ENS Domain Name Wrappers
A wrapper is a smart contract that wraps existing ENS second-level domains into ERC-1155 tokens.
ENS is working on domain name wrappers.
Huff releases its smart contract language.
Arbitrum migrates its Rinkeby testnet to Nitro.
Rainbow will integrate ENS profiles into its wallet.
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ENS developer Makoto Inoue revealed at ethCC that the project has been working on the implementation of domain wrappers. A wrapper is a smart contract that wraps existing ENS second-level domains into ERC-1155 tokens. The purpose is to enable new features, such as the ability to permanently enable or disable Fuses. Fuses are permissions to actions such as transfers, setting text records, and creating further subdomain. Currently, domain holders still have certain ownership rights over subdomains. If a domain owner chooses to irrevocably burn fuses, subdomain owners will be able to transfer their subdomain and create further subdomains. Once a domain is wrapped, any subdomain created will be minted as an ERC-721 NFT. Subdomain holders still risk losing access to their domain if the parent domain owner fails to pay renewal registration fees.
Huff announced the release of its gas-optimized smart contract language for the EVM. Huff is a low-level assembly-like language that exposes the programming stack. Developers can program directly in EVM machine code, manually manipulate code, and embed lookup tables directly into contract bytecode. Huff claims to be able to optimize contracts by up to 80% compared Solidity and Vyper. The smart contract language was initially built in 2019 by Aztec Network CEO Zac Williamson. Pentagon.xyz developer Jet Jadeja later began working on developing the language independently, with the Huff team announcing its public release today. Huff also released a series of tools and libraries, including a compiler, the Foundry testing framework, a VSCode extension, and the Huffmate library.
VeeFriends, the 10k NFT project by entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk, has raised $50 million in a funding round led by a16z. VeeFriends said it will use the funds to further build the future IP of the 283 VeeFriends characters. This includes hiring creative and technical talent. VeeFriends’ IP includes simple, hand-drawn cartoon characters drawn by Vaynerchuk. Since launching in May 2021, the NFT project has generated more than 200k ETH from primary and secondary sales. The project provides NFT holders with access to in-person events such as VeeCon. Vaynerchuck sold 5 NFTs for $1.2 Million in a Christie's auction last October.
Offchain Labs successfully migrated its Arbitrum One Rinkeby testnet to Arbitrum Nitro. The transition allowed projects on Arbitrum One to experience the migration in preparation for Nitro mainnet. Nitro is a new iteration of Arbitrum One that promises faster and cheaper transactions by running reactive fraud proofs over WASM code. Offchain Labs will eventually deprecate the Rinkeby Nitro Testnet as the Ethereum Foundation announced that it will only be maintaining Goerli and Sepolia testnets post-merge. The Arbitrum Goerli testnet will remain as the long-term testnet. Arbitrum Nitro will be launched to mainnet a few weeks after a successful testnet migration.
Rainbow is working on integrating ENS profiles into its mobile Ethereum wallet. The new integration will allow users to register an ENS .eth domain name directly within Rainbow. Users can also set ENS records within the app, view profiles, and search for .eth domains. ENS integration is already supported on the Rainbow website. From ENS text records, profiles now display the avatar, description, URL, discord, Twitter, and GitHub.
Ethereum Shadow Fork 10 Goes Live
A shadow fork is when the state of an existing network is mirrored onto a merged testnet
Ethereum successfully undergoes Shadow Fork #10.
Aave’s $GHO proposal is now live on Snapshot.
Rocket Pool is set to release Smart Node v1.5.0.
StarkGate integrates support for Orbiter Finance.
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The tenth shadow fork for Ethereum Mainnet went live today without any client issues. A shadow fork is when the state of an existing network is mirrored onto a merged testnet. It allows developers to test different merge scenarios. This comes amid the upcoming merge of the Goerli Testnet. Prater, the beacon chain testnet for Goerli, will run through the Bellatrix upgrade on August 4th. Goerli is then expected to hit TTD 10,790,000 between August 6th and 12th. Geth v1.10.21 was released today, configuring the merge TTD on the Goerli testnet. Goerli marks the final testnet to be merged before The Merge on Ethereum Mainnet.
Rocket Pool released a guide for Redstone, a Rocket Pool upgrade that includes compatibility for The Merge. Rocket Pool Node Operators should prepare their nodes for Smart Node v1.5.0, which will be released later this week. On August 15th, Oracle DAO will vote on the smart contract upgrade proposal. The Rocket Pool Core Team will then apply the smart contract upgrade on around August 29th. Rocket Pool will then release a subsequent smart node merge-compatible version as soon as the Ethereum client teams publish the official Terminal Total Difficulty (TTD) for The Merge. The Merge on Ethereum Mainnet is currently targeted for September 19th.
