The rise of Ordinals inscriptions on the Bitcoin network has sparked new interest and debate around its impact on the ecosystem. Initially used to mint images as non-fungible tokens (NFTs), users have now realized that text-based inscriptions can create fungible tokens similar to ERC-20 token standard on the Ethereum network. As a result, the number of Ordinals inscriptions on the Bitcoin blockchain has almost doubled from 2.5 million to 4.78 million in just the last eight days.
Glassnode co-founder and chief technology officer Rafael Schultze-Kraft noted that text-based inscriptions are the most popular form of Ordinals inscription, with over 2.8 million text-based inscriptions as of May 5. Recent data from blockchain data hub Dune Analytics shows that 99% of all new Ordinals inscriptions since April 25 have been text-based, popularized as the BRC-20 token standard.
According to brc-20.io, a new tool that tracks BRC-20 tokens, there are currently 14,200 new tokens hosted on the Bitcoin blockchain. The most popular Bitcoin-based tokens include “ordi,” “nals,” and a Bitcoin-based version of the memecoin Pepe (PEPE), which is ranked third by total market cap.
The total market cap of BRC-20 tokens currently hovers around the $700 million mark, with Galaxy Digital predicting the market for “Bitcoin NFTs” may reach $4.5 billion by 2025. The rise of Ordinals over the last few months has sparked debate around whether it is ultimately positive for the Bitcoin ecosystem. Some Bitcoin proponents believe that Ordinals offer a wider range of financial use cases for Bitcoin, while others argue that it strays from Satoshi Nakamoto’s original vision for Bitcoin as an electronic, peer-to-peer cash system.
In the meantime, miners have enjoyed a surge in revenue due to transaction fees related to the burst of new activity on the network. As the popularity of Ordinals continues to grow, it remains to be seen whether it will have a positive or negative impact on the Bitcoin ecosystem.
The supply of wrapped Bitcoin (wBTC), an Ethereum-based ERC-20 token that mirrors the value of Bitcoin and is pegged 1:1 with its price, has hit its lowest point since May 2021. This follows a significant burn of 11,500 wBTC linked to the now-bankrupt crypto lender Celsius, which has turned its growth rate negative. The current total supply of wBTC stands at 164,396, with a monthly growth rate of -7.39%.
wBTC was co-developed in 2019 by Bitgo, blockchain interoperability protocol Ren, and multichain liquidity platform Kyber. It is managed by the decentralized autonomous organization wBTC DAO, which comprises over 30 members. When merchants want to exchange BTC for wBTC, they start a burn transaction and alert the custodians. The merchant transfers real BTC to a custodian address on the Bitcoin blockchain, which is locked. Once it receives the real BTC, the custodian address mints the equivalent amount in wBTC on Ethereum. Being an ERC-20 token makes the transfer of wBTC faster than normal Bitcoin, but the key advantage of wBTC is its integration into the world of Ethereum wallets, decentralized applications, and smart contracts.
During the peak of the bull run, wrapped tokens became a popular tool of use in the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem. The supply of wBTC peaked at 285,000 in April 2022, when the price of BTC was trading above $48,000. However, with the advent of the bear market and numerous crypto contagions, the demand for wBTC started to fade away.
The first signs of lowering demand came after the Terra collapse, which forced several crypto lenders to redeem their wBTC. According to one report, Celsius Network redeemed about 9,000 wBTC amid a growing withdrawal demand. A similar scenario occurred in November 2022 after the FTX collapse, where reports indicate the now-bankrupt crypto exchange tried redeeming 3,000 wBTC just before filing for bankruptcy. After the FTX collapse in November, wBTC experienced its largest monthly coin redemption, with over 28,000 wBTC redeemed back to the original coin.
The market contagion caused by the FTX collapse also depegged wBTC from the original value of BTC. Although the slippage was just about 1.5%, it raised serious concerns about whether such synthetic tokens were a viable mode of value transfer.
The recent burn of 11,500 wBTC linked to Celsius is significant, as it is the second-largest single-day burn of wBTC. This burn has turned the growth rate of wBTC negative, meaning its supply is decreasing. The total supply of wBTC has now hit a nine-month low.
