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 […]
Ethereums
20 posts
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. The Top Shelf news you subscribed to is down below. Now, a few words from CoinDesk tech reporter Will Foxley. Making consensus Scaling for censorship-resistanceThe shakedown of bitcoin derivatives exchange BitMEX last week is a healthy reminder of what motivates many DeFi developers: building censorship-resistant financial markets. The meaningful comparison between BitMEX and decentralized finance, of course, is the […]
CoinDesk is preparing for invest: ethereum economy 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 them. The Top Shelf news you subscribed to is down below. Now a few words from CoinDesk’s Managing Director of Events Aaron Stanley: Making consensus The meaning of developmentThe exploding popularity of decentralized finance, be it “Weird DeFi” or otherwise, has brought a surge of new interest to Ethereum-based applications while highlighting the scalability issues with the platform’s current infrastructure. Network congestion, a result of increased […]
With the U.S. elections just five weeks away, the crypto market’s focus looks to be shifting back to bitcoin from ether. Source link
The number of pending transactions on Ethereum per minute has jumped 30% after the claim for Uniswap’s UNI token begins. The decentralized trading platform announced around 00:30 UTC time Thursday that it has launched its governance token dubbed UNI with 1 billion coins that will be released over the next four years. While the liquidity mining for the governance token will not start until Friday, Uniswap said historical users and liquidity providers on the platform are now able to claim for 400 UNI per each address. “15% of UNI [150,000,000 UNI] can immediately be claimed by historical liquidity providers, users, and […]
Mongolian authorities have put the kibosh on cheap electricity for crypto miners, Venezuela is seeing healthy crypto use outside government-approved exchanges and a “critical bug” has left 13% of Ethereum nodes useless. You’re reading Blockchain Bites, the daily roundup of the most pivotal stories in blockchain and crypto news, and why they’re significant. You can subscribe to this and all of CoinDesk’s newsletters here. Top shelf Bakkt’s back?Growing institutional interest is helping to drive a recent spike in volume on Bakkt, according to its president, Adam White. Trading volumes for physically settled bitcoin futures on Bakkt rose to $134 million on Tuesday from a previous […]
There are more addresses than ever as part of Bitcoin’s “rich list,” the Federal Reserve is looking to change tack on inflation and another firm is putting its cash reserves into bitcoin, not a bank account. You’re reading Blockchain Bites, the daily roundup of the most pivotal stories in blockchain and crypto news, and why they’re significant. You can subscribe to this and all of CoinDesk’s newsletters here. Top shelf Rich listThe “Bitcoin Rich List,” or the number of wallets with at least 1,000 BTC (~$11.5 million), is at a record high. There are approximately 2,190 rich list addresses, surpassing the previous record of 2,184 […]
BlockFi has raised a Series A, B and C within a 12-month span, an ICO’s investors can’t find the people they’re trying to sue and stablecoin demand may become unbalanced by traders ditching a “market-neutral strategy.” You’re reading Blockchain Bites, the daily roundup of the most pivotal stories in blockchain and crypto news, and why they’re significant. You can subscribe to this and all of CoinDesk’s newsletters here. Top shelf Semper BlockFi?Crypto lender BlockFi closed a $50 million Series C led by Morgan Creek Digital and with participation from Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures – the lead investor in BlockFi’s A and B rounds – Castle […]
Ethereum’s biggest-ever upgrade is supposed to make the blockchain network faster and more efficient. But the new “staking” system could lock up so many of the network’s native ether tokens that investors who want to trade them may have to rely on derivatives markets. The blockchain, the world’s second-biggest, currently uses a validating mechanism similar to larger Bitcoin’s known as “proof-of-work,” where new data blocks and transactions are confirmed via power-hungry computers solving complex cryptographic puzzles. Under Ethereum’s multi-year upgrade now underway, the network would shift to a “proof-of-stake” model, where investors validate transactions by staking ether on the blockchain in […]
For decentralized finance (DeFi) to make its mark, it must reach beyond the crypto bubble, said MakerDAO founder Rune Christensen. “Compared to where we’re going next, we’ve still just scratched the surface of what this technology will do,” Christensen, whose lending platform recently topped $1 billion in committed assets, said. He was joined by fellow DeFi luminaries Robert Leshner and Hayden Adams on Wednesday in a live-streamed conversation on the state of the $3.8 billion DeFi market. The session, part of CoinDesk’s Ethereum at Five series, was moderated by reporter Will Foxley. It will certainly be a hard row to hoe, […]
