Consensys has told the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that Ethereum’s proof of stake implementation “meets and even exceeds the security of Bitcoin’s Proof of Work (PoW).” The blockchain software company said the commission should recognize the advanced safeguards inherent in Ethereum’s design which exceed the “security and resilience safeguards underlying bitcoin-based exchange-traded products.” The […]
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Compass Mining Alerts Bitcoin Miners of Changes in Bitmain’s ASIC Design
Compass Mining, a bitcoin mining firm, published a blog post stating that Bitmain, the company behind the application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) mining rig, has made changes to its design. The post advised miners to be aware of the changes as Compass Mining identified “three issues” with two different Antminer S19 series mining devices.
Bitcoin Miner Compass Mining Identifies 3 Issues with Antminer S19 Series
Compass Mining, a bitcoin mining company, posted a blog post titled “Bitmain Changed Its ASIC Design. Miners Need to Be Ready,” highlighting changes in Bitmain’s ASIC design. Compass believes bitcoin mining facility operators should be aware of the changes, which could cause issues. For example, the firm identified three problems with the Antminer S19, producing 90 terahash per second (TH/s), and the S19 XP, offering 140 TH/s.
William Foxley of Compass Mining explains that the new machines lack a peripheral interface controller (PIC) on the ASICs, making it harder to control individual hashboards compared to those with a PIC. The devices use aluminum plating on the side of the mining rig, which Foxley believes may contribute to overheating issues. Additionally, there is a “consolidation of all components onto one side of the board, causing an increased chance of hashboard errors.”
Foxley explains that without a PIC, units cannot underhash on “one or two boards,” and hashboards made with aluminum plates may fail more frequently in hot climates like Texas than those made with printed circuit boards (PCBs). Additionally, Compass Mining believes non-Bitmain repair shops may face difficulty replacing damaged chips. The operations team discovered these issues within the last six months, and they “significantly affect a unit’s performance.”
In conclusion, Foxley notes in the blog post that third-party firmware could address the PIC issue and enable a miner to run on one or two boards. Third-party firmware can also lower specific variables to keep the ASIC mining rig cooler. The post suggests selecting the best environmental conditions as another solution. However, regarding the aluminum plating, Compass Mining views it as a net negative.
“We view the design decision to swap to aluminum-plating on hashboards as a net negative–one that will increase ASIC failure and underhashing while increasing service and maintenance costs,” Compass’s blog post concludes. “Paired with the lack of a PIC and increased difficulty of swapping out bad chips, we encourage miners to double down on their repair game as they onboard next generation units into their fleets.”
What do you think of Bitmain’s decision to change its ASIC design? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.
OVER Team Revamps OVER ARwards, Dubs The New Edition The ‘Venue Design Contest’
Nearly everyone would agree that digital assets like cryptocurrencies and NFTs are here to stay, and so is the underlying technology behind them, blockchain. However, one industry in particular which could vastly benefit from the seemingly inevitable shift to Web3 is the fashion sector, mainly because the clever utilization of AR and VR technology can breathe new life into one of the most popular and relevant industries in history.
This is where OVER comes in, as the team recently announced a new, totally revamped edition of the OVER ARwards. This version is called the ‘Venue Design Contest,’ and the overarching idea is the creation of meticulous environments. 3D creators will be able to choose from a variety of categories for their projects, including art galleries, exhibition halls, stores and music halls.
Understanding OVER
Before going any further, it is firstly important to understand what OVER is. Over The Reality refers to a decentralized platform for promoting art which, unlike centralized iterations, would not involve any specific restrictions pertaining to things like dress code, color, or anything else. By using the blockchain-based AR (augmented reality) platform, users can ‘live’ interactive AR experiences which are fully tailored according to their own individual preferences. All that is required is a compatible mobile device or a pair of smart glasses.
OVER is hence best understood as a new AR standard which provides interactive unique experiences through the innovative usage of AR, blockchain, NFTs, crypto and the metaverse. The platform uses the OVR token and a notable aspect is the OVER Metaverse.
