Crypto && Coffee 036
- 6 minsTechnology Recap:
Bitcoin:
- Bitcoin Core v0.20.1rc1 is a release candidate for an upcoming maintenance release. In addition to RPC fixes and minor bug fixes, this release will provide compatibility with recent versions of Hardware Wallet Interface (HWI) which is an interface used for Partially-Signed Bitcoin Transactions (PSBTs).
BitcoinCash:
- Antony Zegers & Amaury Séchet of BitcoinABC discussed smart contracts and DeFi on BitcoinCash yesterday on YouTube.
Litecoin:
- David Burkett publishes his July progress update on Mimblewimble for Litecoin. The Litecoin community has re-shared the donation addresses to continue to fund David’s work.
Ethereum:
- On July 30th, 2020 Ethereum turned 5 years old! Here’s a short recap on the past 5 years from The Daily Gwei.
- ETH2.0 update from the Ethereum Foundation including details on Medalla, ethstaker community resource, and the mc-attack-0 multi-client attacknet.
- Medalla, the official community ETH2.0 testnet has launched! Recap the live launch here. Or follow through Hudson Jameson, of the Ethereum Foundations thread on yesterday’s launch.
- View the full health metrics of ETH2 launch for each epoch.
- The Medalla testnet launch has 5 clients running including: Prysm by Prysmatic Labs, Lodestar by ChainSafe, Teku by ConsenSys, Nimbus by Status, and Lighthouse by Sigma Prime.
Other Chains:
- Ethereum Classic (ETC) experienced a chain reorg of 3,693 blocks at block 1904146. This caused all state pruned nodes to stop syncing. It is likely to be caused by a 51% attack and Bitfly advised all exchanges to halt deposits and withdrawals immediately. Full report from Ethereum Classic devs here.
- Aave Protocol introduces their tokenomics upgrade proposal: The Aavenomics. This proposal dives into market policies, protocol governance, token migration, and ecosystem reserves.
- Loopring now supports Compound Finance cTokens and Aave aTokens for zkRollup transfers via Loopring Pay. This is the beginning of their upcoming v3.6 zkRollup upgrade.
- Synthetix announces that staking SNX, minting sUSD, and claiming staking rewards is all now possible through Gnosis Safe wallets thanks to functionality via Protofire.
- NEAR announces the collaboration with Chainlink to make decentralized oracles available to NEAR developers. The first use case for Chainlink on NEAR will be providing pricing data for DeFi applications by leveraging their Price Reference Data framework.
- Cardano successfully hard forked last week on July 30th, 2020 moving from the centralized Byron network to the decentralized Shelley network. View IOHK’s full deep dive in the path to decentralization and Ouroboros proof of stake (PoS) consensus.
- CoinList announces CoinList Pro. This will be supported by GSR and another unnamed leading market maker. These market makers will support Filecoin, Celo as well as other core assets.
- Dharma announces that their users can trade any of the 2,000+ tokens in Uniswap now as of July 30th, 2020. Dharma is offering no-fee, no-gas promotion for one full month until August 30th.
- Synthetix releases the State of Synthetix as well as their roadmap and plans for the next 6-8 weeks.
- The LTO Network is integrating Chainlink oracles to bring accreditation data to Ethereum DApps.
- The Electric Coin Company releases network upgrade v3.1.0 Canopy. This upgrade contains the following ZIPs: Funding Streams, Disabling addition of new value to the Sprout Pool, allow recipients to derive Sapling Ephemeral Secret from Note Plaintext, consensus rules for Zcash dev fund, and explicitly defining and modifying Ed25519 validation rules.
- Researchers of the Monero Research Lab and the Monero Audit Workgroup are pleased to announce the results of a recent audit of the CLSAG ring signature construction. CLSAG enables smaller and faster transactions with rigorous security. Plans to integrate this into Monero are planned for the next network upgrade in October.
- mStable’s Earn is now live!
- Anna Rose of the Zero Knowledge Podcast shares her views on the rest of 2020 for crypto.
- Dive into light clients in Tendermint and how they deal with different block headers at the same height.
- The Monero Community Crowdfunding System has announced the summary of their research into a fully functional Bitcoin and Monero atomic swap protocol.
- Stellar releases their Stellar Dev Digest with Stellar Community Fund finalists, Bitbond growth, and a new delegated signer for the Stellar Network from OrbitLens.
- Eli Ben-Sasson of StarkWare releases the final report on STARK Friendly Hash (SFH) which includes info on rescue hash over a prime field of size ~2^(61).
- Yearn Finance explains Delegated Vaults and full collateral management.
- Figment Networks plans to support privacy-first decentralized network, Oasis and shares their research into all things Oasis.
- Full update on the Maker DAO ecosystem including all executive and governance votes.
Mainstream Recap:
- Coinbase launches Dai Rewards for customers in the US, UK, Netherlands, Spain, France and Australia. The rewards have 2% annual percentage yield (APY).
- Electric Coin Company launched the Crypto in Context Program, which is an initiative to connect industry leaders with underserved and burgeoning communities for dialog, discovery, networking and opportunities focused on cryptocurrencies.
- Fidelity Digital Assets introduces their first report in their Bitcoin Investment Thesis series. View the full report here.
- CoinDesk reports how Chain aims to be the world’s most dominant blockchain power via China’s blockchain infrastructure BSN which is looking to integrate with some of the most well-known blockchain networks.
- Hashstacs co-develops a blockchain project with Bursa Malaysia for its bonds marketplace. The project entitled, Project Harbour, is centered around the usage of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) as a register in facilitating the growth of Labuan’s bond marketplace. In addition to Bursa Malaysia, Securities Commission of Malaysia, Labuan Financial Services Authority, CIMB Investment Bank Berhad, Maybank Investment Bank Berhad and China Construction Bank Corporation Labuan Branch will utilize the Trident Platform built by Hashtacs.
- The Block reports that Chinese authorities have arrested all 27 major suspects of the PlusToken ponzi scheme.
- Circle announces they have entered into a strategic partnership with Genesis which will add new USD Coin (USDC) yield and lending services to Circle’s suite of products. In addition, the parent company of Genesis - Digital Currency Group has made a $25M investment in Circle to accelerate the global adoption of USDC.
- Coinbase is exploring the support of 19 new digital assets. The assets under review are: Ampleforth, Band Protocol, Balancer, Blockstack, Curve, Fetch.ai, Flexcoin, Helium, Hedera Hashgraph, Kava, Melon, Ocean Protocol, Paxos Gold, Reserve Rights, tBTC, The Graph, THETA, UMA, and WBTC.
- Josh Cincinnati resigns from his position as Executive Director of the Zcash Foundation. View his full Gist here.
- Electric Capital announces the close of their second fund, a $110M Seed and Series A fund focused on crypto networks and blockchain enabled businesses.
- Square Crypto gives a developer grant to Lloyd Fournier who is developing a number of Bitcoin focused projects including a library that simplifies applied cryptography experimentation.
- Greg Tusar, co-founder of Tagomi and electronic trading pioneer, joins Coinbase as Vice President of Institutional Products.
This Week’s Cup of Coffee:
This week, we are traveling back to the east coast for a solid Summer Blend from ReAnimator Coffee Roasters in Philadelphia, PA. This roast combines fresh washed Ethiopian and Guatemalan coffees which yields notes of nectarine, melon and brown sugar. Have this during that early morning sunrise or iced in the afternoon for that mid-summer jolt. Sip up!
Jake Tarnow
Not Your Average Engineer