lyra has integrated with 1Inch Network to provide in-app swapping, accessing the best pricing across multiple liquidity sources in DeFi.
- Immutable announces that Self-Serve is now live! This means that it will enable 100% gas-free minting and trading, 9,000 transactions per second, and all secured by Ethereum and StarkWare.
- A proposal was published to burn the keys to the Loot contract.
- The Aragon client is now live on Polygon! With Polygon PoS integration, anyone can now build DAOs with a fraction of the cost.
- RenVM Greycore is now live on testnet! ReVM Testnet will now have a semi-decentralized validator set, also known as the Greycore, which is a set of nodes run by reputable DeFi projects that add an additional layer of protection to RenVM.
- Celo announces the V1 deployment of the Optics smart contracts on Celo, Ethereum, and Polygon! Optics is a new protocol for gas-efficient and trust-minimized interoperability. Optics leverages an optimistic bridging mechanism to enable radically cheaper communication between chains, while preserving decentralization.
- Arbitrum experienced an outage on September 14th, 2021 for roughly 45min..
- Solana mainnet-beta experienced intermittent instability on September 14th, 2021 which resulted in more than seven hours of downtime.
- Georgios Konstantopoulos announces LootLoose. LootLoose let’s one unbundle their Loot bags into individual ERC-1155 NFTs or rebundle them into their own Loot bags.
- Sherlock is introduced which is a risk management platform built on Ethereum and designed to keep end users protected by providing affordable and scalable coverage to protocols.
- A recent proposal was added to the Compound Finance community to add Polygon’s MATIC token as collateral.
- Monero published the v0.17.2.3 minor point release of the Monero GUI software. This release contains a decoy selection bug fix that improves privacy.
- Dharma is now live on Polygon! With this, users can purchase hundreds of tokens on Dharma directly from a US bank account.
- Showtime, the NFT social network platform, is coming to Polygon!
- Shard Labs is bringing the Lido Liquid staking solution to Polygon. Users will be able to stake MATIC and get stMATIC in return for use in other DeFi-based protocols.
- RULER and COVER Protocol are shutting down.
- A Ren bot shared the largest Solana BTC mint to date with ~399.4 renBTC.
- Merlin shares that they have open-sourced mev-bor, a fork of Polygon’s Bor client developed to process Flashbots bundles based on mev-geth.
- CoinMetrics, a leading provider of crypto financial intelligence, has been integrated across all Chainlink Price Feed oracles.
- A Cosmos governance proposal to enable routing functionality on the Cosmos Hub is now live and in its voting period!
- A new version of Yield Utils is out which has been carefully honed for the Yield V2 deployment.
- Rocket Pool will launch on mainnet on October 6th, 2021 at 00:00 UTC.
- BlueWallet v6.2.5 is now out for iOS, Android, and macOS. This latest release includes 4-character BIP-39 support for coldcard QR codes.
- Monero has been listed on Bitfinex Futures!
- Apricot shares their next-generation lending protocol that maximizes yields through cross-margin leveraged yield farming on Solana.
- Dave White of Paradigm introduces Martingale Shares, a new NFT primitive which are synthetics representing fractional ownership of classes of NFTs.
- Oiler releases a community update and an analysis of their Forwards AMM product.
Mainstream Recap:
- SEC charges global crypto lending platform BitConnect and its top executives in $2B of global fraudulent and unregistered offering of investments into a program involving digital assets.
- The SEC is investigating Uniswap Labs. They are seeking information about how investors use the DEX and how it has been marketed.
- Brain Armstrong of Coinbase shares a thread on how the SEC threatened to sue the exchange should it launch it’s proposed lending product.
- Nayib Bukele, the President of El Salvador, shares that El Salvador bought 200 BTC before the launch of Bitcoin being legal tender in the country on September 7th, 2021.
- Panama has introduced a bill to recognize Bitcoin and Ethereum as payment methods.
- BridgeTower Capital and the Solana Foundation form a $20M investment fund aiming to bring Solana to Europe’s high potential industries in the EU, UK, and Switzerland.
- Fredrik of Dune Analytics recaps the hard knock life of Dune’s early days and reflects back on the past three years.
- FTX announced on Tuesday, September 7th, 2021 that Steph Curry will serve as an ambassador for the firm, following others such as Tom Brady and Trevor Lawrence who signed similar deals recently.
- Immutable raises $60M in funding to boost NFT trading.
- Blockstream announces a new partnership with Macquarie to pilot a Bitcoin mining facility and explore carbon neutral alternatives for such facilities.
- Avalanche-based DeFi protocol Trader Joe raises $5M in a token sale from Three Arrows Capital and others.
- Blockworks leaks images of Twitter, possibly allowing users to add Bitcoin and Ethereum addresses to their profile.
- Siren protocol was exploited through the withdrawCapital function which uses a secondary function that has a reentrancy point.
- DFINITY publishes a post mortem on their recent high user traffic incident that occurred on September 1st, 2021.
- DaoMaker was exploited for ~$4M. They left the “init” function un-protected which was used to re-initialize the contract with malicious data and then exit all the funds.
- C.R.E.A.M. Finance shares a post mortem on their AMP exploit which occurred on August 31st, 2021. The exploit resulted in a loss of 462,079,976 AMP tokens and 2,804.96 ETH.
- Celo shares that PayU, one of the largest payment providers for emerging markets, is making a significant purchase of the Celo native digital asset, CELO, and is joining the Celo Alliance for Prosperity.
- Coinbase is rolling out hardware security support for 2FA when logging into Coinbase through one’s mobile device.
- Band Protocol partners with NEAR Protocol to support the MetaBUIDL hackathon which has over $1M in prizes and funding.
- CoinDesk reports former Visa Country Manager, Patrick Yoon, to head South Korea operations for Crypto.com.
- Eden Network has raised $17.4M via seed funding led by Multicoin Capital in a bid to protect Ethereum from malicious miner extractable value (MEV).
- Grayscale Litecoin Trust steps closer to an ETF with the SEC.
- CoinDesk reports that crypto trading app, Coinseed, has been ordered to shut down by the Supreme Court of the State of New York following a lawsuit.
This Week’s Cup of Coffee:
This week, we are heading to Post Falls, ID for a cup of Summer Lovin’ from Doma Coffee Roasting Company. This smooth blend of Peru and Ethiopian coffees yields flavors of cinnamon, marionberry, and apple! Sip up and enjoy!!
Jake Tarnow
Not Your Average Engineer