The Ethereum Name Service’s forthcoming Namechain will be based on Linea, a zero-knowledge rollup.
ENS Labs, the company behind the Ethereum Name Service, said Tuesday that it picked Linea’s technology to build its upcoming layer-2 network, Namechain.
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Linea is a zero-knowledge rollup that came out in July 2023 and was built by Ethereum infrastructure giant Consensys. It is the seventh-largest rollup network, according to L2Beat, with $1 billion locked in its ecosystem.
ENS Labs said it picked Linea to build its network for two reasons. “One is sort of values alignment,” said Nick Johnson, the founder and lead developer of ENS. The other has to do with speed.
Rollups are a special type of blockchain where one can transact faster and at a lower cost. There are two kinds of rollups: optimistic and zero-knowledge. Optimistic rollups use optimistic proofs, which have a seven-day window to dispute transactions before they are finalized (proofs are assumed to be “optimistic” that no one will dispute their contents). Zero-knowledge rollups, by contrast, use zero-knowledge cryptography, seen by many as a superior technology, to secure proofs and finalize those proofs within minutes.
ENS has been described as “the phone book for Web3,” but a more precise analogy is the web’s domain name service (DNS). The domain name “CoinDesk.com” is easier to remember and type than a numerical IP address. Similarly, ENS handles like parishilton.eth, which the namesake heiress acquired in 2021, are more relatable than the strings of letters and numbers that make up Ethereum wallet addresses.
For this service, “we need fast finality,” Johnson said. That’s because “you want to be able to update your ENS name and have the chain reflect it in the smallest interval possible. And to do that and have it remain decentralized and secure, we need fast finality, and optimistic roll-ups can’t deliver that,” Johnson said.
The news comes as other major crypto projects announce their intentions to roll out layer-2 networks, though unlike ENS, some of the biggest names in blockchain have tapped Optimism’s OP Stack to build out their networks.
ENS will be one of the first major projects to build out a layer-2 blockchain based on Linea’s technology (Linea is also building a layer-2 network for blockchain wallet application Status.)
The team behind Linea said last month that it plans to issue a Linea token. Both Johnson and Nicolas Liochon, the founder of Linea, told CoinDesk that there are no concrete plans yet for how that token would be used in the Namechain ecosystem.
Liochon said having the Namechain team working on the Linea stack will help strengthen and decentralize the L2 protocol.
“We really want to have multiple organizations contributing to Linea, and we work on having more organizations too, as a way to make [the network] more secure,” he said. “So really, we want to have multiple teams so there’s no centralization point.”
The team had originally planned for Ink to go live in early 2025, so the launch of the main network is ahead of schedule.
Kraken, the seventh-largest crypto exchange, said its layer-2 rollup network, built on top of the Ethereum blockchain, has gone live.
The network, called Ink, is based on the OP stack, a customizable framework that lets developers build their own rollups using Optimism’s technology. The team had originally planned for Ink to go live in early 2025, so the launch of its main network is ahead of schedule.
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We’re excited to announce Ink is live on mainnet!
Months ahead of schedule, we’re officially launching as part of the Optimism Superchain. This is just the beginning of our journey to bridge the gap between users and builders in DeFi.
Kraken agreed to receive 25 million OP tokens (worth about $58 million) as part of a deal to build on the OP Stack. Optimism has acknowledged that handing out developer grants for participants building on the stack is part of its strategy, which in turn contributes back to the wider “Superchain” ecosystem.
Kraken competitor Coinbase said in August 2023 that it would build a layer-2 network with OP Stack. The product, called Base, is now the second-largest rollup network according to L2beat. At the time, Optimism said the Base team would receive up to 118 million OP tokens and, in return, would contribute the higher of 2.5% of its sequencer revenue or 15% of its profits to the Optimism Collective.
Other participants building a layer 2 with the OP Stack — including Uniswap, World Network, and Sony Blockchain Labs — have not said how many OP tokens they expect to receive as part of their deals.
“Today is just the beginning for Ink, and now our boldest work really begins – growing Ink,” said Andrew Koller, the founder of Ink, in a press release. “We’re pushing the boundaries of on-chain experiences to unlock new applications and opportunities for builders and users alike, layering privacy, security and UX enhancements on a foundation of deep liquidity.”
Also: ENS picks tech for its L2; Bitcoin’s Runes Get an AMM
Welcome to The Protocol, CoinDesk’s weekly wrap-up of the most important stories in cryptocurrency tech development. I’m Marc Hochstein, CoinDesk’s deputy editor-in-chief for features, opinion and standards.
