After the BitMEX enforcement action, are other noncompliant exchanges on the CFTC’s radar? “Maybe,” said Chairman Heath Tarbert. In an appearance Wednesday, the regulator largely deferred to his colleagues at the SEC on the question of whether ether in a proof-of-stake version of Ethereum would be a security or a commodity. He similarly punted on DeFi. “Let me just basically say how impressed I am by Ethereum, full stop, period.” No, that’s not a Silicon Valley investor. That was Heath Tarbert, chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), who flexed a sophisticated understanding of blockchains during a live interview at […]
Ethereum
94 posts
High Ethereum gas prices make it impossible for ERC-20 projects to run any microtransaction payments on Ethereum. This defeats the idea of using the Ethereum network for one of its principal use cases. Gas fees are part of Ethereum. They are the price required for miners to execute transactions. This fee is not constant, it fluctuates depending on network demand. A transaction can be delayed or outrightly rejected if it does not meet the miners’ threshold. https://www.coindesk.com/events/invest-ethereum-economyMichael Garbade is the co-founder and CEO of Education Ecosystem. He is a serial tech entrepreneur who formerly worked at Amazon, General Electric, Rebate Networks, […]
“Money legos” might be an apt metaphor for what decentralized finance (DeFi) does, but since the summer another one has applied: jackpot. Money legos is the term used to describe the way Ethereum allows different financial services to be plugged into each other, also known as composability. That used to be mostly a buzzword, but over the past year composability has become a very real competitive advantage for DeFi. Mixing and matching smart contracts on the fly has proven incredibly valuable. But there remains a $10.9 billion question: Will composability work as well on Ethereum 2.0 as it does now on […]
CoinDesk is preparing for the invest: ethereum economy virtual event on Oct. 14 with a special series of newsletters focused on Ethereum’s past, present and future. Every day until the event the team behind Blockchain Bites will dive into an aspect of Ethereum that excites or confuses us. Today’s intro is written by CoinDesk research analyst Christine Kim. This year, 2020, is proving to be wildly successful for Ethereum in terms of market performance and technological development. Since January, ETH has so far tripled in value, beating out the gains made by the majority of the top crypto assets by trade volume. The only other crypto asset in […]
Since January, over $1.5 billion worth of bitcoin has been tokenized into ERC-20 tokens to use in the emerging decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem on Ethereum. These DeFi applications offer an increasingly large array of potential use cases for bitcoin investors looking for alternative ways to issue loans or make trades on new exchange platforms. Tokenizing bitcoin serves as a bridge between these two leading cryptocurrency communities and an important step forward for traders and investors taking advantage of the features offered by both blockchains. Through tokenized bitcoin projects, the powerful monetary properties of bitcoin can be leveraged in the ever-growing collection of Ethereum-based cryptocurrency applications. […]
The virtual event invest: ethereum economy takes place on Wednesday, Oct. 14. CoinDesk’s Christine Kim spoke to colleagues Michael J. Casey and Aaron Stanley about the most compelling and under-discussed topics about Ethereum 2.0 headlining next week’s conference. For free, early access to new episodes of this and other CoinDesk podcasts subscribe to CoinDesk Reports with Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocketcasts, Google Podcasts, Castbox, Stitcher, RadioPublica, iHeartRadio or RSS. This episode is sponsored by Crypto.com, Nexo.io and Elliptic. From the dynamics of staking to the architecture of sharding, there haven’t been many topics Ethereum 2.0 core developers have shied away from discussing over the past five […]
Few predicted the swift acceleration in the decentralized finance (DeFi) economy this year. The fervent activity in the space has sent DeFi assets skyrocketing to almost $11 billion – equivalent to almost twice the size of the economy of Barbados. Similarly, assets under management held by Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) have hit bumper levels, supported in large part by the continued growth in the decentralized economy. Ethereum, the rails on which most open finance and DAO governance runs, needs to keep pace. Soaring DeFi transaction levels are adding significant demand and strain to the current network, with many DAOs adversely impacted […]
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 […]
A slowdown in cryptocurrency trading on so-called decentralized exchanges has helped to alleviate congestion on the Ethereum blockchain, at least temporarily mitigating concerns that the network was becoming overloaded. On Uniswap, the biggest decentralized exchange, or DEX, daily trading volumes have crashed to $224 million, versus a record high of $954 million on Sept. 1. “Low volatility in the crypto market as a whole has contributed to lower transaction volume and costs,” said Connor Abendschein, a crypto research analyst at Digital Assets Data. DeFi, a subsector of the cryptocurrency industry where entrepreneurs are developing semi-automated trading and lending platforms atop blockchain […]
