Arbitrum Multidimensional Fee Standard
The standard sets best practices for implementing a two-dimensional fee system on L2 infrastructure.
Arbitrum two-dimensional fee standard.
Rocket Pool surpasses 200k staked ETH.
HTC releases a metaverse phone.
Coinbase Commerce adds ETH to payment options.
Listen on: Apple | Spotify | Castbox | YouTube
Arbitrum published a post describing its plan for creating a multidimensional fee standard. The standard will be a set of best practices for implementing a two-dimensional fee system for L2 infrastructure. When users transact on Arbitrum, they are responsible for paying both the L1 gas fee for calldata and the L2 gas fee for off-chain computation. The current infrastructure on Ethereum only has inputs for a single gas price and gas limit, hence it's only one dimensional. To compensate, the L2 gas fee has to cover fees on both L1 and L2. Arbitrum’s node gas estimator increases the L2 gas limit field to cover both dimensions. It results in a confusing user experience. Arbitrum hopes for Ethereum tooling to change for an L2 world.
Rocket Pool, a decentralized Ethereum staking protocol, now has more than 200k ETH locked on the beacon chain. There are more than 1,283 node operators and 6,092 minpools live on the protocol. Rocket Pool offers liquid ETH stakers ~4% APR on their deposits. rETH, Rocket Pool’s liquid staking token, suffered a slight de-peg on secondary markets during the LUNA collapse. It has since recovered most of its value. Unlike Lido, Rocket Pool has a max deposit pool capacity of 2,000 ETH. Funds in the deposit pool are matched with mini pools, which provide 16 ETH, to create Ethereum staking validators.
HTC launched a new metaverse phone with a built-in digital asset wallet. Coined “Desire 22 Pro,” the device comes with pre-installed applications from HTC’s metaverse arm Viverse. With Viverse apps, users can create virtual avatars and manage crypto assets on Ethereum and Polygon. The device also comes with a virtual reality (VR) headset pairing feature. Desire 22 Pro is available in Taiwan, Japan and Europe. HTC is a Taiwanese-based consumer electronics company and is among the early phone makers to experiment with blockchain technology.
ZigZag announced plans for InvisibL3, an app-specific L3 ZK-rollup for private transactions on StarkNet. The layer will be an add-on to the ZigZag exchange, which currently supports trades on the zkSync network. Trades on ZigZag are currently publicly viewable on-chain, revealing the addresses and amounts for each trade. Private transactions on ZigZag will prevent the tracing of addresses and trade amounts for both the maker and the taker. It will also allow users to hide the origin of their funds when moving to another wallet. ZigZag is a decentralized non-custodial order book exchange powered by ZK-rollups.
Coinbase Commerce, a platform that allows merchants to accept crypto payments in a peer-to-peer way, has added support for seven new tokens including ETH. The commerce platform also offers free payments from Coinbase users to Commerce merchants. Coinbase is also implementing a dapp wallet in the Coinbase app, allowing users to trade using DEXs.
Coinbase Supports Gray Glacier Upgrade
The upgrade gives core developers approximately three months to execute the Merge.
Coinbase supports Gray Glacier.
Immutable launches $IMX staking.
L2 Beat launches a community forum.
Nethermind releases v1.13.4.
Devcon VI ticket presale auction.
Listen on: Apple | Spotify | Castbox | YouTube
Coinbas announced support for Ethereum’s Gray Glacier hard fork. The purpose of the upgrade is to push the difficulty bomb on Ethereum’s current PoW chain. This comes amid another delay in the Merge. The upgrade pushes the difficulty bomb by 700,000 blocks, giving core developers approximately three months to execute the merge. The Gray Glacier upgrade went smoothly without any major issues. Only a small fraction of Ethereum nodes did not upgrade in time. The difficulty bomb is a mechanism intended to make PoW mining much more difficult and unprofitable amid the switch to the beacon chain.
Immutable has announced the launch of its $IMX staking program. 20% of Immutable’s 2% marketplace fee is allocated toward the staking pool. Users who hold at least 10 $IMX tokens in their L2 wallet and make an NFT trade during the staking cycle will be eligible to receive a share of the fee revenue in proportion to their staked amount. The project plans to release a dedicated staking dashboard in September. After the first phase of staking, rewards will be distributed every 14 days. Immutable is an NFT-focused L2 blockchain built on StarkEx, StarkWare’s scalability engine. StarkEx uses a STARK-proof system to validate transactions.