Despite this, wBTC remains an important player in the DeFi ecosystem, offering a bridge between the Bitcoin and Ethereum networks. Its integration into the world of Ethereum wallets, decentralized applications, and smart contracts provides an added advantage to its users.
Creating a token requires deploying a smart contract which is simplified with modern platforms that enable users to fill in details of their proposed token without coding or technical knowledge.
Traditionally, creating a token would require a creator to outline token properties, including the supply, name, and number of auxiliary functions. This step would be followed by deploying a smart contract, QA testing and blockchain deployment. While users would traditionally require a basic understanding of coding, newer platforms simplify the process to enable anyone to deploy a token of their own.
One of these platforms is Student Coin Terminal which allows users to create a custom ERC-20 token. Users can start the token creation process by connecting their Ethereum wallet (selecting between Wallet Connect or MetaMask) or create one by selecting the “Get wallet” button. They will then need to add enough funds to pay for contract deployment and set up their tokens. With the foundation in place, users can set up their tokens through a simplified format, enabling users to complete a basic form.
With modern platforms like Student Coin, any user can create a token of their own despite having limited or no technical knowledge.
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Four altcoins on top of Ethereum are recording massive gains over the last seven days while Bitcoin attempts to recover its losses.
Currently sitting with a big 85% gain is CRTS, the ERC-20 token that powers the Cratos mobile app, a real-time live vote platform where users can generate vote topics according to their preference, and other users can participate in the vote.
Market participants have responded positively to developments in Cratos over the last week, including CRTS getting listed on crypto exchange MEXC, as well as the launch of a global version of the app which was previously only available in Korea.
Synapse (SYN), another Ethereum-based altcoin is currently up 89% in the last seven days. Synapse is a cross-chain protocol that aims to provide interoperability between various blockchains. It consists of the Synapse Network (SNP), and an automated market maker (AMM) for pricing and asset rebalancing.
Closely followed crypto analyst Smart Contracter recently told his 198,000 followers that SYN looked exceptional in its Wrapped Ethereum pair (SYN/WETH).
“With all the layer ones competing against each other, accumulating something that bridges them all together feels like a picks and shovels play to me.
SYN chart looks amazing against eth here on the weekly and allows you to bridge to almost every single chain from any chain.”
Source: Smart Contracter/Twitter
Also showing strength is Velas (VLX), a proof of stake blockchain and ecosystem on which one can build artificial intelligence projects, decentralized applications (dApps), or smart contracts.
VLX is currently trading at $0.37, up 73% over the last seven days, about 33% below its all-time high of $0.55.
Making even bigger waves is Vader Protocol (VADER), a decentralized liquidity protocol that anchors a slip-based fee Automated Market Maker (“AMM”) with its own native stablecoin, USDV.
VADER is currently trading at $0.09, up a massive 150% in the last seven days.
At time of writing, Bitcoin is up 11% in the same time frame, currently trading just below $52,000.
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Many layer 2 solutions are competing on being the most active in developments. Amid these scaling solutions in Optimism, and given its latest announcement, it will soon enable developers to launch DApps with just a single click of a button.
Optimism provides support for all the apps on the Ethereum ecosystem. It ensures that transaction fees are lower by keeping its data on the blockchain but running computation off-chain.
The team’s latest blog reveals that an upcoming upgrade will facilitate the launch of DApps on its layer. This means that every tool running on Ethereum will also run on Optimism.
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Latest Upgrade To Provide Support For Ethereum Protocols
The disclosure by the Optimism team assures the developer’s community that the upgrade will help them to simplify the process of launching their decentralized apps. Also, this simplicity stems across features such as gas and traces. Developers targeting Geth now have the opportunity to launch without changing their codes.
Related Reading | New To Bitcoin? Learn To Trade Crypto With The NewsBTC Trading Course
Optimism disclosed that it had overhauled the codes. As a result, it can now go beyond being compatible Ethereum Virtual Machine only to become an EVM equivalence by making its protocol efficient and lightweight.