Chinese tech companies were once seen as copycats of their Western peers: Alibaba was a knockoff of eBay and Baidu imitated Google. More recently, Chinese firms like TikTok and Huawei have established such dominant international positions that U.S. authorities have tried to hold them back. Now, the technological arms race is playing out in the cryptocurrency industry, where one Chinese company is taking on Ethereum, the world’s second-largest blockchain, which U.S.-based developers have used to build semi-automated trading and lending networks under the rubric of decentralized finance, or DeFi. Neo took aim at DeFi in late September with its launch of […]
Ethereum’s highly anticipated 2.0 upgrade is poised to bring the network ever closer to fulfilling its original vision to be a “world computer” that plays host to a parallel, decentralized financial system. At Invest: Ethereum Economy on Oct. 14, we will address the ramifications for investors as decentralized finance takes the crypto world by storm. In a run-up to the event, our two-part CoinDesk Live: Inside the Ethereum Economy virtual miniseries on Oct. 8 and 12 introduces trending narratives we will break down at the main event: Why all the hype behind yield farming and food-inspired tokens? Should investors take them […]
Bitcoin’s price is steadily increasing after last week’s bad news dump; while Ethereum’s fees fall. Bitcoin (BTC) trading around $10,734 as of 20:15 UTC (4:15 p.m. ET). Gaining 0.51% over the previous 24 hours. Bitcoin’s 24-hour range: $10,621-$10,775 BTC above its 10-day and 50-day moving averages, a bullish signal for market technicians. Bitcoin trading on Coinbase since Oct. 3.Source: TradingView Bitcoin’s price has been on a steady rise since Saturday, topping out at $10,775 Monday on spot exchanges such as Coinbase. Cindy Leow, portfolio manager for 256 Capital Partners, a multi-strategy trading firm, notes bitcoin’s capacity to rebound from recent unpleasant […]
Derivative exchange BitMEX’s legal issues with U.S. regulators took a toll on bitcoin’s price while DeFi gave Ethereum miners more fee revenue than ever. Bitcoin (BTC) trading around $10,582 as of 20:00 UTC (4 p.m. ET). Slipping 1% over the previous 24 hours. Bitcoin’s 24-hour range: $10,427-$10,931 BTC below its 10-day and 50-day moving averages, a bearish signal for market technicians. Bitcoin trading on Coinbase since Sept. 29.Source: TradingView Bitcoin’s price was as high as $10,932 on spot exchanges such as Coinbase before quickly plunging 4% within two hours to as low as $10,427. It subsequently rebounded a bit to $10,582 […]
The Australian government is investing big in modern technology, Nasdaq saw its first crypto exchange operator listing and revenues are surging for Ethereum miners amid increased network activity. Top shelf Australia modernizesAustralia will commit A$800 million (US$575 million) to invest in digital technologies as part of its coronavirus recovery plan, Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced Tuesday. The federal plan will see US$256.6 million for a digital identity solution, $419.9 million to fully implement the Modernising Business Registers (MBR) program, $22.2 million for small businesses training to utilize digital technologies and two blockchain pilot programs totalling $6.9 million. “The Plan supports Australia’s economic recovery […]
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
The consultancy giant has released a new solution aimed to streamline enterprise resource planning on the public Ethereum blockchain. Source link
With final preparations for the launch of Ethereum 2.0 soon to be underway, CoinDesk’s Christine Kim spoke with developers Raul Jordan and Eduardo Antuña Díez about what’s left to do and what comes next. The final preparations for Ethereum 2.0 launch will soon be underway. Lead developer at Prysmatic Labs Raul Jordan, who has been building Ethereum 2.0 software for over two years, explained his team would be wrapping up all feature development by October 15. “At that time, it’s all hands on deck to just have good documentation, good user experience, fix up security holes [and] basically prepare for launch. […]
Compared with the traditional financial system, the cryptocurrency industry is evolving fast. Technologists are experimenting with the vast-reaching potential of blockchain. And regulation is typically immature, inconsistent and unevenly applied across international borders, allowing entrepreneurs to move fast and break things, as it were. But there’s also no shortage of competition. The latest example comes from CoinDesk’s Ian Allison, who reported Thursday that Tron, the three-year-old blockchain headed by Justin Sun (the crypto executive who paid $4.5 million to have a meal with Warren Buffett), has entered into a strategic alliance with custody specialist BitGo to accommodate wrapped bitcoin (WBTC) tokens. Wrapped bitcoin is a […]
As decentralized finance (DeFi) balloons to a roughly $10 billion market, infrastructure builders are coming up with ways to reduce the associated risks. Announced Wednesday, wallet and custodial technology provider Trustology has added a “DeFi Firewall” to its suite of institutional-investment tools. The “Firewall” is basically a set of rules or filters selected by a fund, specifying which DeFi protocols or decentralized exchanges they consider kosher. With DeFi’s liquidity mining opportunities driving adoption and demand, investors from a more traditional or institutional background want some of this action. At the same time, they have to be able to show that funds […]
