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Crypto && Coffee 054

Technology Recap: 

Bitcoin: 

  • In a recent thread, Chris Belcher announced that the first multi-transaction CoinSwap has been created on the Bitcoin testnet. Following the CoinSwap protocol, the actual transfer of coins takes place off-chain even though they are still unspent on-chain. The protocol is non-custodial and prevents Alice and Bob from stealing each other’s money at any point in the process. The multi-transaction use-case is to avoid amount correlation. 
  • The next step for CoinSwap on Bitcoin testnet is to incorporate ECDSA-2P which allows the creation of a 2-of-2 multi-sig address that looks the same as a regular single signature address such as P2PKH.  
  • Blockstream Core Tech Engineer Jonas Nick gave a talk recently at ACM CCS 2020 where he discussed the MuSig-DN Schnorr Multisignature scheme.   

Ethereum: 

  • Barnabé Monnot of Ethereum Foundation explored the first 1,000 epochs of ETH2.0 since its launch last week.  
  • DappNode shared an article on the proposal of a DAO for validators on ETH2.0. 
  • A full update on the latest of EIP-1559 was published, diving into the extensive economic analysis by the community and more. 

Other Chains:  

  • Aave V2 is now live on mainnet! The new V2 includes yield and collateral swaps, upgraded flash loans, repayment with collateral, flash liquidations, native credit delegation, batch flash loans, debt tokenization and more.  
  • Chainlink shared a new paper in conjunction with the World Economic Forum (WEF) exploring the importance of decentralized oracles for connecting existing systems to blockchains.  
  • Loopring has now launched their automated market maker (AMM) on Loopring v3.6, their upgraded and improved zkRollup implementation. This brings the ability to do gas-free instant swaps, and gas-free instant adding/removing of liquidity as a liquidity provider on layer-2.  
  • Human Protocol, the underlying system behind hCaptcha, announced that it will be expanding beyond Ethereum to a future Polkadot parachain, Moonbeam. 
  • Terra launched Shuttle, a Terra-Ethereum bridge. The bridge currently only supports whitelisted assets to be sent between Terra and Ethereum networks. 
  • StarkWare shared that DeversiFi reported a bug in the newly deployed StarkEx 2.0 system where traders couldn’t deposit or withdraw Tether and OMG tokens. Here’s a full thread on what happened and statement from DeversiFi 
  • A full dashboard of Loopring, including trading volume, transactions per second, and number of accounts and their balances, has been posted on Dune Analytics. 
  • The Solana blockchain had a hiccup this past week with the mainnet beta cluster failing to produce blocks at slot 53,180,900. The Solana team released a patch and the chain was down for roughly 6 hours.  
  • Samczsun shared a recent talk at Gitcoin’s smart contract security event where they covered a few different topics, including the current smart contract landscape, reentrancy, and unsafe external calls.  
  • Instadapp announced support for Aave V2 with a one-click migration and DeFi strategies.  
  • Opyn gave an introduction to their v2 protocol, which lays the foundation for a more capitally-efficient and highly liquid options protocol.  
  • Anyone looking for an awesome tool to easily switch between Solidity compiler versions should check out solc-select 
  • Monero released v0.17.1.6, Oxygen Orion, as a minor point release which contains P2P network layer improvements.  
  • Dharma now supports ACH purchases in Illinois. Users can now buy up to $25,000 per week of any asset using Uniswap directly from their bank account.  
  • RCN announced that the RCN protocol has successfully integrated Chainlink as its sole oracle provider. After a year of maintaining its own oracles, RCN has embraced Chainlink for its superior security, reliability, cost-efficiency, and scalability.  
  • Rocket Pool discussed their vision on ETH2.0 and how they plan to support ETH2.0 infrastructure and the steps for staking.  
  • DeversiFi launched liquidity mining on Nectar Beehive v1.  
  • Synthetix released an update on SNX and sUSD launching on Monolith. Monolith is a visa debit card and Ethereum smart wallet that enables users to buy, spend, or hold and earn interest with crypto. Monolith is available in countries throughout Europe (EEA) and can be used around the globe with merchants that accept Visa.  

Mainstream Recap: 

  • An active MetaMask phishing scam continues with the amount of victimized assets rising.  
  • S&P Dow Jones Indices stated last week that it will launch a customizable cryptocurrency indexing service in partnership with crypto data providers Lukka in 2021.  
  • Kraken announced that they will make $150,000 in donations to open-source Ethereum projects in collaboration with Gitcoin 
  • Gemini announced the creation of the Gemini Opportunity Fund, a donor-advised fund that will support Bitcoin Core development through grants, fellowships, and donations. They will initially provide $50,000 in BTC funding to the Human Rights Foundation’s Bitcoin Development Fund.  
  • ConsenSys has acquired any.sender to join the Infura team. Any.sender will incorporate their powerful transaction relaying features into the Infura development suite.  
  • Terra launched Mirror, bringing publicly traded companies to mTokens represented on a blockchain that only requires users to stake 150% of its values in one of Terra’s various stablecoins – unlike the 750% required collateralization ratio on Synthetix 
  • The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is making their Strategic Hub for Innovation and Financial Technology (FinHub) a stand-alone office. Senior Advisor for Digital Assets, Valerie A. Szczepanik, will take charge of the office and directly report to the SEC commissioner.  
  • 3iQ’s The Ether Fund IPO is anticipated to close on December 10th, 2020. The Toronto Stock Exchange has conditionally approved the listing under the symbol QETH.U.  
  • 1inch announced a successful closure of a $12M funding round from institutional investors, including Pantera Capital, ParaFi Capital and Nima Capital.  
  • Genesis Block Ventures (GBV) acquired OMG Network, a subsidiary of SYNQA.  

This Week’s Cup of Coffee: 

This week, we are headed down the coast to San Diego for a cup of Bird Rock Coffee Roasters holiday blend Naughty. This dark roast is a blend of Guatemala and Sumatra roasts that yields flavors of dark chocolate with hints of spices. And to answer the question I’m sure you’re asking – yes, there is a Nice roast as well that is a lighter roast with flavors of toffee and candied walnuts. Enjoy!  

 

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