Cryptocurrency Chronicles #25

Hello everyone,

The Autumn has come and with it also plenty of news from the crypto world. As always, there is never a dull week in crypto. DeFi craze kinda slowed down, possibly temporarily only, and most attention has been focused on good old Bitcoin. A bunch of big companies announced swapping their USD cash reserves for Bitcoin. MicroStrategy and Square were amongst the first to do so. Grayscale Bitcoin Trust alone owns now over half a million bitcoins. Yes, it is a crazy number.

Nonetheless, DeFi space advances fast in this consolidation period. A couple of projects rolled out their own Layer 2 implementations on testnet to ease the network congestion pressures. In the spectrum of Ethereum L2 solutions Optimistic Rollups and zkRollups seem to shine the most. We have seen a couple of new DeFi hacks but that was to be expected. Good old CeFi got hacked too. KuCoin lost assets worth over 200M dollars.

At this point, it is not really sure which of the two is safer to use. I would say it’s still CeFi, but DeFi certainly gains its momentum. We could also see some progress when it comes to developing DeFi on Bitcoin even though it’s still kinda dwarfed by the sheer size and volumes of the Etheruem ecosystem. As the old saying goes, if DeFi does not come to Bitcoin, Bitcoin must come to DeFi.

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And so does happen. The number of tokenized bitcoins on Etheruem rises fast. WBTC has been still dominant but the past months showed that Ren and Keep may be catching up fast too. This represents a significant and welcomed shift towards more decentralization. At the same time, this once again proves the utility of Ethereum. Speaking of which, it is interesting to watch the increasing spectrum of assets that reside on top of this blockchain.

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In December we may, or may not, witness the historical moment and the genesis block of the ETH 2.0 beacon chain. At the same time, another purported Etheruem killer will launch its mainnet — Dfinity. Some others have already been accelerating not only their on-chain capabilities but also DeFi ecosystem. There is fierce competition between Cosmos and Polkadot in this regard. Solana, Avalanche, and others are plotting the “flippening” as well. Let’s just watch these fights, and cheer for the better.

Stay safe and healthy!

Stats

Bitcoin

Ethereum

DeFi

  • Visualizing the explosive growth of DeFi in 2020
  • Is it still viable to invest in DeFi?
  • What is the state of Anonymity in DeFi?
  • Secret Tokens (formerly Enigma) are to boost it up!
  • Aave raised another round — of 25M
  • Another month, another hack — this time focused on Harvest
  • Binance announced a 100M fund to bridge DeFi and CeFi
  • Superfluid tokens, ideal for recurring payments, have been released
  • Enter Aavegotchi — a blend of DeFi and NFTs
  • An investment legend, Joel Monegro, wrote a piece where he advises DeFi projects on fundamental design changes
  • Revisiting the Sushi chronicles
  • You can now stake SNX on Optimistic L2 testnet

Altcoins

  • Solana has introduced a bidirectional bridge between its blockchain and Ehtereum
  • Ren ecosystem update
  • Flow raises 18M in their ICO
  • NuCypher launched their mainnet
  • Filecoin launched too, after their 200M ICO in 2017
  • Near has moved towards a decentralized version of its mainnet

Others

  • Nic Carter wrote a nice piece on negative feedback loops in Public blockchains
  • Monero Team and lawyers from Perkins Coie released an important paper on possible compliance of anonymous coins
  • Kucoin got hacked — 200M USD
  • What does the EU cook for crypto?
  • PayPal starts to offer cryptocurrencies to their customers!
  • Another round of Virtual Land auction in Somnium Space