WhiteboardCrypto Newsletter - Feb 10

Welcome back to this week's edition of our WhiteboardCrypto Newsletter!

Delphi Creative Released 2023 State of Bitcoin Report

If you’ve been in the crypto space for a year or more, you know that bitcoin as an asset and Bitcoin as a blockchain have done exceedingly well in that time period. Mostly, this was thanks to Ordinals, the on-chain NFTs exclusive to the Bitcoin network. But it also had a lot to do with innovations in scaling the Bitcoin network through layer 2s, similar to what we see on Ethereum. You can read more interesting insights into the State of Bitcoin in Delphi’s report.

Experimental Token Standard ERC-404

ERC is the code for a type of token in the Ethereum ecosystem. Most NFTs are ERC-721, and most tokens, like MATIC, are ERC-20. The difference is that NFTs are unique, whereas tokens are not (one MATIC is equal to another MATIC, whereas one BoredApe is not the same as another BoredApe). ERC-404 is not an official token standard but purely experimental, developed by the team behind the NFT collection Pandora. Its purpose is to allow NFTs to be fractionalized, so holders can trade unique trait sets, and more. If successful, this could radically change the landscape of NFT trading, especially in the use-case of games.

Learn more here.

Next Ethereum Upgrade Scheduled

The Dencun upgrade for the Ethereum mainnet has been scheduled by the devs for March 13. This upgrade introduces a concept called “proto-danksharding”, which, most simply, replaces a function that is really costly on gas (calldata) with the easier-to-process Binary Large Objects (known as blobs - yes, we like that word too). Blobs store data temporarily and increase data availability, one of the main issues of blockchain scalability. This upgrade will lower gas fees, mostly on layer 2s. Any coders out there will also be interested in the Ethereum Foundation launching an educational program for prospective core contributors and a 2024 grants round.

Learn more here.

Solana Network Was Out… Again

The Solana blockchain is notorious for having repeated outages. But, it had been doing really well, until this week where it had its first outage since Feb 2023. The network was down for about five hours on Feb. 6, and was caused by an infinite loop bug known to developers after a recent upgrade. It turns out the bug had multiple triggers and the devs had managed to deploy a fix for only one before it caused the outage. A single bug can cause the entire Solana ecosystem to go down because it has a “single client system”, as opposed to a “multi client system”. A single client system means there is one version of the software that runs the blockchain, instead of multiples, so when there is a bug, the whole network goes down. Solana has a single client, Ethereum has multiple clients, which is why it goes down much less frequently.

Learn more here.

Privacy-focused Blockchains Take Another Hit

Binance will delist Monero starting on Feb 20. Monero is one of the largest privacy-focused blockchains so it has gained a lot of angst from regulators, which is probably why multiple exchanges have chosen to delist it. After this, it will still be available on some less-popular exchanges, like Kraken and Poloniex, but this will be a big hit to the accessibility of the technology. The native token, XMR, dropped ~15% on the news, but has since recovered by about half.

Learn more here.

More Utility for ENS Domains

The Ethereum Name Service has provided ETH-based usernames and domain names, making wallet addresses more readable and functional, for a few years now. This week, it announced a collaboration with GoDaddy, a popular non-blockchain-based domain service, to link standard domains to ENS names. This won’t incur any additional cost or technical expertise, as it’s apparently quite easy to enable on GoDaddy’s user portal.

Learn more here.

Thanks for reading and I hope you learned something!

- Theodore