DeFi Pulse fixed a bug that led to a substantial misreporting of total value in decentralized finance protocols, former acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney joined the Chamber of Digital Commerce and there’s a new stablecoin that functions like a savings account. Top shelf Fresh capitalCrypto projects are raising funds as the industry continues to build out decentralized protocols. Ethereum data firm Dune Analytics, a Github-like platform which provides DeFi insights, has raised $2 million led by Dragonfly Capital and included Multicoin Capital, Coinbase Ventures, DCG and DeFi angels. Meanwhile, Skynet Labs, a startup formerly known as Nebulous, has raised a $3 million […]
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 […]
It’s pretty much guaranteed at this point that higher inflation is coming. The Federal Reserve, which has already printed about $3 trillion of new money this year, is now explicitly devoted to reducing the dollar’s purchasing power in a bid to revive the economy. Higher inflation also typically happens when a country gets laden with debt and interest rates are cut to zero, as is now the case in the U.S. “We’re at a moment where you may see some inflation,” Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis President James Bullard said last week. The trend could be good for bitcoin, which many crypto investors believe […]
Up until it collapsed, The DAO represented the highest technological achievement – and the coming wave of innovation – that the Ethereum blockchain has enabled. The smart contract and blockchain were interlinked ideas. In Vitalik Buterin’s early writings detailing the network of computers that would become Ethereum, the world’s second largest by blockchain by market cap but largest by developer activity, he put forward the idea of fully decentralized, autonomous corporations or organizations (or, DACs and DAOs). The DAO, which got that name for being the first encoded version of the concept, was the proving ground that the disruptive world of […]
With Ethereum 2.0’s much-anticipated move to Proof-of-Stake getting closer, CoinDesk Research Analyst Christine Kim spoke with Ethereum developer Danny Ryan and Liz Steininger, CEO of blockchain security company Least Authority on what users and investors should expect. The highly-anticipated launch of Ethereum 2.0 is expected to have little to no impact on users and decentralized applications (dapps) currently operating on Ethereum. But in the years after its launch, Ethereum developer Danny Ryan expects the upgrade to radically improve network performance and security. There will be what Ryan calls a “precise point of transition,” where at one block the Ethereum blockchain is […]
There is now more than $1 billion worth of bitcoin on Ethereum, record-setting transaction volume is boosting Ethereum miners’ revenue and VeChain joins China’s food safety watchdog to build track and trace capabilities. Top shelf Token reflectionsUniswap’s decision to airdrop its new governance token was less about competing with its genetic clone SushiSwap, and more about building a community, CoinDesk’s Brady Dale reports. “I think it’s genius in every way,” Robert Leshner, Compound’s founder, said. “It brought a huge number of users into the fold.” Tokens were airdropped not just to liquidity providers (LPs), but essentially anyone who has played with the app […]
This isn’t the CryptoKitties craze of 2017. “The situation is different now,” Stefan George of Gnosis told CoinDesk. Lots of dapps are clawing for Ethereum’s compute power. If activity calms on one decentralized finance (DeFi) platform, it’s likely to perk up on another. “Ethereum is on the way to becoming a whale chain,” George lamented, one where only people transferring large values can stomach its steep transaction fees. So now Gnosis is voting with its feet. The prediction market technology firm is copying all its smart contracts over to Ethereum sidechain xDai. The move will include DXdao’s Omen, an app for […]
Bitcoin lost momentum Thursday while DeFi delirium pushes fees on Ethereum back up. Bitcoin (BTC) trading around $10,920 as of 20:00 UTC (4 p.m. ET). Slipping 0.73% over the previous 24 hours. Bitcoin’s 24-hour range: $10,735-$11,052 BTC above its 10-day and 50-day moving averages, a bullish signal for market technicians. Bitcoin trading on Coinbase since September 15. Source: TradingView Bitcoin headed downward Thursday, going as low as $10,735 on spot exchanges such as Coinbase, but recovering to $10,920 as of press time. Andrew Tu, an executive at quant trading firm Efficient Frontier, sees $11,000 as a key bitcoin price point. ”$11,000 […]
Gelato said the seed round will fund further development of its bot network that will provide automated smart contract execution. Source link
Bitcoin is making gains Monday and Ethereum usage is hitting record highs in September. Bitcoin (BTC) trading around $10,669 as of 20:00 UTC (4 p.m. ET). Gaining 3.4% over the previous 24 hours. Bitcoin’s 24-hour range: $10,250-$10,759 BTC above its 10-day and 50-day moving averages, a bullish signal for market technicians. Bitcoin trading on Coinbase since September 12. Source: TradingView The price of bitcoin hit as high as $10,759 on spot exchanges such as Coinbase Monday. That level has not been seen since Sept. 3 and the cryptocurrency is now heading into bullish territory. “The trend is indeed higher,” said Darius […]
With Ethereum 2.0’s much-anticipated move to Proof-of-Stake getting closer, CoinDesk Research Analyst Christine Kim spoke with Ben Edgington and Vijay Michalik on what would-be validators need to know. “There are indeed responsibilities that come with [Ethereum 2.0 staking]. You can’t just stake and leave it. You need to run what we call a client or a validator software.” That’s Ben Edgington, the product owner of Teku at ethereum venture capital studio Consensys. Teku is one of five software clients currently being battle-tested on the official Ethereum 2.0 test network, Medalla. These clients will connect users to the highly anticipated proof-of-stake blockchain […]
