Web3 developers don’t appear to be fazed by the crypto bear market, with one Web3 platform suggesting they’re “more active than ever” — particularly on the Ethereum (ETH) network. In a new Q3 2022 report on Oct. 13 by Web3 development platform Alchemy, the company said that 2022 could be the “biggest year yet” for development on Ethereum. Around 36% of all smart contracts ever deployed and verified on the blockchain have been in 2022, a count of nearly 118,000 compared to the over 323,700 ever deployed, according to the report. This is despite the price of ETH falling by …

One of the core development teams behind the Ethereum (ETH) Merge, Prysmatic Labs, has been acquired by Offchain Labs, the developer of Ethereum layer-2 network Arbitrum. Announced in an Oct. 13 blog post by Offchain Labs, the deal's financial terms were not disclosed, but it was noted Prysmatic Labs chose to join Offchain Labs "for many reasons," but mainly because of the two companies' alignment in their core beliefs. Prysmatic Labs co-founder Raul Jordan said the move will "build a unified team stronger than the sum of its parts." "Merging with Offchain Labs made perfect sense to us as an …

nxyz, a Web3 platform enabling data infrastructure for blockchains, secured $40 million in Series A funding led by venture firm Paradigm with additional participation from Coinbase Ventures, Greylock Partners and Sequoia Capital. Angel investors also participated, including Balaji Srinivasan, Jaynti Kanani, Jing Wang, Packy McCormick, Surojit Chatterjee and Ryan Selkis. According to nxyz, the funds raised will be used to expand the company’s team, build support across emerging use cases, and expand across different chains. The company will focus on expanding its team globally, across engineering and partnerships, and also onboard several more blockchains in the upcoming months. The Web3 …

Stellar Development Foundation (SDF), the non-profit organization supporting the development of the Stellar network, has launched a new funding initiative to encourage developers to build on the Soroban smart contract platform, which officially went live on Futurenet Tuesday. Soroban brings Turing-complete smart contracts to the Stellar blockchain, enabling developers to build new financial services rails on the network, SDF said. Tomer Weller, SDF’s vice president of technology strategy, said Soroban was developed to overcome the “friction” of other blockchain networks. In an emailed response to Cointelegraph, Weller further explained: "When we looked at what was out there in the market …

The Ethereum network brought smart contracts into the blockchain space, making concepts like decentralized finance (DeFi) possible. Smart contracts can automatically execute processes once certain conditions have been met. Along with this new technology, a new coding language was developed called Solidity. As the blockchain industry continues to grow and new blockchain networks emerge, additional programming languages are being brought into the space, notably Vyper and Scrypto. Programming languages are a set of rules that convert strings of text and numbers into machine-readable code. In simple terms, programming languages enable computers to understand instructions that are input by human beings. …

According to a recent Twitter post by 0xngmi, the anonymous creator of decentralized finance (DeFi) project aggregator Defi Llama, the smart contract code for a novel nonfungible tokens (NFT) borrowing and lending protocol dubbed 'LlamaLend" is near completion. The protocol aims to solve the problem of NFT holders needing to obtain liquidity when holding their digital collectibles and primarily targets small NFT collections. The project's LlamaLend GitHub page explains: "If a holder needs liquid money because a good opportunity has appeared, all they can do [now] is just sell their NFTs." As per its GitHub page, LlamaLend will allow users …

BNB Chain, the blockchain of the Binance crypto exchange and Binance Coin (BNB), launched its latest development-focused initiative, which targets European developers to build and scale decentralized applications (DApps) on the network. The three-week virtual “innovation incubator” program focuses on Web3 startups with at least one key member based in the European Union (EU). Those accepted into the program receive mentorship from industry experts and BNB Chain specialists on tokenomics design and Web3 marketing strategies. The incubator will host exclusive meet-ups in cities across the continent, such as Lisbon, Paris, Berlin, Barcelona, Warsaw and London. According to Zoe Wei, the …

The idea of Web3 has begun to take hold among business web developers in recent years. Modern business models emphasize the significance of moving beyond Web2 and discovering new ways to manage, organize and create meaning from the enormous volume of user-generated data, even though ideas about the current developments of the Web are still hazy and unclear. The Semantic Web is frequently linked to the concept of Web3 as business strategies and web developers envisioned it. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, initially proposed the idea in 1999. He saw the potential for enabling robots to …

Decentralized knowledge protocol Golden has closed a $40 million funding round led by venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z, with additional participation from Protocol Labs, OpenSea Ventures and the founders of Solana, Dropbox, Postmates and Twitch, among others. In addition to leading the Series B funding round, Andreessen Horowitz’s general partner Ali Yahya will join Golden’s board alongside a16z cofounder Marc Andreessen. The funding gives Golden additional resources to continue building its protocol, which is designed to standardize the discovery and verification of knowledge in the era of Web3. Specifically, Golden is developing a decentralized interface that incentivizes collecting and …

Solana ecosystem developer Coral has closed a $20 million investment round backed by some of crypto’s biggest venture funds, setting the stage for launching its new interactive wallet later this month. The investment round was co-led by FTX Ventures and Jump Capital with additional participation from Multicoin Capital, Anagram, K5 Global and other investors, Coral announced Wednesday. Coral said it would use the funds to build internal capacity and launch its flagship product, Backpack. Backpack is said to be an interactive wallet that delivers “crypto-native experiences” through so-called executable nonfungible tokens, or xNFTs. Coral describes xNFTs as analogous to mini-programs …

Since the founding of Ethereum in 2015, an animating question that plagued the community was answered at exactly 06:42:59 UTC on Thursday, Sept. 15, 2022. Ethereum, the technological layer where a new class of applications and self-organizing organizations are being built, eliminated its reliance on an energy-intensive consensus mechanism called proof-of-work (PoW) to a more sustainable and secure consensus mechanism called proof-of-stake (PoS). In what has been described as one of the most significant milestones in blockchain history, the Merge has set the template for how Ethereum will continue to be the most powerful, most used, most credibly neutral, and …

Crypto mixer Tornado Cash has returned to the software development platform GitHub after several weeks of being banned on the website. Ethereum developer Preston Van Loon took to Twitter on Thursday to report that GitHub has partly unbanned the Tornado Cash organization and contributors on their platform. The developer suggested that Tornado Cash’s code repositories are now in read-only mode, which means that GitHub is yet to restore full functionality. “But that is progress from an outright ban. I still encourage GitHub to reverse all actions and return the repositories to their former status,” Van Loon stated. According to GitHub …