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One of the steps the team took to reduce the protocol’s load was to delete its custom compiler. It also deleted over 25,000 lines of codes as it upgraded.
According to the post, the team asserts that developing the “EVM-compliant rollup” is not very easy given that it aims to support the whole Ethereum stack. Moreover, to also implement the security features which EVM requires will also cost a lot of money. However, it is mandatory because every line of codes added to the system comes with possible vulnerabilities.
Optimism Pursuing Compatibility
As for now, the layer 2 scaling solution is now fully equivalent with EVM using Geth. Though it is working to become compatible with alternative node implementations such as Erigon and OpenEthereum using below one thousand lines of codes. The team disclosed that they hadn’t changed the security model of the protocol even with this release.
The reason behind the growth of Optimism is the move from Ethereum mainnet to other chains & layer 2 solutions compatible with EVM
Ethereum has fallen by 7% in 24 hours | Source: ETHUSD on TradingView.com
The migration of capital from Ethereum to these other solutions was to reduce the high fees characterizing transactions carried out on its base layer.
Related Reading | While Broader Crypto Market Holds Its Collective Breath, Whales Are Loading Up On Bitcoin
The information from Dune Analytics even reveals that another rollup network Arbitrum has a TVL of $2.62 billion, which is the largest ETH Bridge. This rival protocol went live three weeks ago, and it is already making waves.
But it is not the only protocol as Polygon ERC-20 Bridge emerged after Arbitrum and is now boasting $2.35 billion in TVL. After Polygon came, Avalanche Bridge and Fantom Anyswap Bridge and each now record $1.86 billion and $476 million, respectively.
Featured image from Forbes, chart from TradingView.com
PeckShield reported through a tweet of the new hack on Cream Finance. The blockchain security company said a flash loan attack on the decentralized finance lending and borrowing protocol.
#FlashLoanAlert https://t.co/JPW7e368qd
— PeckShield Inc. (@peckshield) August 30, 2021
PeckShield explained that the hacking came through a 500 Ethereum flash loan from the attacker. This was used to infiltrate a reentrancy bug in the smart contract of the Flex Network. Usually, flash loans being undercollateralized can be borrowed and repaid within a single transaction.
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As a DeFi protocol for lending, Cream Finance allows users to earn interest from their deposited assets. Though Cream Finance is a fork of the Compound protocol, its operation is quite different from Compound or Aave. The platform has several more markets for some esoteric digital assets.
1/4 @CreamFinance was exploited in (one hack tx: https://t.co/JPW7e368qd), leading to the gain of ~$18.8M for the hacker.
— PeckShield Inc. (@peckshield) August 30, 2021
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This attack on Cream Finance was exploitation involving 1,308 Ethereum and over 418 million AMP, the native token of Flexa Network. According to PechShield, the Ethereum records reveal that over $6 million were hacked at 5:44 UTC.
Cream Finance Becomes Another DeFi Protocol Hacked In 2021
Furthermore, the Cream Finance team members confirmed the authenticity of the hacking reporting. Then, reporting on Discord Channel, the project’s official channel, the members started working with PeckShield.
The team revealed that the hacking was on the CREAM v1 market on the Ethereum Blockchain. Furthermore, they mentioned that it’s through the reentrancy of the contract on the AMP token.
At the time of writing, AMP’s value has dipped by 15% within few hours to $0.05. Also, the value of Cream Finance’s native token, CREAM, plummeted by about 6%.
However, ETH is at $3, 190.46 showing a slight dipping within the last 24 hours. The total amount of the Crean Finance hacking is more than $25 million. The address of the hackers shows that they presently have about $18.8 million.
Amidst the hack, Cream Finance is down by 6% | Source: CREAMUSD on TradingView.com
The Cream Finance team has put a stop to any further loss. The team said that it now has a pause on AMP’s supply and borrow. It further acknowledged that the hack doesn’t affect any other market. Eason Wu, the protocol’s production Manger, disclosed this information on Discord.