This column has written in recent weeks about the surprising possibility that cryptocurrency markets might have become the new home for capitalism, in an environment where central banks and governments are intervening deeply in markets while picking corporate winners via emergency aid. If anything, the ridiculousness of the recent weeks’ saga involving the deliciously named startup protocol SushiSwap shows that not only are market signals alive and well in digital assets, but competition is, too. While from the outside these markets may seem like a den of rampant speculation, the innovative mania now taking place in the fast-growing arena of decentralized finance , known as DeFi, is providing a test of […]
How’s the first registered offering of security tokens in the U.S. going? See for yourself. In the two weeks since INX Ltd. commenced its long-awaited initial public offering (IPO), more than 350 investors’ Ethereum addresses have been added to the “white list” of approved buyers. You don’t need to take the company’s word for it, it’s all on the blockchain, viewable through block explorer sites like Etherscan. The public data doesn’t show who these registered investors are or how many of the tokens, priced at $0.90 each, any of them has agreed to buy. (INX is seeking to raise $117 million […]
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 […]
It wasn’t long ago the Ethereum 2.0 upgrade went live on an official test network. Developers have been catching mission-critical bugs in the code ever since. “This is the biggest testnet launch that Ethereum 2.0 has seen… So we learned about things that were frustrating for people. We found some bugs. We’ve been troubleshooting a very interesting and elusive bug at the moment that can cause nodes to crash,” said Paul Hauner, the lead developer of the Ethereum 2.0 Lighthouse client. Also testing the new Eth 2.0 mock network – called “Medalla” – and finding some surprises along the way is […]
Bitcoin took a dive Wednesday. Ethereum miners are benefiting from all that DeFi. Bitcoin (BTC) trading around $11,396 as of 20:00 UTC (4 p.m. ET). Slipping 4.8% over the previous 24 hours. Bitcoin’s 24-hour range: $11,159-$12,058 BTC above its 10-day moving average but below the 50-day, a sideways signal for market technicians. Bitcoin trading on Coinbase since August 31.Source: TradingView Read More: Bitcoin Price Drops 4% After Latest Rejection at $12K Resistance Bitcoin dropped to as low as $11,159 on spot exchanges like Coinbase Wednesday. The fall was exacerbated by long-oriented derivatives traders on exchanges like BitMEX. That platform experienced $9 […]
The Ethereum Classic blockchain suffered a 51% attack Saturday evening, its third 51% attack this month, noticed by mining company Bitfly, which also spotted the first attack on Aug. 1. (UPDATE 23:03 UTC): Adding comment from ETC Cooperative in third bullet point. Source link
Bitcoin’s rally lost power after a speech by the Federal Reserve chief; Ethereum gas usage hits another record. Bitcoin (BTC) trading around $11,251 as of 20:00 UTC (4 p.m. ET). Slipping 1.8% over the previous 24 hours. Bitcoin’s 24-hour range: $11,130-$11,596 BTC below its 10-day and 50-day moving averages, a bearish signal for market technicians. Bitcoin trading on Coinbase since August 25. Source: TradingView Thursday featured a highly anticipated speech by Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell highlighting U.S. dollar inflation. During the hour Powell spoke, spot bitcoin hit as high as $11,596 on Coinbase. However, it lost steam and dropped $466 […]
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 […]
The bitcoin market is experiencing low volume Monday but ether continues to fuel DeFi’s growth. Bitcoin (BTC) trading around $11,737 as of 20:00 UTC (4 p.m. ET). Gaining 0.34% over the previous 24 hours. Bitcoin’s 24-hour range: $11,592-$11,823. BTC above its 10-day and 50-day moving averages, a bullish signal for market technicians. Bitcoin trading on Coinbase since August 22.Source: TradingView Read More: Leveraged Funds Take Record Bearish Positions in Bitcoin Futures Bitcoin’s price opened the week heading higher, hitting $11,823 on Monday before dipping lower. “Bitcoin has settled into a consolidation position at $11,700,” said Daniel Koehler, liquidity manager at cryptocurrency […]
Markets excited by the prospect of declining ETH fees may have caused a surge in 0x, an Ethereum-based DEX that will benefit from decongestion. Source link
Ethereum Classic’s hashrate has dropped precipitously since January and continues to decline after two successful 51% attacks on the network earlier in August. In light of the vulnerability, Ethereum Classic Labs, self-described as “stewards” of the blockchain, detailed a plan to protect and revitalize the fledgling network in a blog post published Wednesday. Source link
Shaken by weeks of network-overwhelming hacks, ETC Labs has outlined its security response. Source link
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 […]
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
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