In this issue:
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Solana was the biggest draw for new crypto developers in 2024
No wonder: Solana’s transaction volume is off the charts
Coinbase alums take next step toward no-code blockchain development
Kraken’s ‘Ink’ layer-2 goes live
Avalanche activates biggest-ever upgrade
Ethereum’s ENS picks Consensys’ tech for its L2
Bitcoin’s Stacks L2 gets an automated market maker for Runes
Most Influential 2024: EigenLayer’s Sreeram Kannan
This article is featured in the latest issue of The Protocol, our weekly newsletter exploring the tech behind crypto, one block at a time. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Wednesday.
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NEW DEVS ❤️SOLANA: The Solana ecosystem, ground zero for the memecoin craze, was the most popular blockchain among new developers this year, according to a report released last week by Electric Capital. In July, this community became the first since 2016 to bring on board more devs than Ethereum. Solana attracted 7,625 new developers in 2024, the most of any chain and a little over 1,000 more than Ethereum. The results underscore the challenge Ethereum faces as rival smart contract platform Solana’s low fees and fast transactions attract investment and talent. Read more.
SPEAKING OF SOLANA: Solana’s network activity has lit up as the Pudgy Penguins NFT project debuted its native token, PENGU, on the programmable blockchain. Solana registered a total transaction tally of 66.9 million Tuesday, the highest daily volume since its inception in 2020, according to data source Artemis. To highlight how busy it was, Solana’s transaction count eclipsed the total of all other major chains combined. Read more
THE INK IS DRY: Kraken, the seventh-largest crypto exchange, said its layer-2 rollup network, built on top of the Ethereum blockchain, has gone live. The network, called Ink, is Kraken’s answer to Base, the highly successful blockchain launched by rival exchange Coinbase. Like Base, Ink is based on the OP Stack, a customizable framework that lets developers build their own rollups using Optimism’s technology. The team had originally planned for Ink to go live in early 2025, so the launch of its main network is ahead of schedule. Read more
AVALANCHE UPGRADE: Avalanche, a layer-1 blockchain launched in 2020 that’s now the tenth-largest by total value locked (TVL), activated its highly anticipated Avalanche9000 upgrade Monday, marking the ecosystem’s biggest technical changes to date. The network has been prepping for these changes for months, with new features that will cut the costs for sending transactions, operating validators and building applications on the network. Leaders at Avalanche previously said that part of the goal with the upgrade is to attract developers to Avalanche and encourage them to create customized blockchains using its technology, known as subnets, or “L1s.” Read more.
A BOON FOR RUNES: Crypto degens have a new – and, if all goes according to plan, faster, cheaper and safer – way to trade Runes, the Bitcoin ecosystem’s answer to memecoins. An automated-market maker (AMM) for the Runes protocol went live on Wednesday on Stacks, following the unveiling of the layer-2 network’s native BTC-backed asset sBTC on Tuesday. It’s the first AMM for such tokens on Stacks. The teams behind decentralized exchange (DEX) Bitflow Finance and Bitcoin bridge Pontis developed the AMM. Runes launched in April and spurred a flurry of activity, paying 78.6 BTC ($8.18 million) in fees in the first 90 minutes. However, less than a month later, this excitement waned considerably, with fees dropping more than 50%. Bitflow’s aim is for its AMM to help Runes scale and address some of the shortcomings holding it back. Read more.
ENS PICKS L2 TECH: ENS Labs, the company behind the Ethereum Name Service, has picked Linea’s technology to build its upcoming layer-2 network, Namechain. Linea is a zero-knowledge rollup that came out in July 2023 and was built by Ethereum infrastructure giant Consensys. It is the seventh-largest rollup network, according to L2Beat, with $1 billion locked in its ecosystem. Rollups are a special type of blockchain where one can transact faster and at a lower cost. There are two kinds of rollups: optimistic and zero-knowledge. Optimistic rollups use optimistic proofs, which have a seven-day window to dispute transactions before they are finalized. Zero-knowledge rollups, by contrast, finalize proofs within minutes. ENS has been described as “the phone book for Web3,” but a more precise analogy is the web’s domain name service (DNS). The domain name “CoinDesk.com” is easier to remember and type than a numerical IP address. Similarly, ENS handles like parishilton.eth, which the namesake heiress acquired in 2021, are more relatable than the strings of letters and numbers that make up Ethereum wallet addresses. For this service, “we need fast finality,” said Nick Johnson, the founder and lead developer of ENS. That’s because “you want to be able to update your ENS name and have the chain reflect it in the smallest interval possible. And to do that and have it remain decentralized and secure, we need fast finality, and optimistic roll-ups can’t deliver that.” Read more.
