Of course, there’s more to Bitcoin than the three stated parts. Exchanges, mixers and block explorers are but a few new domains within the Bitcoin industry that didn’t exist in 2009. This specialization is likely a net benefit, but also holds downsides, particularly for an industry already within the regulatory cross-hairs. An attack on one part, say proof-of-work (PoW) mining, will bleed into other areas of Bitcoin, such as privacy. Source link
William Foxley
85 posts
Opium Finance has released collateralized debt obligation products (CDOs) for Compound Finance’s automated lending markets, Opium Protocol founder Andrey Belyakov told CoinDesk in a phone interview Friday. Investors can put up the Compound debt token cDai – and soon Uniswap LP tokens – to diversify exposure to DeFi lending markets. Opium’s product pays out structured returns to both a senior and junior risk tranche in exchange. The former tranche offers a 7% fixed return on dai (a collateral-backed stablecoin) at maturity, while the latter pool offers a variable rate paid out after filling up the senior tranche’s return, a blog post […]
Ethereum miners have formed a cartel of sorts to thwart the implementation of a now contentious proposal – one they say cuts into their bottom line unfairly. Eight Ethereum mining pools amounting to around 30% of the network’s hash power have cast their support behind tiny mining pool Flexpool’s stance against Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 1559. The small pool – which only mined 10 blocks among 48 miners in December – is now calling on Ethereum miners to jump ship from major mining pools that support the update such as Sparkpool (24% network hash power) and F2Pool (11%). “Don’t be a […]
Ether (ETH), the native cryptocurrency of the Ethereum blockchain network, has broken its previous all-time price high, according to historical data on some major exchanges. Prices surged on Tuesday to reach $1,439.33 – that’s over Bitstamp’s recorded high of $1,420. Coinbase and Bitfinex have previous record peaks listed around the same level. At press time, the all-time high on CoinDesk’s average of global exchange prices – $1,448 – has not been breached. The previous record was set set two years ago on Jan. 13, 2018. The digital asset has rallied nearly 12% today. Ether first hinted at a coming rally to […]
Wall Street chief financial officers (CFO) are more wary of putting company funds into bitcoin after last week’s 30% price plunge, Bloomberg reports. But given the return of bitcoin’s infamous price volatility – which saw the largest cryptocurrency’s price drop thousands below its peak of $41,900 set on Jan. – the attraction of that strategy may have lessened, according to company executives Bloomberg spoke with. Bitcoin has since recovered some of those losses and is now trading hands at $35,700, according to the CoinDesk 20. Severe fluctuations diminish the attractiveness of the leading cryptocurrency because company cash reserves are mainly rainy […]
China’s Blockchain-based Service Network (BSN) – a permissioned blockchain network for building decentralized applications and tokens – plans on releasing a beta central bank digital currency (CBDC) as early as the second half of 2021, according to a Jan. 15 blog. Source link
Coinbase will break apart certain parts of its Coinbase.com and app infrastructure in a bid to keep the cryptocurrency exchange from going down during periods of high volume. During the recent bitcoin bull run, Coinbase has struggled to keep itself up during stretches of heavy volume, leading to snarky comments on Twitter and Reddit that it’s only news when the exchange doesn’t go down during peak periods. Given the exchange has filed preliminary documents for a public listing of the company’s shares, fixing its infrastructure has undoubtedly taken on an even greater urgency. According to an updated Jan. 8 post mortem […]
The investment giant predicts CBDCs will continue gaining steam, although Western central banks have more outstanding questions than answers. Source link
Optimism has “soft launched” its solution to Ethereum’s transaction problem, the Optimistic Virtual Machine (OVM). The startup announced Friday that OVM is now live, at a time when gas fees have reached near all-time highs for decentralized finance (DeFi) traders. Indeed, the cost to send a single Ethereum transaction has hovered in the low single-digit dollars for the last month – a bit steep for the “internet of money.” First on the docket is DeFi exchange Synthetix, which has been working on an integration for some weeks now. The platform allows traders to exchange Ethereum-based synthetic contracts of real-world assets including […]
An India-based startup is coming for decentralized finance (DeFi) stalwart MakerDAO’s crown with the launch of its new “valuecoin.” MahaDAO’s ARTH algorithmic stablecoin is now live on the Ethereum mainnet, according to a press release shared with CoinDesk. ARTH will also go live on the Matic network at an undisclosed point in the future, the team said. The MahaDAO team defines the new token as a “valuecoin” for its ability to “maintain its purchasing power over time.” That’s compared to other stablecoins – like MakerDAO’s collateral-backed dai token – which are meant to mirror the dollar in terms of price value […]
Paxos is teaming up with Chainlink in a bid to make its asset-backed tokens more widely available across the decentralized finance (DeFi) market. The paxos standard (PAX) and paxos gold (PAXG) tokens are now available on Chainlink’s oracle network, according to a blog post shared early with CoinDesk. Chainlink operates as background pricing and data infrastructure for many DeFi projects and accounts for over 50% of on-chain smart contract calls among oracles, according to DeBank. Paxos’ stablecoin tokens have mainly been playing catch-up since the DeFi spike in 2020. Of the top DeFi lending platforms according to DeFi Pulse, only MakerDAO […]