A crypto hedge fund is folding, Silvergate Bank’s bitcoin-collateralized loans surged this quarter and bitcoin futures markets record triple-digit growth. You’re reading Blockchain Bites, the daily roundup of the most pivotal stories in blockchain and crypto news, and why they’re significant. You can subscribe to this and all of CoinDesk’s newsletters here. Top shelf Bitcoin ETPSwiss crypto manager FiCAS AG announced what could be the first actively managed bitcoin exchange-traded product (ETP). The firm’s Chairman Mattia Rattaggi said the Bitcoin Capital Active ETP’s portfolio could contain up to 15 altcoins as determined by market capitalization, liquidity and the rules of its host exchange, the SIX […]
Projects like MakerDAO, Compound, dYdX and Dharma realized in 2018 they were a distinct group with shared interests within the cryptocurrency industry. Finance has been part of Ethereum from the beginning, but the first attempt to do finance on the “world computer” ended in disaster in 2016: The DAO. A unit of account was key to make decentralized finance (DeFi) startups usable, so when dai launched during the bitcoin runup of late-2017 and didn’t crash when ether fell, it was a positive signal for the space. Within a year of dai’s launch, a full stablecoin boom was underway. The third big […]
Ethereum’s Devcon 1, held in London in November 2015, was like Woodstock, except perhaps with less nudity. Bankers and Big 4 consultants disguised in hoodies shared space with dreadlocked Ethereum coders, sitting cross-legged in the corners, their laptops open in front of them. Packed into a Victorian banking hall in the heart of the City of London, the audience listened as ConsenSys chief Joe Lubin predicted a new future for firms; cryptographer Nick Szabo talked about decentralization in the context of Francis Drake and the Aztecs; and chief scientist Vitalik Buterin assembled shards of the path that lay ahead. “The internet […]
Twitch is offering discounts to subscribers paying in crypto, a federal court ruled bitcoin is money and R3 Corda’s blockchain is a big thing in Italy’s banking system. You’re reading Blockchain Bites, the daily roundup of the most pivotal stories in blockchain and crypto news, and why they’re significant. You can subscribe to this and all of CoinDesk’s newsletters here. It’s SettledR3’s Corda blockchain is used by 55 (~85%) Italian banks for interbank reconciliation, speeding up the process of double-checking transaction logs. The country’s Interbank Agreement was updated in May 2019 to include data standardization opening a window for blockchain processes to be implemented. Using […]
Binance announced the rollout of its crypto debit card, the U.K.’s central bank is thinking hard about a digital currency and the taxman cometh. Here’s the story: You’re reading Blockchain Bites, the daily roundup of the most pivotal stories in blockchain and crypto news, and why they’re significant. You can subscribe to this and all of CoinDesk’s newsletters here. Top shelf AML ComplianceBitGo is offering API support for the Financial Action Task Force’s (FATF) “Travel Rule,” which stipulates the originators and beneficiaries of financial transactions over $1,000 be identified and that their personal data must “travel” with those transactions. BitGo’s offering seeks to remove the […]
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” […]
The following is excerpted from Camila Russo’s “The Infinite Machine,” an in-depth history of Ethereum, which goes on sale July 14. The sale started on July 22 at midnight in Switzerland. The website they put together for the sale had a real-time counter of the amount of ether sold, and the team watched with relief as the numbers ticked up. More than 7 million ether, or about $2.2 million, were sold just in the first 12 hours. It had been a long, hard wait since December and January, when most of them started working for the project. Everyone was worn out, […]
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, […]
If, in the compressed time of blockchain existence, the “crypto winter” of 2018-2019 was Ethereum’s Dark Ages, then we’re now in its Renaissance. But it’s an open question whether the blockchain platform and its enthusiastic community can take the wider world into the next era: the decentralized equivalent of the industrial revolution. As Ethereum prepares to celebrate the five-year anniversary of its mainnet launch on July 31, billions of dollars in value rest on that question. Specifically, on whether the all-important Ethereum 2.0 scaling project can be successfully launched and integrated into its existing architecture. By most measures, the Ethereum ecosystem […]
Bitcoin underwent a protocol update to make the network more resilient to state attacks, while researchers separately found Ethereum may be losing its anonymity. Elsewhere, “Crypto Mom” Hester Pierce has been tapped for a second term at the SEC, and an ex-Yang advisor is making crypto a cornerstone to his House campaign. You’re reading Blockchain Bites, the daily roundup of the most pivotal stories in blockchain and crypto news, and why they’re significant. You can subscribe to this and all of CoinDesk’s newsletters here. Top shelf EthereumThe most popular way to use bitcoin off-chain is on Ethereum, data suggests. Ethereum projects including WBTC and […]