DeFi Dad is a DeFi super user sharing his money experiments and tutorials on Twitter and YouTube. He is an organizing member of the Ethereal Summit and Sessions, host of The Ethereal Podcast and a weekly contributor to The Defiant and Bankless. Ethereum has always been difficult to explain. Even the founders of Ethereum have sometimes struggled to communicate the project’s transformative potential in layperson’s terms. Metaphors such as “world computer” and “gas” tried to translate Ethereum to the world, but looking back it’s clear how little we understood about the platform’s true capabilities. By 2017, big promises were being made […]
Ethereum Classic (ETC) suffered a 3,693-block chain reorganization early Saturday morning, an event first thought to be a possible 51% attack, after a miner used old software after having been offline, according to Terry Culver, CEO of Ethereum Classic Labs. Update (August 1, 15:17 UTC): This article has been updated with an estimate of the attack cost. Update (August 1, 16:28 UTC): This article has been further updated to reflect that the event was likely not a malicious act, but an accidental one in which an offline miner came back online using an old version of ETC. That event then mimicked a […]
“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 […]
Five years ago this week, the first general-purpose blockchain went live on mainnet. Ethereum paved the way for a whole new use case for blockchain technology untethered from Bitcoin’s original vision as electronic cash. CoinDesk marked the milestone with a special series of stories, live–streamed conversations and even a pop-up newsletter. These charts first appeared in the newsletter, one for each day. Here are five charts for understanding Ethereum’s evolution. Part 1: A Bloodless Secession Source: CoinDesk Research Not one year after the launch of Ethereum, a seminal event split the community in two. So acute was the disagreement between these […]
Music is back on the blockchain. Audius, a streaming service that connects music fans directly with artists, has raised $3.1 million in a strategic round co-led by Multicoin Capital and Blockchange Ventures, with participation from Pantera Capital and Coinbase Ventures. Audius has now raised a total of $8.6 million as the platform prepares for prime time, having grown in less than a year to over 250,000 monthly users and 40,000 artists. EDM artists seem to be the site’s burgeoning specialty with notables like RAC, deadmau5, Lido, 3LAU, Zeds Dead, Mr. Carmack and REZZ all signed on. The blockchain use case for […]
The transition to Ethereum 2.0 and its proof-of-stake consensus model is finally underway. Source link
High spot bitcoin volume not seen since June is helping price while Ethereum’s DeFi expansion continues to include costly network fees. Bitcoin (BTC) trading around $10,829 as of 20:00 UTC (4 p.m. ET). Gaining 9.7% over the previous 24 hours. Bitcoin’s 24-hour range: $9,849-$10,964 BTC above 10-day and 50-day moving averages, a bullish signal for market technicians. Bitcoin trading on Coinbase since July 26.Source: TradingView Bitcoin hit $10,964 on spot exchange Coinbase Monday, a price level not seen since August 2019. “The bitcoin breakout seemed to finally have happened as we lifted off from $9,800,” said Jack Tan, of Taiwan-based quantitative […]
What makes Ethereum culture click? Maker Foundation board member Tonya Evans and former ConsenSys chief marketing officer Amanda Cassatt joined CoinDesk senior reporter Leigh Cuen on Monday to discuss Ethereum’s ethos in an hourlong conversation streamed to the CoinDesk homepage. “In terms of its structure and what it accomplishes in the world, it’s by default a global movement,” Cassat said of the world’s leading smart-contract blockchain. Evans, also a law professor at Penn State’s Dickinson Law School, said Ethereum can yield a more equitable version of global finance. Inclusion is baked into the platform but shouldn’t be taken for granted, she […]
The lights were dimmed during the last day of Devcon in October 2019. A hush fell over the auditorium in Osaka, Japan. A haunting melody rippled through the crowd of roughly 1,000 people. Everyone knew the dance was about to begin. Ethereum leaders, including inventor Vitalik Buterin, plus Hudson Jameson and Aya Miyaguchi of the Ethereum Foundation, would lead a goofy dance to close out the annual tech conference. Cheers erupted when the Ethereum influencers took the stage, nodding respectfully to conference organizers and thanking the crowd. Soon the whole crowd was following along, jumping up and down, turning in circles. […]
Ethereum 2.0 is coming. The yearslong upgrade – intended to radically transform the world’s largest smart-contract platform – is inching closer to deployment. The Ethereum Foundation recently announced “Medalla,” a final testnet before the mainnet launch of the Eth 2.0 beacon chain. As of July 10, some developers, including Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, estimate the oft-delayed Eth 2.0 will launch by the end of this year. To mark the fifth anniversary of the network’s launch, CoinDesk is producing Ethereum at Five – a cross-platform series featuring special coverage, a limited-run newsletter and live-streamed discussions on Twitter. New issues and sessions launch daily from […]
Ethereum fees are at a two-year high as the hype around decentralized finance (DeFi) leads to a surge in network activity, according to Coin Metrics. 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
Five years ago, a wildly ambitious project went live. Its creators envisioned a “world computer” that would transform not just money but a vast range of social interactions, pushing the boundaries of what could be done with cryptography and distributed consensus. Ethereum had arrived. From its technical aspirations to unicorn memes, Ethereum is a culture on its own. It has spawned inventions – from digital cats to yield farming – previously unimagined and now faces a major overhaul – Eth 2.0 – to keep up with the market’s demands. CoinDesk is marking the milestone with Ethereum at Five: a cross-platform series […]