Aragon One CEO Jorge Izquierdo has resigned, becoming the highest-profile departure from the decentralized governance project following a series of apparently controversial decisions. “After some hectic months, I took two weeks completely offline following a doctor’s recommendation,” Izquierdo told CoinDesk in a statement. “While I was off, a series of decisions were made in the Aragon Association (mainly with respect to governance) that I disagreed both with the decisions themselves and how they were taken.” “There were several proposals to fix this put forward, but there was no willingness to revert or amend these decisions. As a result, no changes were […]
ShapeShift is swapping business structures again, this time by getting rid of its entire trading desk. The Colorado-based non-custodial exchange is now routing orders through decentralized finance (DeFi) applications in a bid to get rid of know-your-customer (KYC) regulations that gutted the cryptocurrency trading platform back in 2018. The firm will gradually phase out its own centralized trading activity (and KYC policy) in favor of a decentralized alternative as it becomes “100% DEX-based for customers,” ShapeShift founder and CEO Erik Voorhees told CoinDesk in an email. “ShapeShift’s original model was designed to protect users, providing instant liquidity without requiring them to […]
“Pay me in bitcoin” has come true for National Football League player Russell Okung. Some 20 months and a 273% price increase after he first tweeted that demand in May 2019, Okung will be the first player from any major U.S. sports league to be paid in bitcoin. The arrangement comes by way of Zap, the bitcoin startup founded by Jack Mallers. Zap’s Strike product enables traditional paychecks tp be converted into BTC. Okung’s just happens to be quite large. His $13 million yearly salary is being split 50-50 between bitcoin and fiat, Mallers said Monday in a phone interview with CoinDesk. […]
Solana, a proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain spearhead by FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, is “stuck” due to an unknown issue. Source link
Another decentralized finance (DeFi) project was rug-pulled Tuesday, with some $10.8 million in investor funds stolen due to a hidden backdoor in the project’s smart contracts. Compounder Finance – a self-described clone of Harvest and Yearn Finance built by pseudonymous programmers – had its contracts drained of $750,000 worth of wrapped bitcoin (WBTC), $4.8 million ether, $5 million dai and a small assortment of other tokens, according to an address associated with the exploit. And while the attack looks similar to other DeFi rug-pulls or exploits, performed time and time again in 2020, this act of thievery is different because of […]
The first stage of the next-generation proof-of-stake (PoS) Ethereum 2.0 is now live as of 12:00 UTC Tuesday, according to Beaconcha.in. A generalized blockchain for decentralizing computer-based applications – from iPhone games to government bonds – Eth 2.0 has been under construction since the genesis of the current proof-of-work (PoW) network in 2015. Tuesday’s launch concludes the opening act, or “Phase 0,” of Ethereum’s consensus mechanism transition, which will see the network – whose native cryptocurrency, ether, is worth $70 billion by market cap – fundamentally change how it settles payments while in motion. “The launch of the beacon chain is […]
Nine months ago, in a Denver convention center, a booth sat empty. Littered with token stickers, the table was supposed to hold the physical representatives of decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol bZx. It remained empty, however, as the team struggled to make sense of the digital forces twisting their young project. bZx, as they would come to find out, was 2020’s flash loan “patient zero”. AFTER THE HACK: DeFi protocol bZx’s booth sits empty at ETHDenver. (CoinDesk archives) Flash loans remain the common thread through all those recent attacks. These DeFi-native tools enable a savvy investor to take out unbacked loans and […]
Blockchain project Origin Dollar (OUSD) has sustained an oracle manipulation attack worth $2.25 million in dai (DAI) and $1 million in ether (ETH) , according to early reports. The project’s native token is down 36% on the day, according to CoinGecko. Source link
Uniswap community members are scrambling to update yield farming rewards for the automated market maker’s (AMM) native token UNI as the initial liquidity mining program sunsets on Nov. 17. A governance vote for continuing farming on the same four asset pairs – WBTC/ETH, USDC/ETH, USDT/ETH and DAI/ETH – was proposed by Audius strategy lead Cooper Turley and pseudonymous “monet supply” Monday. The proposal will have to pass a series of governance polls before farming restarts Dec. 4. UNI liquidity mining allocations would be half of the original 2.5 million UNI tokens delegated per asset pool on a month-to-month basis. Farming rewards […]
Borrowers can close debt positions on lending platform MakerDAO under the 150% collateral minimum with this one simple trick. A loophole in MakerDAO’s collateralized debt positions (CDPs) market, discovered by Israel-based startup B.Protocol, enables CDPs to be closed far more leniently than the system intends due to a small oversight in the auction market, according to a blog shared early with CoinDesk. The lending protocol is meant to close positions automatically after collateral backing outstanding dai (DAI) falls below the 150% ratio. But a simple call function provides a workaround while decreasing the chance of being smacked by a liquidation penalty […]
Ethereum developers are weighing changes to publicly disclosing critical bugs following the Nov. 11 “accidental hard fork.” Geth had fixed the bug in early October following a disclosure, but it still existed in prior versions of Geth. The bug temporarily caused nodes that had not updated to the correct version of Geth to go down a different path than other clients. Now, developers are reordering the disclosure process for security vulnerabilities in the aftermath of what some developers have called the biggest threat against Ethereum since 2016’s attack on The DAO. That question comes with baggage. A common ethos in open-source […]
Decentralized finance platform Akropolis’ yCurve pools have been drained resulting in the loss of $2 million. Source link