NO CODE, NO PROBLEM? Patchwork, a startup focused on simplifying blockchain and smart-contract development founded by former Coinbase employees, has released the next version of its low-to-no-code tools for building decentralized applications (dapps). Currently linked to Coinbase’s Base and backed by Coinbase Ventures, the “Create-Patchwork” picks-and-shovels approach lowers the barriers to building blockchain applications and attaching data to them. Following the trend toward easily generated content, the complex world of blockchains and smart-contract design is on a path to no-code applications, or a “text-to-app” experience. Create-Patchwork is the first of several features the team plans to roll out in early 2025 and a foundational step to enable creators to generate contracts and applications in seconds using natural language inputs. “Patchwork is an Ethereum protocol that makes it really easy to build dynamic on-chain applications,” co-founder Kevin Day said in an interview. “It lets on-chain things own other on-chain things, and it allows anyone to attach programmable data to on-chain things.” Read more
EIGENLAYER’S SREERAM KANNAN: KING OF THE PROFESSOR COINS
EigenLayer founder Sreeram Kannan at ETH Denver 2024 (Danny Nelson/CoinDesk)
For a crypto founder who’s attracted so much controversy, Sreeram Kannan is surprisingly sanguine.
In a wide-ranging interview after his selection as one of CoinDesk’s “Most Influential” figures in crypto for 2024, the EigenLayer founder was generous with his time, chatting more than an hour beyond our scheduled slot. I was surprised at his openness because the last time we spoke, a colleague and I had just published an investigation into potential conflicts of interest at his company, Eigen Labs, and in the interim Kannan had disavowed our reporting point-by-point on a Blockworks podcast.
This time, Kannan emerged in a different light. Whatever his misgivings about CoinDesk’s past coverage, they didn’t seem top-of-mind.
What emerged wasn’t the portrait of a defensive tech founder, but rather that of a driven, thoughtful academic-turned-entrepreneur still adjusting to a spotlight few in this industry ever enjoy. Instead of bitterness or evasion, I found ambition, reflection and a quiet kind of excitement.
Kannan seemed as astonished as anyone by how swiftly EigenLayer had transformed from a concept into one of crypto’s most talked-about experiments, telling CoinDesk that he continued to view EigenLayer as a “scrappy startup.”
Over the past 12 months, EigenLayer — which allows emerging blockchain applications to borrow Ethereum’s robust security — went from a relative unknown to an industry heavyweight. The platform raised more than $100 million from venture firms including Andreessen Horowitz and, before even fully launching, drew hundreds of millions of dollars in deposits from crypto users seeking extra yield. Many were incentivized by a viral points program that investors hoped would translate into a lucrative future token airdrop.
EigenLayer’s success during the bear market was striking, and Kannan may have played a larger role than any other entrepreneur in revitalizing decentralized finance on Ethereum. But not everything went according to plan. Industry critics took issue with the EIGEN token distribution plan — which locked up tokens for months and barred claimants from certain geographies — as well as the platform’s slower-than-expected feature rollout and concerns about “rehypothecation,” or the reuse of collateral for multiple purposes. In August, the CoinDesk investigation (that Kannan disputed in the podcast) raised questions about EigenLayer’s conflict-of-interest policies, which may have allowed employees preferential access to tokens powered by its platform.
None of this seemed to derail Kannan’s intellectual ascent. Beyond running Eigen Labs, he still holds a position as an affiliate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Washington, and his theory of “restaking” — letting people reuse staked Ethereum assets to secure other networks — has sparked a wave of innovation and copycats. He’s become a familiar face on the conference circuit, where he unpacks his vision of blockchains as tools for solving humanity’s endless “coordination problems.”
Blockchains, Kannan says, “are the biggest upgrade to human civilization since the U.S. Constitution.”
CLICK HERE FOR THE FULL PROFILE BY COINDESK’S SAM KESSLER:
Money Center
‘Wrapped’ in intrigue
Coinbase Says It Nixed wBTC Because Justin Sun Posed ‘Unacceptable Risk’
WBTC Episode ‘Reopened Old Wounds’ of Centralized Failures: Bitcoin Builders Association
Deals and grants
Stablecoin Payments Platform BVNK Raises $50M to Fuel U.S. Expansion
RWA-Focused Plume Raises $20M from Brevan Howard, Others Ahead of Mainnet Launch
Custody Firm Taurus Partners With Temenos Bringing Crypto Wallets to Thousands of Banks
Regulatory and policy
Next U.S. Senate Banking Chair Calls Crypto ‘Next Wonder’ of World
Calendar
Jan 9-12, 2025: CES, Las Vegas
Jan. 15-19: World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland
January 21-25: WAGMI conference, Miami.