About the new edition
The jury, the final prize, and the official guidelines, which have also been updated, are the main additions for this new version. Furthermore, The LandVault, SandStorm, Parcel, Pangea DAO, Spaces DAO, MetaMundo and Metahood will all be OVER partners and members of the specialized jury.
OVER enthusiasts will also be pleased to learn that a sizable final prize pool is arranged for this edition, which contains a staggering ,000 in OVR tokens. There is a leaderboard system in place which will incentivize creators who rank from first to tenth place, with the prizes for sixth to tenth positions being the same (750 OVR each). Furthermore, the first, second, and third places will receive 9,000, 7,500, and 4,500 OVR, respectively. Additionally, the first through fifth positions will be decided by a highly qualified, fair and experienced jury composed of OVER and the previously stated partners.
This edition will commence on October 4th and end on December 15th, 2022. Throughout these ten weeks, creators would be able to design and publish their projects. Besides that, from December 16th to January 10th, users can choose the best creations based on their own personal preferences via a voting process. The final rankings will be published on January 11th, 2023, with the corresponding awards ceremony scheduled for January 25th, 2023.
Not only is OVER continuously making headlines for all the work the team is doing to revolutionize the fashion industry, but this new contest is just the latest in a rising trend of competitions meant to bring out the best of creators and help us further transition into Web3. Check out the official website and the Telegram, Twitter, Discord and Medium channels for additional information.
Why StarkWare Faces Backlash Over Token Design
Ethereum second layer scalability company StarkWare confirmed the rumors about the upcoming launch of the StarkNet token. The asset is aimed at enabling the project to operate a decentralized ecosystem and to create an effective mechanism to “direct its evolution”.
Related Reading | Polygon Climbs 20% On Disney Glee – Can MATIC Sustain Gains This Month?
The StarkNet is an Ethereum second layer scalability solution based on Zero Knowledge (ZK) Rollup technology. This provides decentralized applications (dApps) with “unlimited” scalability without compromising security, decentralization, and composability.
The StarkNet Token was designed to power and incentivized the key elements on this network. The announcement claims these are StarkNet’s users, operators, and developers.
In that sense, the company has implemented a fee structure and token minting mechanism to prevent “speculative manipulation”, with “largely automated” processes, and a track record of efficient functionality across other blockchains.
The announcement is very explicit about the important roles of Operators and Developers. Thus, these components of the StarkWare ecosystem will receive a portion of the StarkNet token.
For example, smart contract developers will be rewarded with a portion of the fees paid by users for leveraging L1 and L2 smart contracts. This process will be automated, according to the design explained above.
The more a project or smart contract provides value to the StarkWare and the StarkNet ecosystem, the more developers will be rewarded with a “larger portion of tokens allocated for this purpose”. The company clarified that the token allocation mechanism is “yet to be determined”, but they will make a big emphasis on preventing “gamification” and be transparent about this process.
Furthermore, the company said that the StarkNet token won’t have a fixed supply. On the contrary, the supply “will increase over time”. The minting schedule is also to be determined by the StarkNet community.
#StarkNet Alpha was launched on Ethereum Mainnet in November 2021.
Now it’s time to advance its decentralization as demanded of an L2 on Ethereum.
Here’s our decentralization proposal, introducing the StarkNet Token, and the StarkNet Foundationhttps://t.co/zk33gANsin pic.twitter.com/YTd0Uj5NbW
— StarkWare (@StarkWareLtd) July 13, 2022
StarkWare Token Allocation Disincentives “Speculation”?
The company claims it has minted ten billion StarkNet tokens. As seen below, these tokens will have the following allocation: 32.9% for “Core Contributors”, 50.1% to be granted by StarkWare to the recently created StarkNet Foundation, and a 17% for StarkWare investors.
Source: StarkWare via Medium
The StarkNet Foundation token allocation will be split with 18% destined for Community Provisions and Community Rebates. These tokens will reward key community members and users “who performed work for StarNet”.
