Crypto && Coffee 122

Technology Recap:

BitcoinBitcoin is a digital currency (also called crypto-currency) … More:

• Lightning Network Daemon, lnd, announces lnd v0.15-beta! This new release includes full support for Taproot (creating addresses, send/receive, PSBT funding and signing), experimental MuSig2 API, BIP-55 support for neutrino and more!

• The Lightning Development Kit shares the full background of LDK and the advantages of using LDK for Lightning network development.

Ethereum:

• The Gray Glacier upgrade is scheduled for blockBlocks hold batches of valid transactions that are hashed an… More 15,050,000 which is expected to occur later today, June 29th, 2022. The Gray Glacier upgrade changes the parameter of the Ice Age/Difficulty Bomb by pushing it back 700,000 blocks. Most core developers anticipate this to be the final difficulty bomb adjustment before The Merge.

• With The Merge approaching, developers have decided to deprecate various testnets including: Ropsten, Rinkeby and Kiln.

• ShadowFork #7 took place on June 22nd, 2022 which was the first one where we had an equal split of clients for all validators.

Other Chains:

• dYdX announces that dYdX v4 will be developed as a standalone Cosmos-based blockchainA blockchain—the technology underlying bitcoin and other c… More with Tendermint Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensusConsensus is a mechanism, usually used by most nodes on the … More, moving away from Ethereum.

• Ava Labs, the team behind Avalanche, releases Core, a free non-custodial browser extension engineered for users to seamlessly and securely access the power of Web4 on Avalanche.

• StarkWare presents StarkEx v4.5 which features ERC-1155 support, bundled transactions, and volition.

• Inter-chain Accounts are coming to Juno. Juno, the hub for CosmWasm Smart ContractsWhat are smart contracts? A smart contract is a computer pro… More in Cosmos, will be the host chain for Inter-chain Accounts and has an upgrade proposal going live for on-chain voting June 30th until July 2nd, 2022.

• Fuel Labs introduces SwaySwap, a Uniswap-like decentralized application running on a persistent Fuel devnet.

• Monero will undergo a network upgrade on July 16th, 2022 at block 2,668,888. The network upgrade will increase the ring size from 11 to 16, upgrade Bulletproofs algorithm to Bulletproof+ which will reduce the transaction size and verification performance by ~5-7%, as well as fee changes.

• THORChain mainnetThe term is used to identify a realnet/mainet blockchain fro… More has been achieved! After 4 years in the making, THORChain supports swap between 7 major ecosystems including: BTC, ETH (+ERC-20What is ERC-20? “Ethereum Request for Comments 20,” more… More), BNB (+BEP-2), DOGE, LTC, BCH, and RUNE.

• Flashbots shares their latest status update with focus on mev-boost, Sepolia testnet, Relay Monitor, and more!

• StarkWare announces a strategic partnership with ConsenSys which will bring Snaps plugins for MetaMask support of native Starknet, infrastructure from Infura, and Diligence smart contract audits.

Hacks | Vulnerabilities | Exploits:

• The Harmony team identified a theft occurring on June 23rd, 2022 on the Horizon Bridge amounting to ~$100M. They are working with Chainalysis for support.

• On March 29th, 2022 a whitehat by the name of “nojob” reported a critical vulnerability in Port Finance on Solana. Today, that whitehat got a $630K payout. Full bugfix review is here.

Mainstream Recap:

• Solana Labs announces that they are building a Web3 mobile phone that will be available in early 2023.

• Coinbase allows eligible Coinbase customers to send and receive ETH, MATIC, and USDC on Polygon, and USDC on Solana. The first time Coinbase has enabled send/receives on a layer-2 or sidechain.

• Tor shares that there has been an ongoing network DDoS attack since June 9th, 2022 and has been impacting performance on the Tor network and various Lightning nodes that utilize Tor.

• Linera, a low-latency blockchain that aims to scale similar to Web2 applications announces a close of $6M seed round led by a16z crypto.

• Brazil’s largest digital bank, Nubank, has rolled out bitcoin buying capabilities to all of its 53.9M customers.

This Week’s Cup of Coffee:

This week, we are heading to Brussels, BE for a cup of Worka Chelichele from Black Potion! This Ethiopian roast yields citrus notes and a nice balance of both floral and fruitiness – perfect for summer mornings. Sip up and enjoy!!