While bitcoin prices stay steady, Ethereum transactions are skyrocketing. Holding on to $9,200 after a weekend in the $9,100 range is the best traders could hope for in a weaker-than-normal market for bitcoin. “After a brief consolidation in the region of $9,000, bitcoin began to adjust upward,” said Constantin Kogan, partner at cryptocurrency fund of funds BitBull Capital. “Now it is near the next important level at $9,200. If today’s trading session closes above this mark, it is likely to see further growth.” Any growth would be welcomed by cryptocurrency traders – so far this month, bitcoin’s overall performance in July […]
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 […]
Camila Russo is the founder of The Defiant and author of “The Infinite Machine,” the first book on the history of Ethereum, which launches today. Read an extract here. Almost five years ago on July 30, 2015, part of the Ethereum team had gathered in Berlin to see the network they helped build go live. A big screen overhanging their worktables served as the countdown clock for when the test network reached block 1,028,201. That’s the palindrome and prime number they picked as the key which would launch the mainnet. Others were waiting for the launch in Ethereum hubs in Amsterdam, […]
This is a weird year for everyone and everything, but it’s a particularly weird year for Ethereum. Why? The second-largest blockchain by market cap and the largest by contributing developers has always been known for having lots of events. COVID-19 has put the kibosh on that. “These folks are in a state of constant BUIDLing” Amanda Cassatt, a ConsenSys alum who launched its Ethereal event series, told CoinDesk in an email. “Ethereum is also, by design, a uniquely collaborative community. These factors contribute to the prevalence of and enthusiasm for in-person events.” Ethereum turns five on July 30, 2020. CoinDesk is […]
There may be an enterprise blockchain arms race brewing in Latin America. LatamLink, an alliance of three organizations involved in the launch of the EOS public blockchain in 2018, is now busy integrating the EOSIO software for enterprise uses. The group seems to be competing for business in the region with ConsenSys, a globally distributed outfit focused on all things Ethereum. Up for grabs is LACChain, a blockchain framework that has the backing of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and a host of public and private entities across Latin America and the Caribbean. ConsenSys set up a Besu testnet for LACChain […]
Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA), the business end of the second-largest blockchain, has appointed a new executive director, Daniel C. Burnett. Burnett, who previously worked as a standards architect within Ethereum-focused ConsenSys, wants to widen the EEA’s scope beyond banks and blue chips, to include exchanges. Burnett even aims to embrace the brave new world of decentralized finance (DeFi), which has proven to be one of Ethereum’s major use cases. “We should be seeing the exchanges as members, we should be seeing tooling vendors as members,” Burnett said in an interview. “It could be something in the API that they have to […]
Nearly $60 million worth of bitcoins moved to Ethereum during June, according to data estimates from Dune Analytics. Wrapped Bitcoin, the oldest tokenized bitcoin protocol on Ethereum, is responsible for roughly 75% of that growth after moving more than 4,800 BTC to Ethereum last month. Demand has increased for using bitcoin in a variety of decentralized financial services as Ethereum continues to be the most popular off-chain destination for bitcoins. More specifically, yield farming and MakerDAO adding tokenized bitcoin as collateral are likely strong catalysts, said Medio Demarco, former associate at Deutsche Bank and co-founder of cryptocurrency research firm Delphi Digital. […]
Lex Sokolin, a CoinDesk columnist, is Global Fintech co-head at ConsenSys, a Brooklyn, N.Y.-based blockchain software company. The following is adapted from his Fintech Blueprint newsletter. We have a beautiful Ethereum garden. In it we grow cash equivalents called stablecoins powering applications that run on open-source, programmable blockchains. It promises to be the new economy – free, permissionless and global. It saw more than $50 billion in transaction volume in June 2020 alone. But there is a hungry weed growing underneath. In our beautiful public garden, there spreads corruption. Can we root out this plant? Can we turn the soil? The weed is […]
Levels of activity on Ethereum have peaked to their highest in two years, going by one metric. The seven-day moving average of the number of active ether addresses rose to 405,014 on Friday – a threshold not seen since May 2018, according to data provided by the blockchain analytics firm Glassnode. Active addresses are the number of unique addresses that are active in the network either as a sender or receiver. Glassnode takes into account only those addresses that were active in successful transactions. Ethereum active addressesSource: Glassnode As of Monday, the seven-day average was down slightly to 390,162. That’s still […]
The world’s largest payment network is looking for an Ethereum developer to help work on a new blockchain-based application. Source link