Jan. 24-25: Adopting Bitcoin, Cape Town, South Africa.
Jan. 30-31: PLAN B Forum, San Salvador, El Salvador.
Cosmo Jiang, portfolio manager at Pantera Capital, says that crypto investing will get more fundamentals-oriented as the industry matures.
It’s not easy to pick what crypto tokens to invest in. Conventional wisdom among crypto natives is that you shouldn’t think too hard about it — after all, coins named after dogs, frogs or cats will regularly outperform tokens tied to legitimate projects.
But that state of affairs cannot last forever, according to Cosmo Jiang, a general partner and portfolio manager at crypto hedge fund and venture capital firm Pantera Capital.
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“If fundamental investing does not come to this industry, it just means that we failed,” Jiang, a self-described classically trained investor who worked in banking and private equity before joining crypto in 2022, told CoinDesk in an interview. “All assets eventually follow the laws of gravity. The only thing that matters to investors at the end of the day — and this has been true for millennia — is cash flow.”
“Crypto went from nothing to $3.4 trillion in market cap now on the back of retail interest,” Jiang said, “but the only way for this asset class to keep growing is by attracting institutional capital. And institutional capital will only care about fundamentals. Logically, that will be the only way to make money on a sustainable basis going forward.”
Pantera has roughly $5 billion in assets under management, Jiang said, with about 75% of those funds locked in venture vehicles and the rest in liquid assets. As the portfolio manager of the firm’s liquid token fund, Jiang’s focus lies in publicly traded tokens.
How does he pick which ones to add to the fund’s portfolio? By looking at product-market fit — meaning, at crypto projects that are developing products in areas where there’s huge demand. There are wwo basic questions at the forefront of his mind: whether the team can execute on their vision, and whether there’s a chance their token will capture some of the economic surplus generated.
“This will sound so stupid to anyone that works with normal asset classes, because it’s so normal,” Jiang said. “But in crypto, for whatever reason, this method is non-consensus.”
Solana versus Ethereum
When it comes to crypto projects, layer-1 networks offer some of the most battle-hardened business models. Smart contract platforms are relatively old — Ethereum launched in 2015 — and generate revenue through transaction fees. Their tokens also accrue value when their networks see increased usage. Solana’s SOL and Telegram’s TON have been two of Jiang’s favorites. But Ethereum’s ether (ETH), to him, isn’t as attractive of an investment as it used to be, because new users aren’t flocking to the network.
Solana saw almost 3 million in average daily active addresses in the last six months, according to a Dune dashboard by altcoin_analyst, while Ethereum only saw 454,000. Moreover, Solana has increased its revenue by 180% in the last 30 days, compared to Ethereum’s 37%, per TokenTerminal. And that means the difference in annualized revenue is shrinking: Solana made $1.27 billion in the last 12 months and is quickly catching up to Ethereum’s $2.4 billion. Despite that, Solana’s market capitalization is still four times lower than Ethereum’s.
“Take a look at incremental growth and compare how much has gone to Solana versus Ethereum. The numbers are stark,” Jiang said. “None of this stuff is worth anything if no one uses it.”
“Ethereum clearly has a lot of very talented people building on it. It has an interesting roadmap, but it’s also valued for that, right?” Jiang added. “It is a very large asset. At $435 billion, that would rank it amongst one of the most successful companies in the world if it were compared to equity. And the unfortunate fact is it’s currently losing market share [to Solana and others].”
Another big difference between the two networks lies in their architecture. In its attempt to solve scaling issues, Ethereum has switched to a so-called modular blockchain design, meaning that various network tasks are split between Ethereum and its associated layer 2s like Arbitrum or Optimism. Solana, meanwhile, has kept it monolithic — everything happens on one blockchain.
For Jiang, that means Solana has an advantage in terms of user interface, and also in terms of capturing the network’s value through SOL. Ethereum, meanwhile, ends up splitting its value across an array of tokens and blockchains, which means the network needs to facilitate a lot more transactions for ETH to outmatch SOL. However, Ethereum’s throughput is rapidly increasing, so in theory the network could develop enough activity for that to eventually happen, but it’s not a guarantee.
“The driving force behind Ethereum philosophy has been maximum decentralization,” Jiang said. “I’m not a crypto native, I’m really a tech investor, so I don’t believe in decentralization for the sake of decentralization. There’s probably a minimum viable decentralization that’s good enough.”