The latter is key in the entire allocation for the StarkNet tokens, the project is set at rewarding work and preventing people from speculating and “gamifing” the mechanism. As the announcement said there will be “no shortcuts to receiving tokens”. StarkWare said the following on its lockup and vesting periods:
To align long-term incentives of the Core Contributors and Investors with the interests of the StarkNet community, and following common practice in decentralized ecosystems, all tokens allocated to Core Contributors and Investors will be subject to a 4-year lock-up period, with linear release and a one-year cliff.
Some members of the crypto community disagreed with the token allocation claiming users and operators, allegedly two major components of the ecosystem, will not receive proper compensation. For StarkNet users, the company recommends the following in light of the upcoming token launch:
If you are an end user, use StarkNet — but only as it serves your needs today. Use it for those transactions and applications that you value, not in expectation of any future reward of StarkNet Tokens.
Related Reading | Upcoming ETH Merge Sees Institutional Investor Sentiment Turn Positive
At the time of writing, Ethereum (ETH) trades at ,140 with a 7% profit in the last 24 hours.
ETH’s price trends to the downside on the 4-hour chart. Source: ETHUSD Tradingview
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ViaBTC Capital | Reasons Behind Solana’s Frequent Downtime: Design Flaws in the Gas Economy
What is the gas fee? In the blockchain world, the gas fee is a fee that users have to pay to the blockchain network for each transaction. For example, when a user makes a transfer on Ethereum, miners must package his transaction and put it on the blockchain to complete the transaction. This process consumes the computing resources of the blockchain, and the fee paid to miners is called the gas fee.
Gas economy
Imagine that each public chain is a society or a city, and gas would be the currency that users need for various activities in the city, and the economic designs of gas have far-reaching impacts on the public chain’s future development. Today, we will illustrate the significance of the gas economy from the perspectives of performance and value capture.
Performance
– The frequent network congestion of Solana
In early May, Solana’s mainnet lost consensus, and block generation was suspended for 7 hours. The mainnet was down due to the NFT minting of a new NFT project. Users turned to bots for sending transactions as much as possible to increase their success rate of minting. This led to 6 million transactions per second on the Solana mainnet, which jammed the network. Moreover, as Solana transmits consensus messages as a special transaction message between validators, the heavily congested network also disabled the normal transmission of consensus messages, eventually leading to the loss of consensus.
This is not the first downtime of Solana. Last September, the public chain suffered a 17-hour downtime due to the massive trading volume created by on-chain bots during the launch of the hit project Raydium. A 30-hour Solana downtime incident happened at the end of January 2022 when the BTC price plunged from ,000 to ,000 during a market crash and created plenty of arbitrage opportunities. Meanwhile, the liquidation/arbitrage bots on Solana, which center on DeFi, kept creating massive transactions, which resulted in network downtime. When comparing Solana to a conventional IT system, we can tell that the downtime resembles a DDoS attack.
「A DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack refers to adding traffic from multiple sources to exceed the processing capacity of a network so that real users would not be able to acquire the resources or services they need. Attackers often launch a DDoS attack by sending more traffic to a network than it can handle or sending more requests to an application than it can manage.」
Instinctively, many people would think that Solana’s downtime is rooted in its public chain designs: the monolithic design of Solana inevitably leads to downtime.
At the moment, mainstream public chains use two kinds of designs: the modular and the monolithic. The modular architecture refers to a modularized deployment where consensus, storage, and execution are implemented separately so that the collapse of the execution layer will not compromise the security of the consensus layer. At the same time, mainstream designs adopted by Avalanche’s Subnet, ETH 2.0, and Celestia’s Rollup can all diverge massive transactions. On the other hand, although Solana as a whole is designed to enable fast transactions, scalability and security were sacrificed.