Tensions between the Bitcoin and Ethereum tribes have been stirred by a trend that outsiders might see as a sign of harmony. Throughout June, the amount of tokenized bitcoin on Ethereum, the bulk of it in WBTC, a special ERC2 token known as “wrapped bitcoin,” soared from 5,200 BTC to 11,682 BTC – now worth around $108 million – according to btconethereum.com. As is their wont, each faction described the growth of WBTC tokens, whose value is pegged one-to-one against a locked-up reserve of actual bitcoin, as proof of their coin’s superiority over the other. The Ethereum crowd said it showed […]
Blockchain technology firm Bison Trails announced its support for features of Eth2 ahead of Ethereum’s planned upgrade. 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
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 […]
The Ethereum Foundation followed up on its 2019 gift to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) this week with a second cryptocurrency donation. UNICEF crypto portfolio manager Cecilia Chapiro said the fund is now accepting applications from startups in emerging markets to receive investments via this second donation of roughly 1,125 ether (ETH), or $262,000 at press time. “We are still looking for big donors … also from a technical expertise perspective, we’re always matching our startups with mentors in the space,” said UNICEF blockchain lead Christina Lomazzo. “We’ve not received any more bitcoin, beyond what we got from the Ethereum […]
The World Economic Forum (WEF) is working with the Colombian government to see if blockchain-based transparency can help prevent a hotspot for corruption, which happens in the process of bidding for high-value contracts to provide public goods and services. WEF partnered with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and the Office of the Inspector General of Colombia to develop a proof-of-concept (PoC) using the Ethereum public blockchain. The aim of the project was to apply a high level of transparency to the procurement corruption use case in the context of the country’s system of government contracting. The PoC will be piloted in […]
It’s costing more to use Ethereum and that may be because more users are flocking to the platform than ever before, according to one key on-chain metric. Analysts say the growth of both transactions and the cost to process them is being driven by an increase in stablecoin usage and DeFi applications. The seven-day moving average of the total amount of “gas” used in transactions on Ethereum’s blockchain rose to a record high of 61.12 billion on Monday, having surpassed the previous high of 60.07 billion reached in September 2019, according to data provided by the blockchain analytics firm CoinMetrics. Gas […]
Ethereum development house ConsenSys is being backed by heavy hitters like Binance and Huobi to test its new “staking-as-a-service” offering, designed to make it easy for institutions to earn income from the next iteration of the second-largest public blockchain. Announced Tuesday, the Eth 2.0 staking pilot from ConsenSys Codefi includes Binance, Huobi Wallet, Matrixport, Crypto.com, DARMA Capital and Trustology. This first batch of participants will provide feedback and feature requests to Codefi as it builds out its Eth 2.0 staking API, which is targeted at large exchanges, wallet providers, custodians and crypto hedge funds. Existing Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchains such as Tezos, […]
Nexus Mutual, an alternative insurance provider for a variety of Ethereum-based DeFi protocols, has seen its risk pool double over the past 90 days to more than $4 million. Indeed, Nexus can barely keep up with the demand for smart-contract cover in the exploding decentralized finance (DeFi) arena. “We are in this position where there are lots of people that want heaps of cover, but we don’t quite have enough assets to cover everything we would like to right now,” said Nexus Mutual CEO and founder Hugh Karp. “So it’s a good problem to have and we’re working on it.” The […]
As Ethereum pushes slowly toward a new type of blockchain technology that some cryptocurrency experts predict could represent the future of decentralized finance, the upstart competitor Cardano is getting ready to go live. And Cardano’s digital token, ADA, is soaring this year in digital-asset markets on speculation that the project’s early embrace of a “proof-of-stake” blockchain might put it in a stronger position to challenge the much-larger Ethereum network. You’re reading First Mover, CoinDesk’s daily markets newsletter. Assembled by the CoinDesk Markets Team, First Mover starts your day with the most up-to-date sentiment around crypto markets, which of course never close, putting in context […]
Ethereum was created to carry out complex applications Bitcoin supposedly couldn’t handle. A new app brings the idea full circle. Pseudonymous developer Fiatjaf has created Etleneum, which he describes as a “centralized” version of Ethereum that runs on payments from Bitcoin’s Lightning Network. Hence the name, a portmanteau of “Ethereum” and “Lightning.” (If that’s too subtle, the Etleneum logo is a diamond shape like Ethereum’s with a lightning bolt running through it.) Like Ethereum, Etleneum has “contracts,” automated agreements over what rules need to be met before money can be dispensed. The contracts are public like Ethereum’s, and like the world’s […]