We’re still early
Jiang’s attention isn’t confined to layer 1s, however. DePIN — an umbrella term for projects focused on building physical infrastructure with the help of blockchain technology — is another source of interest for him and his team. DePIN (short for “Decentralized physical infrastructure network”) projects include Render Network (RNDR), which enables people to lease unused computing power, and Arweave (AR), which functions as a data storage network.
“When I’m talking to [liquidity providers] … the only stuff that gets them interested is DePIN, because these are real businesses in the real world, it’s something that people can actually allocate and get behind,” Jiang said.
But he’s not against investing in memecoins too — or, at least, in the projects that enable memecoin trading, if not the coins themselves. “I would never, as a hedge fund investor, invest in a blackjack player,” he said. “But I’ve made a lot of money investing in casinos.” And there’s reason to believe the sector could keep expanding, because at the end of the day, the revenue generated by Pump.fun, trading bots and decentralized exchanges is still small compared to the revenue generated by the $540 billion global gambling market.
Even so, Jiang’s strategy failed to outperform bitcoin’s (BTC) 132% return in 2024, he said. In his view, that’s due to bitcoin being relatively advanced in its own bullish cycle, whereas blockchain technology has lagged behind throughout the year. That being said, prospective returns on such tokens should ultimately be higher than for bitcoin, he said, especially since the incoming Trump administration will likely be much friendlier towards the industry than the Biden one ever was.
“On a compounded multi-year basis, we will do extremely well,” Jiang said. “If blockchain reaches billions of users over time, then almost logically, you have to believe that everything else will grow a lot faster than bitcoin.”
“According to ETH’s realized price—the average price at which holders purchased their ETH—the current upper limit for ETH’s price stands around $5.2k,” CryptoQuant said.
Investor demand, onchain metrics and network activity are setting up ether (ETH) to reach a $5,000 level for the first time, CryptoQuant analysts said in a report.
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Ether spot ETFs posted a 13-day inflow streak on Wednesday to reach nearly $2 billion in cumulative net inflows. The funds attracted their first billion from July to early December, but SoSoValue data shows that they needed only five trading days to capture the next billion.
Total daily transactions hovered around the 6.5 million to 7.5 million level in the past few months, compared to about 5 million through 2023, indicative of higher network activity.
Meanwhile, the total supply of ETH has reached its highest level since April 2023, but the amount of ETH burned via fees has been growing since September. The total supply of ETH has reached 120 million, marking the highest level since April 2023.
Burns refers to permanently removing tokens from circulating supply by sending them to a wallet that no one controls. As the network sees higher activity and demand, the burn rate increases, limiting the growth of ETH supply and creating deflationary pressure.
Higher network activity on Ethereum signifies increased usage and demand for the network’s capabilities, reflecting the growing adoption of decentralized applications. Moreover, it leads to greater ETH burned via transaction fees, which can create deflationary pressure on the total ETH supply, as the burn rate can outpace issuance during periods of high activity.
These factors cumulatively set up ETH to retake its all-time highs from 2021 and beyond.
“ETH could be heading above $5k if current demand and supply dynamics continue,” CryptoQuant said. “According to ETH’s realized price—the average price at which holders purchased their ETH—the current upper limit for ETH’s price stands around $5.2k.”
“This upper limit marked the top for ETH in the 2021 bull run. However, as new market participants buy ETH at higher prices, this upper price band continues to rise,” they added.
The recent surge in Ethereum’s price has significantly increased the total value of assets locked within its ecosystem, reaching $77 billion on Thursday, the highest level since January 2022.
The lion’s share of these assets is managed by just three key applications: Lido, which dominates with over $38 billion in staked ether, making it the largest liquid staking protocol; Aave, with $19 billion spread across various assets, functioning as a lending platform; and EigenLayer, a restaking platform, holding $18 billion.
The Ethereum network has witnessed a notable uptick in several key metrics in November. There’s been an increase in revenue, transaction fees, new wallet creations, and on-chain volume, all indicating heightened activity when compared to the quieter months from May to September, as a CoinDesk analysis previously noted.
Ether largely underperformed bitcoin and other major tokens since 2022 but saw a return in bullish sentiment after Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential elections in November, rekindling hopes for a DeFi bull run among investors.
Trump’s campaign has signaled a potential softening of regulatory pressures on cryptocurrencies, which could ease operations for DeFi platforms within the country. This anticipation has been a catalyst for increased demand for ETH and has propelled the growth of major DeFi tokens since early November.