Will an active secondary market emerge for ether (ETH) locked into Ethereum 2.0’s deposit contract? That’s the question on the tip of most every trader’s tongue Wednesday after the release of the deposit contract by the Ethereum Foundation. As of press time, that contract holds some 5,000 ETH worth $2 million. Launching a derivatives market for beacon chain ether would provide liquidity for investors who can’t move out of staked positions. That’s because the deposit contract is a one-way bridge until at least phase 1 of Eth 2.0, also known as Serenity. Yet, some exchanges such as FTX are looking at […]
Ethereum 2.0’s deposit contract is now live, heralding the imminent unveiling of the “world computer’s” second act. Released at 15:00 UTC, according to developer Afri Schoedon, the deposit contract is the first physical implementation of Eth 2.0 for everyday users. The deposit contract acts as a bridge between the forthcoming proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain and the current proof-of-work (PoW) mainchain, valued at some $40 billion by market capitalization. The genesis time for Eth 2.0 was first set for Jan. 3, the 12th anniversary of the launch of the Bitcoin network. The date has been moved, the GitHub file shows, to Dec. 1. […]
The Tron blockchain halted creation and execution of blocks due to a “malicious contract” against a super representative on Nov. 2, according to multiple reports. First reported by Crypto Briefing, the smart contract blockchain halted block production at 10:00 UTC for some two hours, according to Reddit users. The event is notable as it validates centralization concerns raised against Tron, which already holds an infamous reputation in blockchain circles. Tron uses a Delegated Proof-of-Stake (DPoS) consensus mechanism. DPoS blockchains sacrifice decentralization for throughput by centralizing certain transaction activities to majority nodes. Tron CEO Justin Sun followed reports with a tweet thread stating […]
Ethereum’s “Berlin” hard fork remains a few months away at best, according to the All Core Developers bi-weekly call held Friday. A soft target of January is now in the works, following the planned launch of the Ethereum 2.0 beacon chain in December. Berlin is a hard fork of the current Eth 1.x proof-of-work (PoW) blockchain. The systemwide upgrade – which includes low-level changes for improving the original mainchain while Eth 2.0 is under construction – was originally planned for July, but was pushed back this summer due to burnout of client employees and a perceived need for higher client diversity. […]
Decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Harvest Finance has upped its bounty from $100,000 to $1 million for information leading to the return of $24 million in siphoned funds taken in an exploit Monday. According to the Harvest Finance Twitter and Discord account, the anonymous Harvest Finance team is offering the bounty for “tracking down” the attacker and returning the funds. A $50 million flash loan from Uniswap was used Monday on Harvest Finance to sway the price of USDC and USDT pools. Harvest Finance’s pricing feeds – based on Curve Finances stablecoin pools in this case – were manipulated by the flash […]
Flash loans can be used for more than just siphoning funds out of poorly put-together decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols. That’s one lesson investors can learn from Israel-based startup BProtocol’s manipulation of flash loans to sway election results on DeFi legacy project MakerDAO earlier this week. According to the MakerDAO community forum, on October 26, BProtocol borrowed 13,000 MKR tokens worth some $7 million through a flash loan from derivatives platform dYdX swapped for MKR on lending platform Aave. Voting with the flash-loaned MKR tokens enabled BProtocol to speed up desired election results for its project built on MakerDAO. The “attack” was […]
“What is the time value of money?” That’s the age-old question Allan Niemerg, former head of research and investments at Cumberland DRW and founder of newly launched Paradigm-incubated Yield Protocol, is trying to answer with his new programmatic money market. Released publicly Oct. 19, Yield is jostling to join a $2.6 billion decentralized lending industry dominated by established players such as Compound by providing a benchmark product others have not: a DeFi yield curve. STABLE RETURNS: Yield Protocol’s six offerings plot a DeFi yield curve, the founders say.(Yield Protocol)Source: Yield Protocol And while money markets aren’t always a head-turning topic, they do […]
An arbitrage trade exploiting weak points in decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Harvest Finance led to some $24 million in stablecoins being siphoned away from the project’s pools on Monday, according to CoinGecko. According to reports, an attacker used a flash loan – a technique that allows a trader to take on massive leverage without any downside – to manipulate DeFi prices for profit. The exploit sent the platform’s native token, FARM, tumbling by 65% in less than an hour, followed by the project’s total value locked (TVL), which dropped from over $1 billion before the exploit to $430 million as of […]
A possible exploit in decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Harvest Finance has sent the platform’s native token, FARM, tumbling by 65% in less than an hour, according to CoinGecko. According to reports surfacing early Monday, upwards of $25 million in value has been drained from Harvest Finance pools and swapped for renBTC (rBTC) by an unknown attacker. Other funds have been mixed through Tornado Cash, an Ethereum obfuscation software. Following the attack, investors appear to have pulled roughly $350 million from the site. “We are working actively on the issue of mitigating the economic attack on the Stablecoin and BTC pools, and […]
The Ethereum 2.0 deposit contract is a few weeks away at least, according to Ethereum Foundation researcher Danny Ryan. Speaking Thursday on the Bankless podcast, Ryan said the deposit contract won’t go live until it receives a thumbs up on an audit of a critical crypto library, BLST, performed by cryptography audit firm NCC Group. “This library is critical to creating keys, signing messages. Critical, in early phases, [means] that if you use this library, they need to be secure; if you use it to generate your wallets, it needs to have good randomness; and if you are signing your deposits […]