Recall that earlier in the year; Cream Finance had a huge hack. The attack led to the loss of $37.5 million worth of digital assets. According to the report, the earlier hacking had a root cause from the exploitation of Alpha Finance.
Related Reading | Reports Show 45% Surge In Stock And Cryptocurrency Sign-Ups Across Rural Areas In India
Flash loans have remained one of the controversial features of decentralized finance. This’s because there’s no collateral needed for the loans, and hence, they are susceptible to hacks. This accounts for the recent attacks and hacks of flash loans.
A similar incident is a hack on the Bilaxy crypto exchange on August 28. The exchange had a huge hot wallet hack that compromised about 295 ERC-20 tokens. Also, a hack on Liquid on August 19 resulted in a loss of about $100 million.
Featured image from Pixabay, chart from TradingView.com
The second biggest stablecoin by market capitalization is already a multi-blockchain project. Soon, though, USDC will live almost everywhere. According toCoindesk, it will soon be available in, “Avalanche, Celo, Flow, Hedera, Kava, Nervos, Polkadot, Stacks, Tezos, and Tron.” That will bring the total to 14; since USDC is already functional in Ethereum, Algorand, Stellar, and Solana.
The biggest stablecoin, Tether or USDT, is only available in 8 of those. Currently, the most used stablecoin is Tron’s version of USDT.
Related Reading | Is USDC’s Billion Dollar Growth A Sign Crypto Smart Money Is Ditching Tether?
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With that in mind, CENTRE said:
“We anticipate that USDC on these blockchain platforms and multichain protocols will further accelerate the use of the world’s fastest growing digital dollar currency.”
The consortium that runs USDC, CENTRE, is a joint venture between Coinbase and payments processor Circle. The information comes from, “a draft announcement from USDC administrator CENTRE obtained by CoinDesk.”
For this, we have to go back to the academy. Coinzillainforms us:
USDC is one of the fastest-growing stablecoins pegged 1 to 1 to the US Dollar.
What is more remarkable is that Circle, the company that developed the stablecoin, is actually holding the amount of money required for backing the USDC in circulation.
That’s definitely a show at USDT.Tether’s auditandlegal issueshave been a topic of contention in the cryptocurrencies community for a while now. Can they back all the Tether they’ve minted? A burning question that’s harder to answer than you’d think.
For what is worth, USDC’s independent audit ison the public recordand says:
USD Coin (“USDC”) tokens issued and outstanding less tokens allowed but not issued (218,807,037) and less blacklisted tokens = 14,697,267,257 USDC
US Dollars held in custody accounts are at least equal or greater than the USDC tokens outstanding at the Report Date and Time.
Back to Coinzilla’s academy, the stablecoin’s characteristics are:
In essence, USD Coin is an ERC-20 token that functions through the Ethereum Network. Nowadays, USDC transactions can also be settled through Algorand, Solana, and Stellar’s infrastructures.
Since the launch of USDC 2.0, the payment process is simplified, the gas fees being paid directly in USDC.
Related Reading | Circle’s Stablecoin USDC Passes Independent Audit, Fully Backed by USD
Stablecoins Are Supposed To Rule The USA in 2021
The official love affair between the US government and USDC started last January, when Jeremy Allaire from Circle announced that, “the largest US banking regulator with new guidance allowing US banks to use public blockchains and dollar stablecoins as a settlement infrastructure in the US financial system.” According to him, “Decentralized, permissionless, open source and internet mediated software is literally becoming the foundation for not just the US financial system but for the global economy.”
3/ The new interpretive letter establishes that banks can treat public chains as infrastructure similar to SWIFT, ACH and FedWire, and stablecoins like USDC as electronic stored value. The significance of this can’t be understated.
— Jeremy Allaire (@jerallaire) January 4, 2021
Recently Randal K. Quarles, the Federal Reserve’s Vice Chair for Supervision,considerably raisedthe stakes:
In my judgment, we do not need to fear stablecoins. The Federal Reserve has traditionally supported responsible private-sector innovation. Consistent with this tradition, I believe that we must take strong account of the potential benefits of stablecoins, including the possibility that a U.S. dollar stablecoin might support the role of the dollar in the global economy. For example, a global U.S. dollar stablecoin network could encourage use of the dollar by making cross-border payments faster and cheaper, and it potentially could be deployed much faster and with fewer downsides than a CBDC.