However, the modular design of a public chain is not the key because although the consensus stayed secure, the individual rollup could still suffer from downtime when facing overwhelming transactions in a very short period. In other words, the modular design just lowered the systemic risks (e.g., a certain rollup could halt but the rest can survive) for the public chain. The gas design is the real reason behind Solana’s downtime, and more network downtime is on the way if the design is not improved.
– The gas mechanisms of different chains
The figure below shows the gas designs of three mainstream public chains. On Solana, the gas fee is based on the number of signatures. The more signatures a transaction uses, the higher the gas fee. However, the maximum memory capacity of each transaction is fixed, and so is the maximum gas fee per transaction, which helps users easily calculate the cost of sending massive transaction requests. Moreover, transactions on Solana are not sequenced, which means that when the cost of sending massive requests is lower than the profit (arbitrage, NFT minting, etc.), users would use bots to send transactions on a large scale to increase the likelihood of the execution of their transactions. This is also the reason behind the downtime events that took place on Solana.
Ethereum and Avalanche share similar gas designs. Both feature the base fee and the priority fee, which creates an inherent sequencing issue because transactions with a higher priority fee would be first executed. As such, although users can still use bots to create massive transactions on Ethereum and Avalanche, their transactions will not be executed no matter how many requests are sent when the priority fee becomes insufficient, and they have to wait in line. Considering the cost of gas, such a design eliminates the possibility of network downtime arising from massive transactions at the economic level.
Source[1]
– Improvement by Solana
Economic isolation has always served its purpose better than methodological isolation. Solana has already started to build its own Fee Market by introducing a concept similar to the priority fee. Meanwhile, Metaplex, Solana’s NFT market, will also adopt a new concept called Invalid Transaction Penalty, which means that users will have to pay a fee for invalid transactions when minting NFTs.
Value capture
Value capture is the reflection of a gas economy via the market cap of the gas (the native crypto of the chain). The market cap of a native coin is roughly determined by two factors: cash flow and monetary premium.
– Cash flow
When it comes to charging the gas fee, most public chains follow the same approach: lower the gas fee as much as possible to attract users from Ethereum. From the perspective of cash flow, such an approach is unsustainable. Of the three mainstream public chains, only Ethereum stands with a considerable net cash inflow, although the network is still issuing more Ethers. If we consider additional issuance as a type of subsidy, then the net expenditure of Ethereum per day would be about .7 million if the annual issuance rate stands at 3.21%. Solana and Avalanche, on the other hand, have an income of ,250 and ,000 a day on average, with a daily net expenditure of .6 million and .86 million and a yearly issuance rate of 6.93% and 5.22%. The high net expenditure & high issuance rate significantly dilute the market cap of the public chain coins.
Source[2]
Let’s turn to the destinations of cash flows. Under Ethereum’s current mechanism, the base fee is burned, while the priority fee is offered to miners. Compared with the gas burning and distribution mechanisms of Solana and Avalanche that offer the gas fee to validators, the miner reward is a design that compromises value capture. Ethereum uses the PoW design for block generation, and most of the miners adopt a business model under which tokens that have been mined are sold to cover the mining cost (such as electricity fees and maintenance costs). Therefore, the part of the gas fee paid to miners will most likely go out from the ecosystem. It would be better to give the gas fee to validators because the cost of running a node is not as high as operating a mining factory. Since there are not significant ongoing operating cost, validators are more likely to invest the rewards they’ve received in the nodes, which makes the ecosystem safer without diluting the value of the native coin. Burning fees might be the most direct and effective way to capture valuee and benefits both node stakers and token holders. In addition, MEV constitutes another major source of revenue for public chains. According to statistics from Flashbots, from 2020 to now, 0 million worth of MEV has been paid to miners, which is a conservative estimate.