If you’re an Ethereum project looking to get audits done before the close of 2020, it’s probably too late in the game. Audit firms CoinDesk spoke with said they are swamped with decentralized finance (DeFi) projects. The months-long backlog comes amid a sharp pullback across the $11 billion DeFi market, with most tokens down 19% over the last 30 days, according to Messari. Audit firm OpenZeppelin, which has overseen audits on DeFi staples such as Compound and Augur, said it is “seeing an overwhelming demand for audits” and is booking clients “well out into Q1 2021.” “We’re seeing a lot of […]
A vulnerability in LND versions 0.10.x and below has been disclosed to the Lightning Labs team, according to engineer Conner Fromknecht in the Lightning Network developer channel Thursday. In light of the disclosure, the firm is urging node operators to upgrade to versions 0.11.0 or higher as soon as possible. Source link
Ethereum miners are signaling their disapproval of a technical proposal advocated by top Ethereum developers, a new survey shows. Eight of the nine mining projects partaking in a community survey on Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 1559 had a negative impression of the proposal, with seven of the nine saying they would refuse to implement the EIP if it were included in a future hard fork. EIP 1559 swaps Ethereum’s current bid-based transaction market for a set fee, BASEFEE, with a small tip for miner compensation. The EIP gained steam over the summer months as the cost to send even a basic […]
Mobile and desktop Bitcoin and Lightning wallet BlueWallet has added support for BIP 78 with its PayJoin feature. Source link
Ethereum’s annual developer conference, ETHOnline, kicks off Friday afternoon. Instead of hopping from city to city like past Devcons, catch the latest Ethereum updates from your laptop at home. Friday’s segments are free online here. The conference continues every Friday including October 9, 16, 23 and 30. Each day focuses on one area of interest for Ethereum developers and investors such decentralized finance (DeFi) or scaling Ethereum. A hackathon with up to $100,000 in prizes also begins today and concludes Oct. 22. For anyone so inclined, here’s what CoinDesk is watching today: Source link
The sudden takedown of BitMEX has cast a new light on Ethereum’s decentralized finance (DeFi) markets. On Thursday, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and Department of Justice (DOJ) served the Seychelles-based crypto derivatives exchange with a slew of charges, arresting CTO Samuel Reed and seeking out CEO (and admitted DeFi degen) Arthur Hayes for violating the Bank Secrecy Act. While centralized exchanges (CEXs) reside on central servers in various municipalities around the globe, decentralized exchanges (DEXs) like Uniswap remain uncensorable, existing within smart contracts on top of the Ethereum blockchain. However, they are founded by real, live humans who […]
Ethereum developers will take a second whack at a final Ethereum 2.0 “dress rehearsal” after the first, Spadina, failed due to “critical peering issues,” Ethereum Foundation researcher Danny Ryan said in a tweet Wednesday. CoinDesk’s invest: ethereum economy is a fully virtual event Oct. 14 exploring the ramifications for investors of the sweeping changes underway within the Ethereum ecosystem. Learn more. Source link
Artificial intelligence and data service Ocean Protocol has suspended its old contract on the Ethereum blockchain and hard-forked its project, following the $150 million KuCoin hack. On Sunday at 22:00 UTC, Ocean Protocol announced it had migrated from its old token address to a new one to thwart the KuCoin hacker’s attempts to offload 21 million OCEAN tokens worth some $8.6 million, according to the Ocean Protocol team. “At 1600 GMT, a new contract was instantiated reflecting the balances of OCEAN as of block height 10943665 on the Ethereum mainnet. The new smart contract will allocate stolen token balances to an […]
On Thursday, ConsenSys-incubated startup Liquality released a new wallet that lets you atomically swap digital assets directly from your browser. The Liquality Atomic Swap Wallet can act as a trustless alternative to current methods of porting cryptocurrencies into the decentralized finance (DeFi) space due to the peer-to-peer (P2P) nature of atomic swaps, Liquality co-founder Thessy Mehrain told CoinDesk in a phone interview. The wallet interacts similarly to cryptocurrency wallet MetaMask, but with an entirely different end-game: swapping assets trustlessly. “It’s called a chain abstraction layer, which basically is a way of making different blockchains talk the same language and interact,” Liquality […]
MakerDAO will not compensate victims of March 12’s “Black Thursday” flash crash that left some of the decentralized finance (DeFi) platform’s investors out $8.33 million, according to a vote that closed Tuesday. The Maker community had initially voted in early April to refund sunken investors. Nearly six months later and the community – represented by current holders of Maker’s MKR governance tokens – concluded a final vote to give zero compensation for lost funds. Some 65% of votes opted for zero compensation, with the next two options for partial compensation receiving 18% and 15%, respectively. The vote itself was dominated by large […]
Parity Technologies has released the second version of its blockchain building kit, Substrate 2.0, according to a blog post shared Wednesday with CoinDesk. The new release gives developers additional tools to customize a blockchain “precisely for your application or business logic,” the post reads. Parity Technologies is the developer of the Polkadot blockchain with ambitions for developing a Web 3.0, undergirded by a meshing of various blockchains. The centerpiece of that multi-blockchain vision is Substrate. It acts as a tooling kit for developers making their own blockchains with Polkadot – also built on Substrate – working underneath as a communication and […]
