WhiteboardCrypto Newsletter - Feb 8

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

Ethereum raises gas limit

While this sounds like you’ll end up paying more gas, it actually means that Ethereum can handle more transactions now than it could before. Gas is what is the fee paid by users for each action they take on the blockchain, and the transactions fill blocks. Each block has a maximum number of actions it can include and that is calculated by the gas limit. So, an increase in the gas limit means that each block can hold more actions, helping Ethereum scale.

Learn more here.

Uniswap introduces hooks

Uniswap v4 is adding an upgrade called ‘hooks’ that allows developers to customize pools, swaps, fees, and LP positions. This might look like having dynamic fees for a pool based on usage, better automated liquidity, or unique swapping tools. V4 also introduces ‘flash accounting’ which means that complex transactions will cost less gas; in V3, every action in a pool cost unique gas, but flash accounting makes it so that the actions are grouped in a way that means you pay less gas and can do more things with less transfers.

Learn more here.

$30m funding round for… smart contracts on Bitcoin?

Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, originally included something called “OP_CAT” in the code that runs the Bitcoin blockchain, but ended up removing it because of the added risks. What does OP_CAT do? It adds a function to transactions that allows for “rules” about how those transactions will perform. Basically, it introduced programmability similary to what we see with smart contracts on Ethereum. A project called Taproot Wizards held a funding round that raised $30m to try to bring this OP_CAT code back. There are a lot of concerns about this from the Bitcoin community, and if there isn’t an agreed-upon outcome, there may be another hard fork of Bitcoin in the future.

Learn more here.

Thanks for reading and I hope you learned something!

- Theodore