Former President Donald J. Trump turned down Fox News’s invitation to debate Vice President Kamala Harris on the air this month. But the Republican nominee will appear on the network next week for an unusual televised town hall, fielding questions …
Former President Donald J. Trump turned down Fox News’s invitation to debate Vice President Kamala Harris on the air this month.
But the Republican nominee will appear on the network next week for an unusual televised town hall, fielding questions from an all-female audience.
The event, announced by Fox News on Friday, will focus on “issues impacting women ahead of the election,” the network said, including abortion, day care, child care, health care and the economy.
It will not be shown live. The event will be taped on Tuesday evening, in Cumming, Ga., and air on Wednesday at 11 a.m. The moderator is the Fox host Harris Faulkner.
Mr. Trump’s Democratic opponent, Ms. Harris, is set to appear for her own town hall on CNN on Oct. 23, with voters in Pennsylvania. That event will be aired live.
CNN has said that Mr. Trump has an open invitation to appear on the network for a town hall.
Fox News on Friday said the same regarding Ms. Harris. “Fox News has a standing invitation to Vice President Harris for a town hall event of equal stature which has been extended to her campaign multiple times since she became a candidate for president in August,” the network said in a statement.
Mr. Trump, whose performance at the ABC debate in September was widely viewed as lackluster, has repeatedly signaled that he has no intention of meeting Ms. Harris again on the debate stage before Election Day.
Chris LaCivita, one of Mr. Trump’s campaign managers, formally declined Fox News’s invitation for a debate in Pennsylvania on Oct. 23 or 27 several hours after the network first proposed it, according to a person familiar with the exchange. Ms. Harris’s campaign has not commented on the Fox invitation to debate, with the anchors Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum moderating.
If Ms. Harris accepted the Fox News invitation, it could allow her to sharpen her argument that Mr. Trump is afraid to joust with her face-to-face — even on a channel where he enjoys sympathetic coverage from commentators.
Agreeing to a Fox debate, though, could increase pressure on Ms. Harris to appear on Fox for her own solo town hall, which her campaign has so far been reluctant to do.
In an interview set to air next week, Ms. Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, told the MSNBC host Joe Scarborough that he believed Mr. Trump was afraid to debate the vice president.
“You saw the first debate, didn’t you? Yeah, that’s why,” Mr. Emhoff said when Mr. Scarborough asked what was stopping Mr. Trump, according to an advance excerpt. “He’s afraid that that’s going to happen again.”
The latest in blockchain tech upgrades, funding announcements and deals. For the period of Oct. 3-9.
Thursday, Oct. 3
Polyhedra’s ZK Prover, Expander, Tops Speed Rankings in First Results From ‘Proof Arena’
Polyhedra Network, a blockchain project specializing in zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs, released the first set of data from its new Proof Arena, a benchmarking platform designed to evaluate and compare different ZK provers. According to the team, “The data includes comparisons of provers from Polyhedra, Polygon, Linea and StarkWare – Expander, Plonky3, GNARK, Halo2 respectively. Results: the Expander prover is significantly faster in terms of proof generation time and peak memory; Plonky3 achieves stellar performance in terms of setup and verification time, and GNARK has the smallest proof size.” [EDITOR’S NOTE: Please see our exclusive feature story on Proof Arena, published in July.)
Sui Claims First Among L1 Chains to Run Scion Architecture, Enhancing Defense Against Internet Routing Attacks
Sui, a blockchain built around the Move smart-contracts programming language, has become the first layer-1 project to drop the outdated Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), and is now running Scion’s cutting-edge network architecture. According to the team: “The upgrade provides validators with a comprehensive defense against internet routing attacks that have caused significant downtime on other networks, making Sui even more secure. Implementing Scion enables fallback between networks, giving Sui resilience to network hijacking and DDoS attacks. Validators maintain consensus during attacks, improving epoch rewards. Full nodes benefit from better state sync, avoiding bottlenecks and retry delays.” (SUI)
Polish Bank Pekao Partners With Aleph Zero to Launch ‘Archiv3,’ for Tokenizing Works by Nation’s Artists
Poland’s second-largest bank, Bank Pekao S.A., has partnered with Aleph Zero to launch Archiv3, “a project to tokenize and preserve renowned Polish artworks,” according to the team: “Using Aleph Zero’s eco-friendly blockchain, digital reproductions of masterpieces by artists like Jan Matejko and Stanisław Wyspiański have been minted as NFTs and stored in the Arctic World Archive for long-term preservation. This marks the first use of blockchain to safeguard historical art in the AWA, combining technological innovation with cultural preservation.”
