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Lightning Speed: How To Take BTC From Reserve Asset To World Reserve Currency
Is the Lightning Network bitcoin’s killer app? It might be, but it still has a long road ahead. One of the stops on that road is the possible inclusion of stablecoins. Does bitcoin need them? Aren’t there inherent counterparty risks with those? The debate over those questions rages on. And in their latest post, The Bitcoin Layer makes the case for this development to be crucial in The Lightning Networks trajectory.
According to The Bitcoin Layer, “a global capital market operating on top of bitcoin-denominated financial rails is inching closer with each new onramp.” And the Taro protocol and all of the assets it would bring to The Lightning Network is the mother of all onramps. However, the risks it brings forth are as big as the opportunities it presents.
The first part of the article is about Magma, “a Lightning liquidity marketplace that allows nodes to buy and sell liquidity by leasing other network participant’s channels for a minimum specified period of time.” According to the article, Magma’s existence proves “a structural demand for secondary markets of liquidity”. In those markets, “participants can buy and sell collateral as needed—eventually blossoming into a deep and liquid capital market.”
Not only that, The Bitcoin Layer also theorizes about:
“Through time, Lightning Banks will emerge. As market participants lack the technical wherewithal to efficiently operate Lightning channels, most Lightning Network channel management will be subsumed by these entities who specialize in it.” Read More
Brazilian Voting Authority Might Include Blockchain Tech in Future Elections
The Brazilian voting authority (TSE), has publicly declared it is studying blockchain as a technology that might help the organization in its task of organizing ballots. Celio Castro Wermerlinger, coordinator of modernization of the institution, stated that this decentralized ledger tech was included in a research program called “Elections of the Future.”
Blockchain tech is being included in several solutions designed for various applications, including ballot and voting technologies. The Brazilian voting authority announced last month that they were researching blockchain tech and the different ways it might be included in ballots.
Celio Castro Wermerlinger, who is the coordinator of modernization at the Brazilian voting authority, stated that end-to-end voting protocol, post-quantum cryptography, shared keys, and blockchain were part of the technologies being studied. This investigation is part of a program called “Elections of the Future,” that seeks more efficient and more economically viable solutions to be implemented in the electronic voting system. Read More
Blockchain and NFTs are changing the publishing industry
Traditional publishers are using NFTs to build communities and engage with audiences.
Web3 has become the most sought-after investment sector of 2022, as use cases for nonfungible tokens (NFTs), the Metaverse and other blockchain applications come to fruition. Therefore, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that different segments of the publishing industry have begun to use Web3 technologies to transform traditional models.
For example, the textbook publishing giant Pearson recently announced plans to use NFTs to track digital textbook sales to capture revenue lost on the secondary market. Time magazine, which was founded 99 years ago, has also been using NFTs to create new revenue streams, along with a sense of community within the publishing industry. Keith Grossman, the president of Time, told Cointelegraph that the magazine is demonstrating the new possibilities of engagement that Web3 brings to the publishing industry. He said:
“Web3 can evolve one's brand in a world where individuals are moving from online renters to online owners, and privacy is beginning to move from platforms to the individual.” Read More
Pinterest for Web3: Project launches curation ecosystem on Avalanche
CurateDAO launched an Avalanche-based “curate-to-earn” platform where participants can earn by contributing to databases.
With play-to-earn (P2E) gaming rising in 2021 through Axie Infinity (AXS) and an offshoot called move-to-earn (M2E) gaining fame through STEPN (GMT), another variation of the “to earn” model launches in an attempt to bring Web3 elements to existing Web2 frameworks.
In an announcement, the CurateDAO team told Cointelegraph that they’ve launched a Pinterest-like database platform on the Avalanche (AVAX) blockchain. Similar to other “to earn” models, users can be rewarded with crypto tokens for performing tasks. In this case, the task given to participants is contributing their curated lists to the project’s database.
There are different roles within the project's ecosystem. This includes curators, who will mint and set rules for a database, a scout who will find and contribute content that aligns with the database rules and viewers who participate by looking at the content.
The curator can be an individual, a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) or an artificial intelligence (AI) program like GPT-3. They will earn along with the scouts as content gets purchased by the viewers or accessed by watching advertisements. Read More
Markethive Leading The Way In Web 3 Social & Market Media
Web 3.0 is the next generation of the internet which people envision will be more decentralized and permissionless. One that's built on decentralized protocols, where users help with content creation and the governance of the web itself. They also have the ability to own a part of the network, so you can think of it as a Read-Write-Own Internet.
There are already several technologies that could serve as the backbone for a Web 3 world. Most point to blockchains like Elrond, Cardano, or Ethereum, for example, but other distributed technologies like IPFS can also be used to decentralize networks.
Thousands of dApps (decentralized applications) are already being built in the Web 3 environment. These often include native tokens to add value to the application to those who hold the tokens. These native crypto assets allow those who participate in the network to share in the value generated from it.