Source[3]
– Monetary premium
Monetary premium refers to the appreciation of a public chain coin in terms of its practical value and value storage. Most existing public chain coins are carrying out massive issuance, which makes them poor value storage, and the practical value forms the backbone of their market cap. The growth of the ecosystem of a public chain coin will create scenarios where it can be used as a payment method. For instance, most NFT transactions are settled with public chain coins. Meanwhile, most emerging public chains also consider the practical value as the primary means of appreciation, which is why they have set negligible gas fees to attract traffic and new users. Meanwhile, some public chains have built foundations worth hundreds of millions of dollars to encourage more developers to build DApps in their ecosystem. The logic behind such an approach is to make big investments to attract users in the initial stage and try to recover the cost later.
Conclusion
To sum up, the gas design of a public chain will have profound impacts on the future development of a public chain, and a poor design could lead to poor value capture and even performance bottlenecks. When evaluating a public chain project, we can also get a rough picture of its development strategy and future growth through its gas designs.
[1] https://docs.solana.com/implemented-proposals/transaction-fees#congestion-driven-fees,https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/gas/,https://docs.avax.network/quickstart/transaction-fees/
[2] https://cryptofees.info/,https://moneyprinter.info/,https://solanabeach.io/
[3] https://docs.solana.com/implemented-proposals/transaction-fees#congestion-driven-fees,https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/gas/,https://docs.avax.network/quickstart/transaction-fees/
Coreto Platform to Get a Makeover with Coreto Design Language
A month after its Alpha launch, the reputation based online social platform for crypto communities, Coreto has entered Phase II and is in the process of receiving a huge upgrade. As a part of this new development, the community-driven, crowdsourced crypto information platform is implementing Coreto Design Language (CDL) – a design language system optimized for efficiency, cost, stability and usability of the platform.
The implementation of CDL is an unmistakable sign of Coreto’s evolution as the project prepares to soon emerge from Alpha release to Beta launch. The new design language is created keeping the community’s as well as Coreto’s own developers’ needs in mind. As a community-oriented project with plenty of features in the pipeline, it is important to create a simplified, user-friendly platform for the convenience of users. At the same time, developers should have enough flexibility with access to necessary tools for rapid deployment without compromising on the user experience front.
By following a modular approach with reimagined graphical elements, the new Coreto Design Language will promote a sense of familiarity to all the stakeholders, throughout their journey with the platform.
Achieving Consistency While Maintaining Competitive Edge
The implementation of CDL into the Coreto ecosystem is more than just a branding exercise. While there is no arguing that a refreshed look with improved user experience will grab the user’s attention, the design language should also ensure consistency in all aspects, throughout the platform.
The modular approach adopted by CDL is slated to drastically cut down the time needed to develop and launch new features. With clearly defined elements in place, the development team won’t have to worry about the looks or spend time perfecting the user experience for each new release. By cutting short the turnaround time, CDL will put Coreto in a position to keep up with the constantly evolving technology and community needs.
More Time and Resources to Serve the Community
The official launch of revamped Coreto will also mark the project’s entry to Phase II. The timing of CDL upgrade will provide adequate time for the Coreto team and early adopter community who are part of Phase II to test the new system and achieve perfection before production.
The time and resources saved by eliminating the need to create everything from scratch will help Coreto to focus on planning and development of new features without taking their eyes off the main mission that is clearly outlined in its manifesto.
Celebrating the “First-Month Anniversary”
Coreto announced Alpha launch on April 12, 2021, with a select batch of 500 users to test and experience the platform first-hand. Exactly after a month, on May 12, 2021, Coreto is onboarding another 500 pre-registered users who have been patiently waiting for their turn until now. These 1000 users will be instrumental in giving quality feedback about the platform to Coreto team, helping them further improve their offering.
With registrations still open, interested community members can request for early access to the platform to gain a firsthand experience of what Coreto has to offer. Those registering for early access will be onboarded in multiple batches, enabling them to access all the latest features of the constantly evolving platform.
Uniswap v3 announced for May 5, best DEX design on the planet?
The third iteration of the decentralized exchange Uniswap (v3) has a mainnet deployment date of May 5. The official announcement confirmed a highly anticipated feature, support for the second layer solution Optimism Rollups.
