Ankr, one of the industry’s fastest RPC providers and web3 developer toolsets, has announced that it will become a remote procedure call provider for Optimism. Optimism is an open-source layer-2 scaling solution for Ethereum that focuses on speed and efficient transactions across the network. It has caught the eyes of many in recent months, including Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin. This is a great example of why I'm so proud of @optimismPBC for adding non-token governance (the Citizen House). Optimism explicitly has goals *other* than just "make OP go up", and the only way to do that long-term is with explicit …
Natural disasters in the United States are becoming more prevalent, resulting in increasing costs, a lack of transparency between state and government organizations, and a slew of other issues impacting relief systems. The Pew Research Center found that the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) public assistance program spent 23% more on natural disasters between 2010 and 2019 than it did from 2000 to 2009. Data from Climate.gov further shows that 2021 was the third-costliest year in history for natural disasters in the U.S., totaling over $145 billion in damages from 20 weather-related incidents. But as disasters become more common and …
Interoperability-focused blockchain network Cosmos has dropped a new whitepaper proposing a revamped Cosmos Hub aimed at strengthening interoperability and security, along with key changes to its native ATOM token. The new Cosmos whitepaper was released on Monday at the Cosmoverse conference in Medellin, Colombia. The upgrades outlined in the whitepaper are still technically in “proposal” status but changes are expected to be made on-chain on Oct. 3. Cosmos is an ecosystem of blockchains designed to scale and interoperate with each other. Cosmos Hub was the first blockchain to be built on Cosmos, which initially served as an intermediary between other …
On Wednesday, crypto-fiat gateway payments provider Ramp announced it had raised a $52.7 million Series A funding round led by Balderton Capital, NFX, Galaxy Digital, Seedcamp, Firstminute Capital, and angel investors. Ramp allows its partner brands to offer crypto-enabled services, claiming that it takes mere hours for developers to integrate their decentralized applications, or dApps, with its software. It has over 400 partners, including Axie Infinity, Mozilla, Opera Browser, Dapper Labs, Aave, Argent, Trust Wallet, and Zerion. The firm has regulatory approval in the U.S., U.K., and Poland. Current uses of Ramp include purchasing cryptocurrencies for storage in wallets directly …
On Thursday, a proposal to fund decentralized autonomous organization zkDAO passed via treasury protocol BitDAO with close to 200 million votes cast. The proposal was authored by Matter Labs — the organization behind Ethereum scaling protocol zkSync — and Mirana Ventures. Utilizing zk-Rollups, zkSync and its family of technologies will build layer-2 infrastructure capable of returning succinct proofs to the Ethereum network without sending the entire data. The result, if implemented, would mean a vastly speedier network. Zero-knowledge-based solutions have attracted much attention in recent months due to recurrently high levels of congestion on Ethereum, as well as exuberant gas …