Digital-Asset Platform Taurus Collaborating With Chainlink Labs to Accelerate Tokenized Asset Adoption
Taurus, a digital asset-platform to custody, issue and manage cryptocurrencies, and Chainlink Labs, a blockchain oracle developer, announced a collaboration to accelerate tokenized asset adoption by financial institutions. According to the team: “Taurus will use Chainlink to enrich tokenized assets with offchain data and enable cross-chain interoperability. This includes integrating Chainlink Data Feeds, Proof of Reserve and CCIP. The collaboration aims to accelerate time-to-market for tokenized assets, increase liquidity and enhance cross-chain security.”
VC Firm Key Difference Labs Partners With Ethereum L2 List to Launch ‘Pioneer’ Incubator Program
Key Difference Labs, a venture capital firm, is partnering with Lisk, an Ethereum layer-2 project, to launch the Lisk Pioneer Program, an incubator program for projects looking to build on the Lisk blockchain. According to the team: “Benefits Include Funding: $100,000 per project (total of 20 projects); Mentorship: Guidance from industry leaders with a proven track record; and Exposure: Access to events, marketing support, and networking opportunities. This program is a four-month go-to-market process. Startups will receive expert guidance on tokenomics, raising capital, partnerships, community growth, and assistance with exchange listings.”
Protocol Village is a regular feature of The Protocol, our weekly newsletter exploring the tech behind crypto, one block at a time. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Wednesday. Project teams can submit updates here. For previous versions of Protocol Village, please go here.
Republican U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump won chits from the Bitcoin community for reportedly purchasing smash burgers at a Bitcoin-friendly New York pub. But in a way, the whole episode was about damage control.
Bitcoiners aren’t usually the forgiving type – especially toward perceived apostates who ape into other cryptocurrencies. That’s why Republican U.S. presidential nominee Donald Trump’s visit last week to a beloved Bitcoin bar in New York appeared so well timed – to repair any lost credibility after he and his family started promoting a decentralized-finance project that appears rooted in other blockchain ecosystems.
ALSO:
This article is featured in the latest issue of The Protocol, our weekly newsletter exploring the tech behind crypto, one block at a time. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Wednesday.
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Screenshot of the Zaprite invoice used by Republican U.S. presidential nominee Donald Trump to buy burgers and Diet Cokes at the bar PubKey in New York (PubKey/X)
LESSER EVILISM – It goes without saying that many Bitcoin purists do not like to mingle their business, politics or even company with users of other blockchains or cryptocurrencies. Which is partly why the Republican U.S. presidential nominee Donald Trump garnered so much scorn from Bitcoiners last week for promoting a very-much-NOT-Bitcoin decentralized-finance project, World Liberty Financial – complete with its own token, and a pre-mined allocation to insiders. “Trump launching a sh*tcoin may have been the final straw to lose my vote,” tweeted Bitcoin-friendly author Mitchell Askew. Responses on the thread ranged from total agreement to what one might call lesser evilism – the rhetorical contrast of one bad option with an even worse option: “True but it’s that or WW3 with commie Kamala,” wrote @FrictionlessBTC.
The DeFi dalliance threatened to undo much of the goodwill Trump built up at the Bitcoin Nashville conference in July, when he tossed out a series of red-meat pledges, including commuting the rest of Silk Road creator Ross Ulbrecht’s life sentence and creating a “strategic national bitcoin stockpile.” Multiple standing ovations ensued.
So it was fortuitous timing for Trump that his campaign scheduled a stop, later in the week, at the Bitcoin-friendly New York City bar, PubKey. According to the bar’s official X account, Trump bought 50 smash burgers and Diet Cokes for people in attendance, at a total cost of $998.77 including tax and tip, and then paid for it all in bitcoin. Fox News posted a video of the entire scene, leading a sharp-eyed reporter from CryptoSlate to quickly point out that Trump’s role mainly consisted of standing by at the counter while handlers actually performed the transaction, passing smartphones back and forth between them. Whatever. The bar crowd cheered. “Crypto burgers!” Trump said as he handed them out. A voice from behind the camera corrected him, “Bitcoin burgers!”
As much as it was a second chance for Trump to prove his Bitcoin bona fides, the choreographed transaction served as a sort of benchmark for the blockchain’s evolution as a viable payments option for a retail-facing business in the U.S. Will Cole, head of product at the Bitcoin payments app Zaprite (who happens to be Bitcoin-friendly U.S. Senator Cynthia Lummis’s son-in-law), described what he called the “Trump stack:” PubKey, running a node on Bitcoin’s Lightning Network on Voltage Cloud, used Zaprite to provide an invoice for the purchase, and Trump paid using a Strike wallet. (Official spokespeople for the Trump campaign didn’t respond to CoinDesk’s email asking where the bitcoin originated from.)
