Cryptocurrencies and the wider blockchain ecosystem are helping change the status quo of how we conduct our day-to-day lives. With these emerging technologies, Web3 is being ushered in as a permissionless and open innovation using middleware blockchain protocols. By doing so, they’re replacing middlemen software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies by capturing value at a greater level. Middleware protocols are by no means new. After all, Web2 is supported by middleware applications, the main one being HTTP. Middleware is what enables users to interact with each other and with applications in a computing environment. And with Web3, there are a variety of protocols …

Illia Polosukhin, the co-founder of NEAR protocol, thinks Ethereum development has a focus problem. He says engineers should be fixing crucial issues that will enable Web 3 to scale to billions of users. “We need simplicity of usage. We need easy programmability. We need composability that is natural to the applications. I don't see the current Ethereum evolutions targeting any of those goals.”, Polosukhin said in an exclusive interview with Cointelegraph. Polosukhin envisions a new version of the internet, or Web 3, in which the user will retain full ownership of their own data and assets. He believes this new …

Bitcoin price is still a ways from its $69,000 all-time high but this isn't stopping altcoins from moving toward new highs. Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView shows that since hitting a low of $0.13 on Dec. 4, the price of Harmony (ONE) has risen 163% to establish a new all-time high of $0.38 on Jan. 14 Three reasons for the growing strength of Harmony include an expanding ecosystem, the launch of multiple cross-chain bridges and developers interest in finding Ethereum network alternatives. ONE benefits from Harmony's $300 million ecosystem development fund One of the biggest boosts to the …

The layer one (L1) battle is starting to heat up again and multiple protocols have seen their token values rise in recent weeks as traders venture out to see what life is like outside of the Ethereum (ETH) network. One L1 protocol that has seen its token price climb to a new all-time high this week was NEAR, a community-run cloud computing platform focused on interoperability and lightning quick transaction speed. Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView show that, following a pullback that hit a low of $13.10 on Jan. 9, the price of NEAR climbed more than 50% …

The world at large has already made a transition to the internet, spending an increased amount of time online. However, the way the internet is currently set up, there will always be a gap in experiencing the full range of human connections on screen. While this might be true, the next version of the internet, the metaverse, has hinted towards several possibilities that exist only in the digital world, such as making experiences and “luxury” products available to the poor and promoting the concept of sustainability with more efficient ways to achieve one’s passions. These achievements may sound lofty, but …

The Ethereum ecosystem still has far more developers than rival networks, but they are catching up with a faster rate of growth. Ethereum competitors such as Polkadot, Solana, and Binance Smart Chain are growing faster in terms of development activity according to crypto research firm Electric Capital which released its findings on the blockchain development ecosystem in a new report on Jan. 6. It revealed that more than 4,000 monthly active open-source developers work on Ethereum — considerably more than the 680 who work on the Bitcoin network. Across all chains, the total monthly active developers measured was more than …

The Solana blockchain has suffered a third incident in just a few months that clogged the network and caused transactions to fail, with users debating whether it was caused by another DDos attack or if it was just network issues. The scale and nature of the incident is hard to ascertain, with Coinbase, Wu Blockchain and Redditors reporting there had been an incident causing the network to slow and transactions to fail. However Solana Labs co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko denied there had been a DDoS on this occasion. The latest incident comes less than a month after a previous attack which …

Digital asset curator Metaversal announced Tuesday that it has completed a $50 million funding round to further expand its investment capabilities in the nonfungible token (NFT) and metaverse sectors. The Series A funding round was co-led by investment firms CoinFund and Foxhaven, with additional participation from Collab+Currency, Dapper Labs, Digital Currency Group, Franklin Templeton, Rarible, Theta Blockchain Ventures, Galaxy Vision Hill and others. Metaversal said it will use the funding to expand its NFT-focused business, including acquiring high-profile digital collectibles and supporting projects that are being bootstrapped by its venture studio. The funding also enabled Metaversal to secure partnerships with …

According to data compiled by CryptoRank and Santiment, Cardano (ADA) was the most developed crypto on Github in 2021, with over 140,000 events. Rounding out the top three were Kusama and Polkadot at second and third places, respectively, with roughly the same number of events over the year. Cardano beat Ethereum's development activity by a wide margin, with the latter coming in at fourth place. Santiment defines a Github event as either creating an issue, creating a pull request, commenting on an issue or pull request, and forking/starring/watching a code repository, among others. The Most Developed Cryptos on @Github in …

The Graph Foundation has announced a $48 million funding grant to open-source API platform, The Guild in a bid to advance usability and performance of the networks subgraphs. Joining as a core network developer, The Guild will provide vast experience from its time managing and contributing the growth of components within the GraphQL ecosystem — a programming language initially established by Meta, formerly Facebook, in 2012 — to focus on enhancing subgraphs features such as "composition, analytics and mutations" on The Graph. The Graph, a Web3 indexing and querying infrastructure platform, has invested $248 million into their core developer network …

Developer Samuel Dobson announced via a series of tweets on Thursday night that he is stepping down as a Bitcoin Core maintainer after 3 years. His reason being that he “can no longer dedicate the time required, as I approach the end of my PhD.” I am officially stepping down as a maintainer of Bitcoin Core. Serving as the wallet maintainer for the past three years has been an absolute privilege, and I want to thank my incredibly generous sponsor John Pfeffer (@jlppfeffer) for his support throughout. /1 — Samuel Dobson (@meshcollider) December 9, 2021 As a Bitcoin Core wallet …

Solana's blockchain performance was reportedly hit by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack over the past 24 hours, however the network appears to have remained online throughout. A DDoS attack generally refers to a large number of coordinated devices, or a botnet overwhelming a network with fake traffic to take it offline. This wouldn't be the first time Solana has suffered this issue, with Cointelegraph reporting in September that the network suffered a 17-hour-outage due to mass botting activity for an initial DEX offering (IDO) on Solana-based DEX platform Raydium. The latest DDoS attack was highlighted by Solana-based NFT …