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.
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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.
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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.
Meta Begins Testing Ethereum NFTs
Users will be able to connect a crypto wallet to their Facebook profile and post NFTs to their timeline.
Meta begins testing Ethereum NFTs.
Sepolia merge testnet upgrade.
BlockFi signs an acquisition deal with FTX.
3AC files for Chapter 15 bankruptcy.
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According to a Meta representative, Facebook began rolling out NFT support for certain U.S. creators. Earlier this week, Navdeep Singh, a Product Manager at Meta, tweeted a sneak peek of the implementation. The sneak peek showed NFTs under a new “digital collectibles” tab on a user’s Facebook profile. Users will be able to connect a crypto wallet to their Facebook profile and post NFTs to their timeline. Meta plans to support NFTs on Ethereum, Polygon, Solana, and Flow. Meta is also implementing NFT display options within Instagram’s AR feature. Users will also be able to display 2D NFTs that they own using mobile AR.
Ethereum’s Sepolia Testnet is set to transition to PoS when Terminal Total Difficulty (TTD), the total difficulty on the PoW chain, hits 17,000,000,000,000,000. Upgrading to The Merge occurs in two phases. The first phase, known as Bellatrix, occurs when the Beacon Chain reaches a certain epoch height. Sepolia already ran through the Bellatrix upgrade on June 20th. The second phase occurs when the PoW chain hits a TTD value on the execution layer. At the current hash rate, Sepolia will hit the target TTD on July 6th. Sepolia will be the second of three public testnets to merge. Ropsten successfully ran through the merge on June 8th. Goerli will follow the same process at a later date. Once Goerli and Prater have stabilized, an epoch and a TTD value will be chosen for The Merge on Ethereum Mainnet.
BlockFi CEO Zac Prince revealed that the company lost close to $80 million from a $1 billion overcollateralized loan provided to 3AC. The loan was partially collateralized by GBTC, which depegged by more than 30%. BlockFi was forced to liquidate GBTC at a loss. Prince said the losses will be absorbed by BlockFi with no impact to client funds. He also revealed the company signed a stock purchase agreement with FTX. As part of the deal, BlockFi will receive a $400 million revolving credit line subordinate to all client funds. This means the loan must first be used to fulfill obligations to clients before it can be used for other operations. FTX also has the option to acquire BlockFi at a variable price of up to $240M based on performance triggers. The new deal values BlockFi at a maximum of $680 million, nearly a 90% drop in value compared to its peak valuation of $4.8 billion.
According to Bloomberg, 3AC has filed for Chapter 15 Bankruptcy to protect its U.S. assets. This comes after the firm was ordered by a court in the British Virgin Islands to liquidate its assets. 3AC is currently in default on a $646 million loan from crypto platform Voyager Digital. Voyager Digital has since suspended trading and withdrawals for its users citing the unpaid loans. FTX, Deribit, and BlockFi are among the firms to have liquidated their positions in 3AC. Under Chapter 15 bankruptcy, foreign companies are provided with a mechanism for dealing with U.S. assets while their insolvency proceeds in their home country.
Ramp Network, a fiat on-and-off ramp has added support for ETH on Optimism. Users can now onboard to Optimism by credit card, bank transfer, or Apple Pay. Onboarding via a gateway is among the lowest-cost options because it removes the need to bridge.