Asked whether the episode might have helped erase any lingering disgust among Bitcoiners over the World Liberty Financial rollout, PubKey founder Thomas Pacchia didn’t exactly dispute the premise of the question: “The other stuff that the family has going on is sort of outside our purview and scope,” he said in an interview. “Everybody is on a journey toward understanding the difference between Bitcoin and crypto. I like to meet people where they are.”
ELSEWHERE:
Caroline Ellison exits a Manhattan courthouse after being sentenced to two years in prison on Sept. 24, 2024. (Victor Chen/CoinDesk)
Huddle01, Blockchain Video Conferencing Project That Seeks to Outdo Zoom, Targets $37M Node Sale
Huddle01 CTO Susmit Lavania, left, and CEO Ayush Ranjan, on a Huddle video conference call. (Huddle01)
Huddle01, a blockchain project to provide decentralized audio and video conferencing – aiming to provide lower latency virtual meetings than Zoom and Google Meet – plans to raise as much as $37 million in a sale of network nodes.
The 49,600 “media nodes” being sold offer operators a way to contribute excess internet bandwidth the communication network, in exchange for token rewards. According to a litepaper, some 21% of the project’s HUDL tokens will be distributed to media nodes.
“These nodes will power a network that already outperforms the incumbent Web2 competitors on latency where there is a large cluster of nodes, and is capable of improving lags across the globe,” Huddle01 CEO Ayush Ranjan said in the release, shared exclusively with CoinDesk.
The project is built using technology borrowed from the Ethereum layer-2 network Arbitrum. A test network will launch two weeks after the sale completes, according to the press release.
Huddle01 becomes the latest in a growing trend of blockchain projects conducting node sales as a way to raise funds while simultaneously decentralizing their networks.
GO HERE FOR THE FULL STORY BY BRADLEY KEOUN
Money Center
Fundraisings
Screengrab from Daylight blog post with examples of personalized transaction recommendations (Daylight)
Deals and grants
Deus X CEO Tim Grant (Deus X)
Data and Tokens
*Regulatory and Policy
Protocol Village
Top picks of the past week from our Protocol Village column, highlighting key blockchain tech upgrades and news.
LTC has outperformed both bitcoin and ether over the last 30 days.
Litecoin (LTC) has begun the month with a rally, rising 7% over the last 24-hours, with bulls noting the network’s halving in two months and a significant uptick in activity in May.
It continues a period of overperformance for litecoin, which is up 7.5% over the last 30 days, the third-best result among crypto assets over that period, and topping bitcoin, which is down 6.2% and ether, which has edged lower by 0.5%
Litecoin’s network activity has been picking up all year and more intensely since the beginning of April. Data from IntoTheBlock shows that the total of addresses holding a balance has now pushed to nearly 8.5 million.
IntoTheBlock
Litecoin is also approaching a halving in August which analysts are deeming a significant event for both the network and the price of LTC. Similar to the oft-noted bitcoin halving, the litecoin halving will see its block reward (paid in LTC) slashed by half.
Litecoin is a lot cheaper in terms of units compared to bitcoin, which attracts investors looking to position themselves ahead of the halving, according to Charles Storry, head of growth at Phuture, a crypto index platform. “From investors I’m speaking with, they anticipate the halving to push the price of BTC, LTC and the market,” said Storry.
Litecoin might also be benefitting from the congestion that the Bitcoin network has been witnessing due to the recent burst of activity related to the Ordinals protocol, and leading to soaring costs for users.
“Because of Ordinals and BRC20 tokens taking up large shares of transaction volume on Bitcoin of late, fees have increased as well as the time to process transactions on the network,” said Brent Xu, chief executive officer and co-founder of Umee.
“Litecoin, in a sense, is an old-school clone of BTC and in turn serves a similar purpose,” added Xu. “And this is why you’re probably seeing more people transact in LTC at the moment – it’s serving as an outlet of sorts during a time of BTC congestion,” he said, though cautioning that this has happened before and LTC’s outperformance may thus not be sustainable for the long term.
Nauman Sheikh, Head of Protocol and Treasury Management at Wave Digital Assets, agreed that the halving is influencing the current price performance, noting a 30% rise in open interest for litecoin futures and perpetual contracts during the last week of May.