A preliminary proposal for the Aave $GHO stablecoin is now live for voting on Snapshot. If approved, the Ethereum V2 Market on the Aave Protocol will be assigned as the first facilitator for the USD-pegged $GHO stablecoin. It will allow anyone to use various assets as collateral mint $GHO. 100% of the interest payments from $GHO loans will go directly to the AaveDAO. Users will still earn interest on the underlying supplied collateral. The borrowed $GHO is burned once a user fully repays a position. Aave governance has until July 31st to vote on the preliminary proposal.
Mercedes Benz is now among the growing list of companies to use Polygon PoS. Daimler South East Asia, part of the Mercedes Benz Group, is now in production with its Acentrik blockchain. Acentrik is a decentralized data marketplace that allows enterprises to buy and sell data. Private data can also be sold for its use in calculating results without revealing the underlying data. Acentrik executes transactions on Polygon. Users can pay for data with a stablecoin, but will still need MATIC to pay for gas fees. The data itself is stored off-chain on IPFS or AWS S3. An NFT represents each dataset with a metadata hash stored with it.
StarkGate, the native gateway for StarkNet, has integrated Orbiter Finance into its bridge. Users can bridge ETH from Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism, and Polygon to StarkNet via Orbiter. Users can also use Banxa and Layerswap gateways to transfer ETH onto StarkNet. There is still a limit on how much ETH can be bridged with capacity increasing by 30 ETH each week. There is currently 540 ETH in the StarkNet Alpha deposit contract. StarkNet is still in an alpha phase and will undergo a regenesis before its final production release planned for Q4 2022.
Mirror Releases Wallet Based Subscriptions
Users can now subscribe to any publication by adding an email and signing a message with their Ethereum wallet
Mirror releases wallet-based subscriptions
Rainbow Wallet expands NFT support for L2s.
StarkEx hits 200 million transactions.
Angle Protocol deploys on Arbitrum.
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Web3 publishing platform Mirror released wallet-based subscriptions. Users can now subscribe to any publication by adding an email and signing a message with their Ethereum wallet. Users will receive email notifications when new content is posted. The new feature shines light on wallet-based community building that can be used across web3 applications Creators can use the new subscribe feature to create token-gated experiences, airdrop tokens to subscribers, whitelist subscribers for NFT mints, and governance voting exclusive to subscribers. Users can also create Dune Analytics dashboards to track subscriber activity. To access the subscribe link, simply add “/subscribe” to the URL of a publication.
Rainbow Wallet rolled out support for NFTs on Ethereum Mainnet, Polygon, Optimism, and Arbitrum. Rainbow users can now view and send NFTs directly from their wallet. NFTs across the supported chains will automatically load on a user’s home page. The integration displays NFT properties, collection descriptions, and the OpenSea floor price of an NFT. Rainbow initially supported NFTs on Polygon earlier this year. The wallet provider had raised an $18 million Series A led by Alexis Ohanian in February. Rainbow wallet is available on iOS and Android.
Polygon released its Q2 2022 report for its PoS sidechain, reporting 5.34 million unique addresses and 284 million total transactions. 66.6 million of those transactions came from NFT mints on Polygon. OpenSea saw an increase of 1.2 million new NFT wallets on Polygon in Q2. According to the report, the average cost per transaction in Q2 was just $0.018. A total of 243k smart contracts have been successfully deployed on the PoS network. Over the last 4 months, Polygon has partnered with Disney, Reddit, Meta, Stripe, and Adobe among other brands to enable low-cost NFT and token integrations across established platforms. Polygon PoS currently has about 800k monthly active users.
StarkEx, a permissioned scaling engine by StarkWare, has processed more than 200 million transactions since launching in June 2020. ImmutableX, Rhino.fi, dYdX, and Sorare are among the applications that have integrated StarkEx as an app-specific scaling solution. The network currently holds $652 million in TVL. StarkEx uses zkRollups and a STARK-proof system to validate transactions. StarkEx also supports Validium, which keeps data availability off-chain with a trusted third party referred to as the Data Availability Committee (DAC). Developers can also select to use Volition, a solution that enables both ZK-Rollup and Validium vaults in an application.
Angle Protocol has deployed its borrowing module on Arbitrum. Users can now leverage wETH and USDC to mint the protocol’s agEUR stablecoin. Users can also bridge the agEUR stablecoin to Arbitrum through Angle’s integration with LayerZero Labs. Angle is a capital-efficient and over-collateralized stablecoin protocol with initial support for a Euro-pegged stablecoin.