Will stablecoins like USDC and USDT substitute the Digital Dollar project? Could they be an alternative to CBDCs? We’ll have to wait and see.
Featured Images by NeONBRAND on Unsplash - Charts by TradingView
Dvision Network is extending a cross-chain bridge to Binance Smart Chain (BSC).
Dvision Network is Now on BSC
In a bid to offer its users multiple blockchain protocols to choose from,Dvision Networkannounced it is enabling the bridge between Ethereum mainnet and the Binance Smart Chain. This means that soon enough, DVI ERC-20 tokens can also be used in the form of a BEP-20 token with a multi-chain functionality aided by the bridge built in close cooperation with Curvegrid.
Dvision has already announced their readiness to launch on BSC in their blog post and also started a countdown in their website, which pinpoints to the official launch of the bridge on 20th May.
Notably, Dvision Network will partially migrate to Binance Smart Chain via the asset portal bridge “Looking Glass” developed on top of Curvegrid’s MultiBaas blockchain middleware to enable smooth and convenient cross-chain transfers of DVI in both BEP-20 and ERC-20 tokens.
Reasons to Extend to Binance Smart Chain
According to the team at Dvision Network, the project’s decision to integrate with Binance Smart Chain (BSC) largely stems from its vision and belief in BSC as an ecosystem that is committed to become a hotbed for the next generation of decentralized applications (dApps).
The project highlights the high scalability of the BSC ecosystem and its compatibility with smart contracts and Ethereum Virtual Machine programmability that boasts of high TPS (transactions per second), and rapid decentralized trading with minimal fees.
Moreover, the integration with BSC will facilitate advanced smart contract functionalities and immense computation for Dvision Network on top of Binance Smart Chain to enable users to tap the network’s low transaction fees and high throughput efficiency.
Truth be told, BSC is now considered to be the largest ecosystem in the blockchain industry and recently also eclipsed the Ethereum network in terms of daily transactions volume where it recorded 9 million in daily transactions compared to Ethereum’s all-time-high transactions of 1.5 million.
Compatibility with BSC and Ethereum
While Dvision Network is expanding to BSC, it is worthy of note that the BEP-20 DVI token will not replace the existing ERC-20 DVI token. Rather, the two token smart contracts (BSC and Ethereum Mainnet) will exist concurrently to power the interoperable bridge to move one token from one network to the other.
This way, Dvision will continue to thrive on Ethereum as an ERC-20 token and on Binance Smart Chain (BSC) as a BEP-20 token.
As mentioned earlier, the cross-chain bridge has been developed in close cooperation with the Curvegrid team which holds expertize in developing asset portal bridge enabled via the Looking Glass which is built on top of the MultiBaas that functions as a link between the Ethereum mainnet and BSC.
To make things easier to understand, the above dashboard is the user interface of the ERC-20 = BEP-20 transfer bridge that is primed to live roughly next week.
More information pertaining to guidelines for the use cases of the DVI on BSC will be shared with the Dvision Network community later, presumably right before the BEP-20 = ERC-20 DVI Bridge goes live on BSC.
About Dvision Network
Dvision Networkis a VR content ecosystem powered by blockchain technology. Dvision Network offers a wide range of VR-based products and services such as NFT-Market, Meta-Space, and Meta-City, among others.
The team at Dvision Network boasts of VR industry veterans and stalwarts that are committed to bringing the project’s vision to fruition. To know more about what’s in the pipeline for the Dvision Network community, check out the project’s roadmaphere.
Unless you have been living under a rock, you will have heard about Ethereum. It is a blockchain that has given Bitcoin a run for its money over the years. A decentralized protocol, meaning no interference from Governments, intermediaries or even the tax man, it allows developers to build their own open-source decentralized apps, with