Web 3 promises a decentralized alternative where we are all users, owners, and developers. This quote from Fabric Ventures sums it up beautifully,
“Web 3.0 enables a future where distributed users and machines are able to interact with data, value, and other counterparties via a substrate of peer-to-peer networks without the need for third parties—the result: a composable human-centric & privacy-preserving computing fabric for the next wave of the web.” Read More
Tether also confirms its throwing weight behind the post-Merge Ethereum
”We believe that a smooth transition is essential for the long-term health of the DeFi ecosystem and its platforms, including those using our tokens,” Tether stated.
Hot on the heels of an official announcement from USD Coin (USDC) issuer Circle Pay, stablecoin giant Tether has now also officially confirmed its support behind Ethereum’s upcoming Merge upgrade and switch to a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism-based blockchain.
The announcement came on the same day as its stablecoin competitor, who pledged they will only support Ethereum’s highly anticipated upgrade.
In a Tuesday statement, Tether labelled the Merge one of the “most significant moments in blockchain history” and outlined that it will work in accordance with Ethereum’s upgrade schedule, which is currently slated to go through on Sept. 19:
“Tether believes that in order to avoid any disruption to the community, especially when using our tokens in DeFi projects and platforms, it’s important that the transition to POS is not weaponized to cause confusion and harm within the ecosystem.”
“Tether will closely follow the progress and preparations for this event and will support POS Ethereum in line with the official schedule. We believe that a smooth transition is essential for the long term health of the DeFi ecosystem and its platforms, including those using our tokens,” Tether added. Read More
Circle's USDC Will Not Support an Ethereum Proof-of-Work Fork
Circle insists it’s doing “the right thing,” advocating for the new chain's development amid growing discussions of yet another Ethereum fork.
Stablecoin provider Circle announced its intentions to fully support Ethereum’s shift to a proof-of-stake (PoS) chain following the highly-anticipated merge event slated for September 19.
“We understand the responsibility we have for the Ethereum ecosystem and businesses, developers and end users that depend on USDC, and we intend to do the right thing,” read the announcement.
The firm’s stablecoin USDC is currently the second-largest stablecoin, commanding a market capitalization of $54.2 billion.
Circle’s announcement comes amid growing speculation that the merge event will also lead to another Ethereum fork that would keep the mining-intensive PoW consensus mechanism alive and well.
Following the merge, miners will be swapped for so-called validators in which users stake 32 Ethereum to validate transactions on the network.
Any groups with a hefty amount of Ethereum mining hardware would thus be made obsolete. Read More
Reddit partners with FTX to enable ETH gas fees for community points
With the new integration, Reddit users will be able to purchase Ether from supported Reddit apps via FTX’s payment and exchange infrastructure platform FTX Pay.
After moving away from Bitcoin (BTC) payments years ago, online forum Reddit now seems to be inching closer to embracing cryptocurrency payments via a new partnership with the FTX exchange.
Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto exchange FTX and Reddit announced in a joint statement on Tuesday that the platform intends to integrate Reddit’s Community Points in the United States, the European Union, Australia and other markets.
The partnership features the integration of FTX Pay as a payment and crypto exchange solution to unlock new crypto-enabled perks for Reddit Community Points. Introduced in May 2020, Reddit Community Points are a measure of reputation in communities or subreddits, allowing users to own a piece of their favourite communities.
“As a unit of ownership, points capture some of the value of their community. They can be spent on premium features and are used as a measure of reputation in the community,” Reddit said when launching the Community Points two years ago. Reddit Community Points are based on Arbitrum, one of the most Ethereum scaling solutions.
With the new integration, users will be able to purchase Ether (ETH) from supported Reddit apps via FTX’s payment and exchange infrastructure platform FTX Pay. The cryptocurrency can be used to pay blockchain gas fees, or network fees for their Community Points transactions on-chain. Read More
How Secure Is the Ethereum Sitting in Your MetaMask Wallet?
Security and privacy experts say it's become alarmingly common for people to report vulnerabilities on public forums like Twitter because they otherwise get ignored.
It’s been an unrelenting week for MetaMask developers.
Reacting to the news that $4.5 million worth of funds had been drained from thousands of software wallets on Solana, the team behind MetaMask—far and away the most popular software wallet for Ethereum and Ethereum-compatible networks—combed through the wallet's codebase to make sure users would not be affected by a similar hack.
That kind of fire drill has been repeated elsewhere. On reports that the Near Wallet might have a vulnerability similar to the hacked Solana wallets, the protocol’s Twitter account said Thursday night that it’s “highly recommended” users change their security settings.
Scanning for vulnerabilities after there’s been an exploit is one way that developers handle security. Ideally, they find them before they’ve been exploited. MetaMask has said previously that it’s working to reorganize its teams to better respond to security issues, but there are signs that it’s struggling to keep up. Read More
Disclaimer: These articles are provided for informational purposes only. They are not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or any other advice.