Ethereum L2 data and research website L2 Beat has launched a forum, with the first post discussing the overhaul of the Total Value Locked (TVL) metric. L2 Beat faces several challenges when determining TVL, including manipulated tokens, accounting for tokens minted on L2, counting native tokens, and the lack of a clear definition of TVL across platforms. L2 Beat proposes the addition of a new metric, Assets Under Management (AUM), which tracks the total value that would be lost if the L2 disappeared without a way to recover funds. L2 Beat also plans to filter out small-cap tokens and will implement a whitelist for any token that is not in the top 300 market cap. The forum is still open for community feedback.
Nethermind, an Ethereum execution layer client, has released v1.13.4 with an updated Total Terminal Difficulty (TTD) of 17,000,000,000,000,000 for the Sepolia testnet. The release also included updates to make SnapSync the default sync method on Mainnet, Goerli, and Ropsten. SnapSync is a tool for efficiently syncing blockchain nodes.
The presale auction and raffle for Devcon VI tickets opens this week on July 5th. Devcon is the world’s largest Ethereum developer conference and will take place in Bogota, Columbia from October 11th-14th. The auction will be run on Arbitrum with ETH being the only form of payment. The 20 highest bidders will each receive a ticket and 80 tickets will be raffled to the remaining bidders for purchase at the reserve price. Everyone who participates in the auction will receive a POAP NFT. General admission tickets will be sold in waves later this month. Devcon also offers a discount for builders, students, and LATAM residents (application required). DeFi dashboard Zerion is currently running a challenge for a chance to win a trip to Devcon VI.
Polygon Launches Avail Testnet
Avail stores transaction data from other blockchains and proves that the data is available.
Polygon launches Avail DA blockchain.
Circle’s CEO asserts that USDC is stable.
ENS generates $3.3 million in revenue for June.
Orbiter Finance adds support for StarkNet.
Listen on: Apple | Spotify | Castbox | YouTube
Polygon announced the release of Polygon Avail, a modular blockchain focused on data availability. Avail stores transaction data from other blockchains and proves that the data is available using KZG commitments, Data Availability Sampling (DAS), erasure coding, and light client P2P networking. While rollup solutions execute computation offchain, they store data onchain, making it the highest-cost component. Avail proposes to bring immediate cost savings and increased throughput to L2 rollups. The network is now live on the Avail Testnet.
Jeremy Allaire, the CEO of Circle, shared a Twitter thread reassuring that its USDC stablecoin stands in a strong financial position. This comes after rumors of a potential collapse in the event of a default on USDC reserves. Allaire shared recent transparency reports released by Circle after the LUNA collapse. Allaire also said the company will share a blog post this week regarding Circle Yield, a short- and long-term yield interest rate product built on USDC and available exclusively to accredited investors. As of May 13, 2022, the USDC reserve held $11.6 billion in cash and $39 billion in U.S. Treasuries. Earlier this week, Circle announced that New York Community Bank will become a custodian for USDC reserves. The company has previously partnered with Signature and Silvergate for holding USDC reserves.
ENS domain 000.eth has sold for a record 300 ETH, or approximately $328,000. It marks the second-largest ENS sale on secondary markets. Paradigm.eth holds the number one spot, having been purchased for 420 ETH in October 2021. This comes amid a resurgence in ENS domain registrations. In June 2022, 122k new .eth domains were registered, generating $3.3 million (2,500 ETH) in revenue for the protocol. 25k new Ethereum wallets now hold an ENS domain as of last month. ENS has leased 1.47 million domain names with 463k wallets holding at least one domain.
Orbiter Finance, a cross-rollup bridge, has added support for StarkNet Alpha. Users can now bridge from Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism, and Polygon into Starknet. Users can also withdraw from StarkNet into any other chain on the bridge. Orbiter is the first third-party bridge to add support for Starknet. Starknet Alpha is a ZK-rollup that uses STARK proofs to verify transactions as an L2 network on Ethereum. It was first released in November 2021 and is still in the alpha phase. Currently, bridging to or from StarkNet could take a few hours to complete. Deposits into StarkNet are limited with capacity increasing by 10 ETH every Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday at 9:00 EST.
StarkWare has partnered with ConsenSys to give developers access to the ConsenSys platform, including StarkNet integrations on MetaMask and Infura. As part of the partnership, StarkNet developers can now access Infura on private beta. The StarkNet integration on Infura gives developers access to API endpoints with support for all RPC methods. MetaMask released its first ZK-rollup-enabled snap for StarkNet, enabling developers to expand functionality for dapps. The StarkNet snap derives StarkNet keys from a user's MetaMask Secret Recovery Phrase, allowing them to manage assets on StarkNet. The snap can be used to deploy StarkNet accounts, make transactions on StarkNet, and interact with StarkNet smart contracts.