To the surprise of many, bitcoin (BTC) has been a breakout star in Ethereum’s decentralized finance (DeFi) moment. Taking the form of wrapped or tokenized bitcoin, the digital asset takes the best of both blockchains – bitcoin’s price value and brand along with Ethereum’s programmability – into one highly in-demand token. Last week alone, the supply of BitGo’s wrapped bitcoins (WBTC) topped 76,000 after setting an all-time record of nearly 21,000 wrapped bitcoins minted within one week. The week before held the previous record of over 12,200 tokens minted in a single week, according to Dune Analytics. Overall, investors have made […]
An Ethereum smart contract feature that offers rebates for fees has developers scratching their heads, wondering if they should toss the old code in light of an exponential rise in transaction costs. Called gas tokens, these smart contract loopholes are a way to send transactions on the cheap by “tokenzing” gas, the fees paid for running computations on-chain. The feature allows an Ethereum user to buy up transaction fees when they are low, store them and then spend them when the fee price inevitably rises again. While the matter is still under discussion, some developers worry tokenized gas could one day […]
SushiSwap investors were handed a raw deal over the weekend after the pseudonymous founder of the $1.27 billion, 1.5-week-old decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol cashed out. A fork of DeFi darling Uniswap, SushiSwap is the brainchild of a pseudonymous founder, Chef Nomi, who took the former project an extra yard by adding rewards for providing liquidity to the exchange through a liquidity provider token (LP), called sushi (SUSHI), that earns a portion of the AMM’s revenue. In essence, AMM’s provide the infrastructure to match lightly traded tokens with liquidity. A variant of other decentralized exchange (DEX) experiments, Uniswap has grown to be […]
Chainlink has acquired Cornell University’s privacy oracle solution DECO for an undisclosed amount. This is Chainlink’s second acquisition to date, according to an announcement made by the firm on Saturday. DECO was co-created by Ari Juel, former chief scientist at digital security firm RSA, who will also join Chainlink Labs as part of the deal under the same title. Moreover, Chainlink CEO Sergey Nazarov and Juels have begun drafting a second Chainlink white paper, according to a phone interview with the pair. The duo authored the original Chainlink white paper in 2017. Chainlink’s oracle solution ports data from off-chain locations into […]
Users do not have to pre-fund their USDC-bearing wallet with ether before every transaction, according to Centre. Source link
Historic fee pressure plaguing the Ethereum blockchain is forcing one of decentralized finance’s (DeFi) hottest projects to consider swapping tires while driving. Digital asset trust company BitGo is in the process of “reaching out” to community partners to build an Ethereum sidechain due to heightened fees, according to CTO Ben Chan in an email exchange. BitGo’s premiere product wrapped bitcoin (WBTC) is an ERC-20 token with a 1-1 peg to bitcoin. It currently secures some 46,000 BTC worth just north of $500 million through a custodial patchwork. “During the time the white paper was written, we wanted to consider potential solutions […]
Tether has adopted Ethereum scaling solution OMG Network amidst record demand for settlement space on the “world computer.” “The integration [between Tether and OMG Network] will result in a reduction of confirmation times delivering faster payments while fees will be reduced without compromising on-chain security,” Tether Inc. said in a blog Wednesday. OMG Network can handle thousands of transactions at a third of the cost of Ethereum as a Layer 2 solution for Ethereum that batches transactions before settlement, OMG Network CEO Vansa Chatikavanij said in a statement. Tether – now the third largest cryptocurrency with a market capitalization of $13.1 […]
Data provider Chainlink will provide decentralized weather data for insurance startup Arbol, according to a blog shared with CoinDesk. Arbol provides crop insurance for small to medium-sized farmers or enterprises. Smart contracts pay claims to subscribers when a preset value – such as the average monthly temperature or rainfall – turns out different than the contract specifies, the firm said. Called parametric insurance, the financial derivative is often used in agriculture to hedge against future events, such as a bad harvest. Other firms, notably CME Group, also offer weather derivatives that require middlemen. Arbol insurance, on the other hand, self-executes using […]
Ethereum Classic developers were still licking fresh wounds late last week when yet another 51% attack was launched against their blockchain early Thursday morning. And as the bits settle, the proof-of-work blockchain’s future remains in question more than ever. The first attack occurred on Aug. 1, the network’s second ever. Five days later, a second 51% attack followed the news that the first had indeed seen a successful double-spend of $5.6 million worth of ETC. Read more: Ethereum Classic Suffers Reorganization That Resembles 51% Attack Amid Miner Complications The second attack was perhaps more important, although smaller in monetary terms ($1.68 […]
Decentralized finance (DeFi) has been clogging the Ethereum network, but not in the way most analysts would have guessed. An architectural quirk in the most-used software version of Ethereum, Geth, has led to an uptick in the practice of spamming the network to secure trade profits over the last six months, according to Certus One co-founder Hendrik Hofstadt. Transaction spamming is one of many reasons the average Ethereum user fee has increased some 800% since May, according to Coin Metrics. Ponzi schemes like MMM or DeFi’s general growth in 2020 are also to blame. Hofstadt told CoinDesk that algorithmic trading firms […]
Medalla, the final testnet before the anticipated launch of Ethereum 2.0 later this year, is now live, the Ethereum Foundation announced Tuesday. Source link
“Though now evolved in many ways,” Gavin Wood wrote in Ethereum’s 2015 yellow paper, “the key functionality of a blockchain with a Turing-complete language and an effectively unlimited inter-transaction storage capability remains unchanged.” Five years and thousands of bits later, Ethereum is still chugging along as a decentralized platform for self-executing code. And it has “evolved in many ways,” with the largest yet to come: Ethereum 2.0. Call it Slasher or Casper, Shasper or Serenity, Eth 2.0 has had as nearly many names as unrealized goals. For all the hubbub, a physical implementation is knocking on the cryptocurrency gates and is […]