This feature will be enabled at a later date. The official announcement focuses on another “groundbreaking new feature” that the Uniswap Labs team has dubbed Concentrated Liquidity Positions. This will allow users to:
Rather than being required to allocate capital across the entire price spectrum from 0 to infinity, each LP is given full control over what price ranges they wish to provide liquidity to.
Another new feature is multiple fee tiers that will allow liquidity providers (LPs) to receive rewards relative to the amount of risk they take. The third iteration of the decentralized exchange will allow LPs to take advantage of “greater flexibility”.
This will have multiple direct implications for liquidity providers: they will be able to participate with up to 4,000 times more capital efficiency than in Uniswap v2 and earn fees by limit order, according to the official announcement. Therefore, they will receive higher returns, Uniswap Labs’ team said:
Capital efficiency paves the way for low-slippage trade execution that can surpass both centralized exchanges and stablecoin-focused AMMs.
1/
🦄 Today we are thrilled to present a detailed overview of Uniswap v3, the most flexible and capital efficient AMM ever designed!
🏃 Mainnet launch is scheduled for May 5, with a scalable Optimism L2 deployment set to follow soon afterhttps://t.co/NTekDxWVA8
— Uniswap Labs 🦄 (@Uniswap) March 23, 2021
Uniswap v3 introduces license to prevent forks
Researcher for cryptocurrency investment firm Paradigm, Dan Robinson, claimed that Uniswap v3 has the “best DEX (decentralized exchange) design on the planet”. Robinson believes the newly announced features put Uniswap above the competition.
He added that in the future other automated market makers could be built on top of Uniswap v3:
By combining multiple positions, LPs can approximate arbitrary curves. Any static curve can be implemented on Uniswap v3 and efficiently aggregated with the rest of its liquidity.
This includes custom formulas like the ones used by Balancer and Curve, as well as ones that don’t have elegant formulas. This means that most existing DEXes could be built on top of Uniswap, but it also vastly expands the design space to previously unimaginable AMMs.
The first iteration of Uniswap was launched in 2018, the second in May 2020. Since then, trading volume on the automated market maker has surpassed that of large crypto exchanges. As somehow of a trade-off, other projects have forked the DEX.
To prevent similar actions, the new iteration will be released with a Business Source License 1.1. In theory, this should prevent other projects from forking Uniswap’s v3 codebase. The license will last for 2 years, then a GPL 2.0 license will be adopted permanently.
However, the community can vote to speed up this process or give “exceptions”, Uniswap Labs stated:
We strongly believe decentralized financial infrastructure should ultimately be free, open-source software. At the same time, we think the Uniswap community should be the first to build an ecosystem around the Uniswap v3 Core codebase.
Governance token UNI is trading at .62 with losses of 2.7% on the 24-hour chart. On the one-week chart, UNI has posted gains of 12.6%.
![Uniswap UNI](https://www.newsbtc.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Uniswap-UNI23.jpg)
For My Cause My Cleats Design, Russell Okung Sports BTCPay Server
The NFLs biggest Bitcoin spokesperson, Russell Okung, will wear cleats advertising BTCPay in his next game.nThe post For My Cause My Cleats Design, Russell Okung Sports BTCPay Server appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.n
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For My Cleats, My Cause Design, Russell Okung Sports BTCPay Server
The NFLs biggest Bitcoin spokesperson, Russell Okung, will wear cleats advertising BTCPay in his next game.nThe post For My Cleats, My Cause Design, Russell Okung Sports BTCPay Server appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.n
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JRR Crypto Launches Token Design Competition – BTC Media Sponsor
n nn nn n nnnnnnnnIn a collaboration with LongHash and BTC Inc, JRR Crypto has launched an international token design competition.Beginning on October 26, 2018, JRR Crypto launched this design competition at a multiday festival in Berlin. According to the group, its designed to address one of the fundamental issues that the development of decentralized projects faces today.JRR observed that most blockchain projects that design a pass-through mechanism are too f
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