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The Protocol: Solana’s Allure for Devs; Avalanche’s Big Upgrade

Published

2 месяца ago

18 декабря, 2024

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:

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.

Network News

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

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.

Feb. 1-6: Satoshi Roundtable, Dubai

Feb. 19-20, 2025: ConsensusHK, Hong Kong.

Feb. 23-24: NFT Paris

Feb 23-March 2: ETHDenver

March 18-19: Digital Asset Summit, London

May 14-16: Consensus, Toronto.

May 27-29: Bitcoin 2025, Las Vegas.

Uncategorized

Solana Plunges 14%, XRP, Dogecoin Down 8% as Crypto Market Sell-Off Worsens

Published

2 часа ago

25 февраля, 2025

admin

Crypto majors slid as much as 14% in the past 24 hours as a Monday sell-off extended into Tuesday amid generally bearish sentiment and the lack of actionable catalysts that may help support the market.

Solana’s SOL fell 14% — bringing 7-day losses to over 20% — while dogecoin (DOGE), xrp (XRP) and ether (ETH) fell more than 8%. Bitcoin lost the $92,000 level for the first time since late November, threatening a potential downside break of the multi-week consolidation between $90,000 and $110,000

Overall market capitalization fell 6.6%, while the broad-based CoinDesk 20 (CD20), a liquid index tracking the largest tokens, dropped more than 7%.

Traders said the current bearish sentiment could be overblown and macroeconomic decisions were key to support market growth.

“Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana shouldn’t be trading this far below their all time highs,” Jeff Mei, COO at crypto exchange BTSE, said in a Telegram message. “On the U.S. side, inflation concerns and a pause in Fed rate cuts have kept markets down, but this could change as weak economic data released last week could spur Fed officials to take further action.”

Augustine Fan, head of insights at SignalPlus, mirrored the sentiment: “The ‘slowdown’ narrative will likely dominate the narrative in the near term, with stocks and bonds trading back in positive tandem with correlation nearing the highs of the past 12 months.”

Fan explained that the «bad data is now good» once again, as markets refocus their attention on Fed eases, and provide tailwinds to both gold and BTC in the near future.

Data released early this month showed, the widely-watched Consumer Price Index (CPI) surged 0.5% month-over-month in January, much more than the expected 0.3% gain, sending investors to prefer cash positions or risk-off bets until clear signs of a government intervention to boost the economy.

The U.S. CPI measures the average change over time in the prices paid by urban consumers for a market basket of consumer goods and services. Changes in CPI readings tend to impact bitcoin, and the broader crypto market, as investors view the asset class as a hedge against inflation.

Uncategorized

FTT Briefly Spikes After Sam Bankman-Fried Tweets for First Time in 2 Years

Published

3 часа ago

25 февраля, 2025

admin

The token associated with defunct crypto exchange FTX surged briefly Monday night after Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder and onetime CEO of the platform tweeted for the first time in two years.

Bankman-Fried, who was convicted on seven different counts of fraud and conspiracy in November 2023, is serving out a 25-year prison sentence. He’s currently detained in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn as his lawyers work through an appeal of his conviction. Still, his account on X (formerly Twitter) posted a 10-tweet thread about layoffs, seemingly referencing Elon Musk’s push to have federal employees email their work activities from the past week or risk resignations.

«I have a lot of sympathy for [government] employees: I, too, have not checked my email for the past few (hundred) days,» his thread began. FTT, the token associated with FTX, briefly spiked from roughly $1.55 to $2.07 after his tweets before falling back to around $1.78, according to CoinGecko.

Bankman-Fried does not have direct access to sites like X or email, but can send messages through the Corrlinks system, which lets prisoners in the U.S. communicate with others, a person familiar confirmed.

It was not immediately clear who might be posting the tweets on Bankman-Fried’s behalf.

Over the weekend, Musk, who according to court documents is a special government employee, tweeted that federal employees would have to tell the Office of Personnel and Management what they did last week, with a non-response being considered a resignation. While some federal agency heads or other leaders told their employees not to respond, others said their employees should reply.

It’s another step in Musk’s efforts to lay off broad swaths of the federal workforce at the behest of U.S. President Donald Trump.

Bankman-Fried’s tweets referenced layoffs and detailed circumstances that might cause an employer to fire employees.

«It isn’t the employee’s fault, when that happens. It isn’t their fault if their employer doesn’t really know what to do with them, or doesn’t really have anyone to effectively manage them. It isn’t their fault if internal politics lead their department to lose its way,» the thread said.

After Bankman-Fried’s tweets, another X account claiming without evidence to be him linked a contract address, claiming he received a pardon from Trump and now works for DOGE, the government entity that may or may not be led by Elon Musk. The linked token saw some immediate trading volume, according to on-chain data. The new, seemingly fake account has a label saying «it is a government or multilateral organization account,» suggesting a government agency account may have been compromised and renamed.

UPDATE (Feb. 25, 2025, 04:05 UTC): Adds information about SBF_DOGE account.

Uncategorized

Pump.Fun’s Rumored AMM Pivot a ‘Strategic Miscalculation,’ Says Raydium

Published

4 часа ago

25 февраля, 2025

admin

Solana’s dominant automated market maker (AMM) Raydium hit back Monday on rumors that major volume driver Pump.Fun was preparing to launch its own AMM.

Abandoning Raydium whole hog would be a «strategic miscalculation» for the massively popular — and profitable — memecoin factory, core contributor InfraRAY said in a post on X. He cast doubt on the notion that Pump.Fun could replicate its success if it swaps Raydium out for in-house trading infrastructure.

Token investors dumped RAY en-masse this weekend after hawkeyed observers noticed Pump.Fun was apparently testing its own AMM, presumably with the intent to replace Raydium’s longstanding liquidity pools as its platform of choice. Such a move would shake up the economics of decentralized token trading on Solana.

Right now, Raydium, the chain’s largest AMM platform, captures trading fees generated by Pump.Fun memecoins that «graduated» from the launchpad to its own pools. The arrangement — in place since Pump.Fun’s earliest days — has been a financial boon for Raydium

But it also leaves Pump.Fun out of the long-term upside of the tokens its users create. That’s not to say it’s making nothing: Pump.Fun has amassed half a billion dollars on the fees it collects from early-stage token launches, one of crypto’s grandest warchest.

Raydium is currently generating over $1 million in fees every day from trading across all its liquidity pools, not just those of Pump.fun tokens. That said, over 30% of Raydium’s daily trading volume comes from Pump.fun tokens, according to a Dune dashboard, meaning a good share of its fees could dry up if Pump.Fun switches away.

«100%, revenue hit is real,» InfraRAY said in a message to CoinDesk. But he cautioned that the market’s 30% haircut on RAY tokens was «overblown» and partially due to SOL’s own weakness.

He said any pivot to a new AMM could hit myriad issues: inadequate supporting infrastructure, low demand for migrated tokens, a flop on volume at launch.

«I think that’s a real risk they are overlooking but I could be wrong,» InfraRAY said.

Pump.Fun co-founder Alon Cohen declined to comment.