A second private sale of the Polkadot token (DOT) netted the Web3 Foundation and Parity Technologies some 3,982.07 bitcoin (BTC) worth an estimated $43.3 million at press time, according to sources. A bitcoin address shared with CoinDesk saw 1,059 transactions beginning July 24 at 5:22 UTC. The token offering was not available in certain jurisdictions such as the United States, according to the sale’s website. DOTs were listed for $125 per token, according to Reddit users claiming to be involved in the sale. The Web3 Foundation did not return requests for comment. Additionally, the Polkadot community voted to redenominate the smallest subunit […]
New on-chain analysis from Whale Alert says Bitcoin’s anonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto mined an estimated 1,125,150 BTC, now worth an estimated $10.9 billion. In a Medium post, researchers describe how Satoshi continued mining with the same rig until at least May 2010. Disclosure The leader in blockchain news, CoinDesk is a media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups. Source link
Blockchain startup Conflux has announced its Conflux Ecosystem Grants Program, paid in the blockchain’s native CRX token, for building out the Conflux ecosystem, according to a release from the firm. Disclosure The leader in blockchain news, CoinDesk is a media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups. Source link
Only 30% of Ethereum Classic’s nodes will support future network hard forks after a major client walked away from the project last week. OpenEthereum has voted to stop supporting its Ethereum Classic client to focus attention on other projects. In addition, it has concerns about that blockchain’s immutability, according to a GitHub vote Thursday. It’s also well known that client Multi-Geth will not support future network updates either for similar reasons. What this means is, of the 615 current Ethereum Classic nodes listed by ETC Nodes, 425 won’t update in the future as developers make changes via hard forks. That leaves […]
Privacy coin Zcash has successfully hard forked in the planned network update “Heartwood.” With the update, miners can receive coinbase transactions right to a private address, in addition to other new features. The hard fork occurred on July 16 at 10:58 UTC at block height 903,000, according to the Electric Coin Company (ECC), the for-profit development house behind the project. An uncontentious hard fork, Heartwood was supported by both the ECC and Zcash Foundation. Read more: Zcash’s Funding Vote and the Woes of Decentralized Governance The update includes two Zcash Improvement Proposals (ZIPs). The first, “Shielded Coinbase” (ZIP 213) brings long-sought […]
Someone hacked Twitter Wednesday – and they used bitcoin to capitalize on it. Bitcoin is an alternative money system based on the value of censorship resistance. In other words, Bitcoin was built from the ground up to evade third-party interference (think banks, governments and law enforcement), making it a natural tool in the hands of a world-class hacker. Read more: Why Use Bitcoin? Bitcoin’s value proposition can be broken into a few categories all based on the technology under the hood. Once the hacker gets it, it’s theirs Bitcoin is electronic. A popular meme for bitcoin is “magic internet money,” which, […]
Ethereum developers are aspiring to launch Eth 2.0 in 2020. But that doesn’t mean all the technical details have been spelled out yet. The sum of account balances maintained by the network’s nodes – called the state – continues to grow larger and larger as applications and projects transact. Adoption is good, but runaway growth is bad. Independent developer Alexey Akhunov may have a solution – one pulled from Cosmos, the interoperability blockchain. His new proposal, dubbed “ReGenesis,” posted on EthResearch on June 24, would bring stateless client research to the current Ethereum chain (also known as Eth 1.x) by “nuking” […]
A new decentralized finance (DeFi) “money Lego” will allow app developers to make it possible for users to automate their transactions. Called Gelato, the protocol moved from alpha to a live and audited v1 on Ethereum’s mainnet on July 3. And, according to a blog post shared early with CoinDesk, decentralized exchange (DEX) Gnosis will be the first major platform to integrate Gelato, allowing users to swap and withdraw tokens in a “seamless Uniswap-like UX.” “It’s a network that transacts on behalf of users or even dapps themselves, based on some conditions, like price or the collateralization ratio of a debt […]
Crypto payments processor BitPay now supports segregated witness (SegWit), according to a company blog post shared in advance with CoinDesk. “Support for SegWit is currently an optional feature for Bitcoin wallets in the BitPay App. Later this year, as part of a phased rollout plan, support for SegWit will be a default for all Bitcoin wallets. In addition later this year, SegWit will be implemented for invoice payments,” the blog states. The move comes three years after the firm opposed the update in favor of an alternate solution, SegWit2x. The fight over SegWit vs. SegWit2x fractured the Bitcoin community. The dispute […]
Demand to transact on the Ethereum blockchain has pushed fees to uncomfortable levels. A new technical proposal helps address high fees by implementing a dynamic pricing system. Called EIP 1559, Ethereum users would now pay a set “base fee” to the network plus a tip to miners. One technical observer calls it “the biggest change to any blockchain post-release.” The cost to use Ethereum has increased some 500% since April. That’s not very helpful for people running programs on it. And while average gas fees are not at the all-time highs seen in July 2018, the problem will need fixing if […]