The most popular way to use bitcoin off-chain is on Ethereum, recent data indicates. Since 2016, software engineers have worked to extend the oldest and largest cryptocurrency’s use cases through a variety of companion protocols, like the Lightning Network for payments or the Liquid Network for trading. But to date, the most popular off-chain protocols that use bitcoin (the currency, with a small “b”) run on the largest rival to Bitcoin (the network, uppercase). In fact, Ethereum projects including WBTC and imBTC hold 70% more bitcoins than Lightning or Liquid. This is “ironic” to Camila Russo, author of “The Infinite Machine“, […]
Matic, a sidechain scaling solution for Ethereum, began deploying its mainnet on Sunday. The India-based Matic Foundation announced via a blog post that it had brought 10 nodes online, the first volley of a network Matic hopes to grow tenfold. Project insiders told CoinDesk that the launch validates almost three years of forging ties in India’s developer scene, an effort they began long before the India Supreme Court effectively legalized cryptocurrencies earlier this year. With the rollout, Matic, which last year raised seed funding from Coinbase Ventures, can now run dapps and support asset transfers between its network and the ethereum […]
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 […]
Osho Jha is an investor, data scientist and tech company executive who enjoys finding and analyzing unique data sets for investing in both public and private markets. With the halving capturing the attention of most investors in the cryptocurrency space as well as some mainstream press, the changes at Ethereum have gone largely unnoticed in the broader crypto community. While BTC has become an investment option for those seeking strong money principles in a time of central bank balance sheet expansion, ETH also represents strong money principles. Ethereum 2.0 has been plagued by delays – a natural part of the software […]
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 […]
Blockchain venture studio Thesis has put a pause on deposits into tBTC, its new platform meant to put BTC on Ethereum so BTC can be used in decentralized finance. The Thesis team cited a bug, but is not disclosing details until all funds have been safely withdrawn from this iteration of tBTC. Thesis is now helping early users withdraw any BTC that had been deposited. The project lead behind the new system, Thesis CEO Matt Luongo, sent the following statement to CoinDesk via a spokesperson: “While the tBTC dapp was being tested over the weekend in its alpha version, a couple […]
Reddit has expanded its “community points” trial, offering users a way to earn a “piece of their favorite communities,” built on top of the Ethereum blockchain. In a slide presentation, published Wednesday evening, Reddit revealed its plans to utilize the Ethereum network to incentivize the creation of “quality posts and comments.” The points can be spent on premium features and used as a measure of reputation in the community, the social media platform said. Users are rewarded based on their contribution to their favorite channels, with the community ultimately deciding how many points each user receives. Users can hoard their points […]
R3, the company behind distributed ledger technology (DLT) platform Corda, is edging ever closer to Ethereum, with news of a partnership with blockchain-in-the-cloud startup Kaleido. The announcement comes following Kaleido’s emergence as a standalone company last month. The startup revealed Tuesday it was spun out of ConsenSys, the Ethereum-based venture studio founded by Joe Lubin. “We spun out April 1. It’s been exciting for us to take that step forward,” Sophia Lopez, Kaleido’s chief operating officer, told CoinDesk in an email. “In addition to the partnership with R3 and going live with Corda available on the Kaleido platform this afternoon, we […]
A handful of big names in crypto want in on the privacy features offered by Zcash. “It is humbling and inspiring that such a strong group of builders is leaning in to push that mission forward and help guide the future of Zcash,” privacy coin co-founder Zooko Wilcox said in a press statement. The Electric Coin Company (ECC) announced Monday the launch of the Zcash Developers Alliance (ZDA), an invite-only working group that includes the Lightning Network startup Bolt Labs, the cross-chain technology startup Thesis, the Ethereum conglomerate ConsenSys and two leading startups working on the Cosmos project, Agoric and Iqlusion, […]
Developers can now access the tools needed to manage a full-scale Enterprise Ethereum network through Microsoft’s Azure marketplace. The PegaSys Ethereum Suite, which includes Hyperledger Besu, PegaSys Plus and PegaSys Orchestrate, will help developers deploy multi-node networks with blockchain explorers, monitoring and dashboards, Ethereum development studio ConsenSys said in a press release on Friday. PegaSys is the protocol engineering group at ConsenSys, which in turn is the Brooklyn, New York-based firm known for incubating Ethereum projects. Despite laying off dozens of workers in late April, the firm is looking ahead to further network developments in the blockchain arena. “We are excited […]
Tether growth is hitting new all-time highs across multiple blockchains, but the first protocol to support Tether is being left behind. Omni Layer, built on Bitcoin, has suffered negative growth in Tether transactions for the last 12 consecutive months. Tether supply on Omni Layer has also fallen more than 50% over the same period, according to Coin Metrics. Omni Layer’s Tether supply peaked in mid-2018 at just over $3 billion. Tether tokens first launched on Omni Layer in October 2014. While fluctuations in stablecoin supply and transaction counts happen regularly, it’s unusual for there to be a contraction in supply for months at […]