Bitcoins stored on the Liquid Network were temporarily able to be seized by network moderators Thursday night. The potential vulnerability in the Bitcoin sidechain’s security parameters was discovered by Summa founder James Prestwich. Liquid – a network developed and overseen by Blockstream and meant to move bitcoins around more quickly than the Bitcoin blockchain – moved 870 bitcoins that had been stuck in a queue since June 11 waiting to be processed. Occurring Thursday at 17:19 GMT, the transfer used a less-secure two-of-three emergency multisig rather than the 11-of-15 typically used for such transactions. The funds were potentially seizable for about […]
Avalanche blockchain developer AVA Labs has closed a $12 million private sale of its AVAX token. The funding round was co-led by Galaxy Digital, Bitmain, Initialized Capital, NGC Ventures and Dragonfly Capital, and included other undisclosed individual investors. The sale precedes a planned public offering of the Avalanche token to U.S. accredited investors and non-U.S. citizens, according to a release from AVA Labs. The public sale will run for two weeks beginning July 8 with 7 million tokens up for grabs. Another 5 million will be available based on the round’s success during the first week, the firm said. Founded by […]
A freelance marketplace for sourcing specialized talent is placing its bets on a token to get the dirty work done. Braintrust launched out of stealth mode Wednesday, backed by a $6 million seed round featuring True Ventures, Homebrew Ventures, Uprising Ventures, Galaxy Digital, IDEO CoLab, Kindred Ventures and Vy Capital. The tech startup aims to cut the middleman (think: ZipRecruiter, Indeed) from the employment decision, all using a blockchain – in this case, a fork of decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Compound. “In the current environment of massive economic uncertainty, it is our responsibility to share our expertise in managing a distributed […]
Platinum records are coming to cryptocurrency with a new integration between rapper Ja Rule and social currency startup Roll. Announced Tuesday, Billboard Hot 100 artist Ja Rule has inked a deal with Roll, an Ethereum-based protocol that allows content creators to control their own platforms using cryptocurrency’s native digital scarcity. “I’ve been following Roll and blockchain technology for a while actually on the sidelines,” Ja Rule said in a statement. “I think it’s the perfect time to partner with a company that can take blockchain technology mainstream. I see it happening in the next few years with the right partners and […]
Citing regulatory concerns, Berlin-based security token startup Neufund has announced plans to freeze its fundraising campaigns and sideline future tokenized equity offerings. “Many European countries had aspirations to become a blockchain-friendly hub … [T]he authorities have stifled this plan, blocking the innovation in its tracks,” the firm wrote in a blog post Monday. Launched in 2016, Nefund helped allocate some $19 million in capital through novel equity and security token offerings (STOs), including a blockchain-based initial public offering in 2019. The firm claims to have some 11,000 investors across 123 countries. In a statement, Neufund CEO and co-founder Zoe Adamovicz said […]
Ethereum’s consensus algorithm is not the only thing changing with the launch of Eth 2.0. The underlying cryptography itself is getting an overhaul based on leading research out of the Electric Coin Company. Called BLS12-381, the new elliptic pairing curve will securely coordinate transactions on the proof-of-stake (PoS) Eth 2.0 network, while opening up opportunities for data savings and privacy-tech solutions. Currently, the ins and outs of that curve are being baked into the network with Ethereum Improvement Proposal 2537. That EIP is slated for delivery with the protocol’s 10th hard fork, Berlin, tentatively scheduled for July. As a hard fork, […]
A “high severity vulnerability” was found and patched in Ethereum wallet Argent, according to leading white-hat hackers OpenZeppelin. Disclosed Friday, OpenZeppelin security researcher Alice Henshaw discovered a vulnerability within Argent that would have allowed user funds to be drained from wallets that did not have Argent’s “guardian” feature. According to an OpenZepplin blog post and press release, news of the discovery was first shared with Argent on June 12: “OpenZeppelin’s research revealed an error in the latest version of Argent’s smart contracts that would allow anyone to trigger the wallet recovery process without a signature – on any wallet with zero […]
Reddit is anticipating big demand for its Ethereum-based “Community Points” system only one month after rolling out the product. Now the social media site is looking for a scaling solution. Posted in the r/Ethereum subreddit Thursday, Reddit announced a partnership with the Ethereum Foundation to find a Layer 2 (L2) scaling technique for the site’s 430 million users. Community Points are earned by garnering “upvotes” on posts and can be used to purchase specialized GIFs or emojis. Following CoinDesk’s request for comment, Ethereum Foundation Executive Director Ayako Miyaguchi tweeted: A blockchain for decentralized applications, Ethereum has been eyeing various scaling techniques […]
Decentralized blogging is coming to a URL near you thanks to a partnership between Unstoppable Domains and Protocol Labs. Launched Thursday, San Francisco blockchain firm Unstoppable Domains has released its decentralized blog (dBlog) service hosted on Protocol Lab’s InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), complete with the .crypto domain. “No one can take it down,” Unstoppable Domains co-founder Brad Kam said in a phone interview. “We expect over time all sorts of content that is currently controversial or maybe even not permissible in certain parts of the world popping up because the censorship-resistant internet is usable now.” dBlogs come complete with tools similar […]
Infrastructure-as-a-service firm Bison Trails has added support for yet another “Ethereum killer”: NEAR Protocol. Inked Tuesday, Bison Trails will help host the newly launched NEAR Protocol’s validator set, currently consisting of over 150 nodes including some 40 of the project’s investors. The NEAR Foundation announced the closing of a $21.6 million sale of its NEAR token, led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), on May 4. “What we’re doing with it is helping people run their own NEAR validators and, if they don’t want to run a validator, they can delegate to the Bison Trails NEAR community validator,” Bison Trails protocol specialist Viktor […]
The 20th iteration of Bitcoin Core, the open source software powering the Bitcoin blockchain, was released Wednesday. Experimental software called “Asmap” was included to protect against a theoretical “Erebus” attack. An Erebus attack allows nation-states and/or large internet providers such as Amazon Web Services to spy, double-spend or censor bitcoin transactions. The patch would help thwart an attack but is not a conclusive fix. Bitcoin Core released a new software update Wednesday, Bitcoin Core 0.20.0. Notably, the release includes experimental software to hedge against attacks from players the size of nation-states, which could effectively fracture the Bitcoin network. Called “Asmap,” this […]
Trail partners Ethereum and Ethereum Classic are soon to split ways, highlighted by the latter’s successful “Phoenix” hard fork Sunday night. Executed at block 10,500,839 on May 31, the backwards-incompatible network upgrade makes Ethereum Classic fully compatible with Ethereum. That is, until the larger blockchain swaps its consensus algorithm in a network overhaul known as Eth 2.0 – tentatively scheduled for Q3 2020. The hard fork represents a major departure for Ethereum Classic, which is sticking with Proof-of-Work (PoW) while its sister chain moves to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) and sharding. Read more: Vitalik Buterin Clarifies Remarks on Expected Launch Date of Eth […]
Twetch positions itself as an alternative to the platform it was deplatformed from, actively marketing itself against the San Francisco firm run by Bitcoin enthusiast Jack Dorsey. Petty said the application maintains censorship resistance by archiving conversations on the BSV blockchain. In fact, Twetch posted a meme aimed at Dorsey for censoring conversations on the platform mere hours before its account was suspended. In the meantime, Twetch has launched an alternative account and will appeal the decision. If Twetch wins its appeal, Petty said it could be hours to days before the account is back up and running due to cache […]
The first large minting of MakerDAO’s dai stablecoin using a bitcoin synthetic has occurred, signaling user demand for inter-blockchain asset support on Ethereum’s largest decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol. Crypto lending platform Nexo minted $4 million dai Wednesday by using WBTC as collateral. “This really showcases the latent demand for non-ETH assets,” MakerDAO founder Rune Christensen said in a tweet, “and it’s the beginning of a broader trend of DeFi acting as an economic vacuum that will eventually attract almost all value to the Ethereum blockchain.” Adding exposure to bitcoin is a major step by DeFi’s leading protocol, giving Maker lenders access […]
Ethereum’s premier coin mixing service is now permissionless. Tornado Cash, a privacy tool for obfuscating the history of Ether (ETH) transactions, completed a cryptographic process known as a trusted setup ceremony on May 10 followed by a contract update on Monday to create perpetually self-executing code. “With a record 1,114 contributions this was by far the largest Trusted Setup Ceremony to date,” Tornado Cash wrote in a May 13 blog post. “By comparison, all other trusted setup ceremonies had less than 200 participants.” The ceremony, relying on a cryptographic method known as multi-party computation (MPC), makes Tornado Cash “completely trustless and […]
The top bitcoin derivatives product is now available on decentralized finance (DeFi). Andreessen Horowitz-backed dYdX released its Bitcoin Perpetual Contract from private alpha on Wednesday, bringing the most liquid digital asset derivative to Ethereum’s burgeoning DeFi market for non-U.S. investors. Unlike similar futures products, perpetual contracts don’t expire at a set time. “For the first time, users can trade the most popular financial product in crypto – BTC perpetual contracts – on a decentralized exchange,” dYdX founder Antonio Juliano said in a private message. dYdX’s newest derivative will offer 10x leverage and no expiry, with margin and settlement conducted in USD […]
Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin has clarified his remarks on the expected launch date of Eth 2.0. CoinDesk chief content officer Michael J. Casey asked if the overhaul to the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap was “really coming in July. Are we ready for it?” “I think so, yeah,” Buterin said, before rattling off milestones achieved so far. In response, Buterin tweeted, “Yeah I did not say July. Perhaps the question contained the word July but I did not hear July when it was asked.” He then sent a second tweet, saying, “OK I definitely should have heard July in the […]
Chainlink may be solving part of the problem that first drove Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin’s interest in decentralized applications. “One day [‘World of Warcraft’ game maker] Blizzard removed the damage component from my beloved warlock’s Siphon Life spell. I cried myself to sleep, and on that day I realized what horrors centralized services can bring. I soon decided to quit,” Buterin wrote. Similarly, Chainlink is rolling out its Verifiable Random Function (VRF) service, where subscribers can gain access to provably random values needed for demonstrating the integrity of smart-contract-based projects such as online games. With Chainlink VRF, you know an application […]
The Polkadot network is “very near launch,” founder Gavin Wood told attendees of the Ready Layer One (RL1) virtual conference on Wednesday in a sneak peek of the Ethereum co-founder’s new network. Wood, who wrote Ethereum’s technical paper in 2014, created Polkadot with the intention of allowing users to send transactions across blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum in what is commonly referred to as making them interoperable. Like Kusama, Wood told RL1 attendees Polkadot will roll out in five or six stages, beginning with a “chain candidate” launched by the Web3 Foundation. The candidate operates as a de facto genesis […]