The top cryptocurrencies by market capitalization keep changing over time as the industry matures. Solana (SOL) has seen its value skyrocket so far this year and has been consistently processing over 2,500 transactions per second. The cryptocurrency’s price, according to TradingView data, is up nearly 13,000% year-to-date as the year started with SOL trading slightly below $2. Solana is now changing hands-on exchanges for around $240. Solana is a blockchain platform that aims to achieve high transaction speeds at a low cost without sacrificing decentralization. To do so, it relies on a number of unique features, including a “proof-of-history” mechanism. …

Nonfungible token-based projects like Loot and The N Project have helped spike interest in the Metaverse to an all-time high, raising hopes again that blockchain will finally break through to the masses. Will it, or is history doomed to repeat itself? The problem is that the very things that capture the imagination of the public are the very same things that ultimately degrade the performance of the underlying platforms and raise barriers to entry higher than ever. In this article, I’ll explore the fundamental issues responsible for creating this dynamic with the goal of helping address these issues once and …

High transaction fees have been a persistent thorn in the side of investors and blockchain projects since at least 2014 when Ethereum Network co-creator Vitalik Buterin stated in reference to Bitcoin, “The ‘Internet of Money’ should not cost $0.05 per transaction. It's kind of absurd.” Fast forward to November 2021 and the simple act of approving a token so that it can be transacted on Uniswap can cost as much as $50 worth in Ether (ETH) depending on the time of day. Even layer-2 solutions, which were billed as the protocols that would help solve the fee issue, have been …

The Ethereum network has seen its first consecutive week of negative supply issuance as bubbling markets drive persistently high transaction fees. With the highly anticipated London upgrade introducing a burn mechanism into Ethereum's fee market in early August, a small quantity of Ether has since been destroyed with every transaction executed on the network. With gas prices sustaining at high levels, Ethereum has seen seven consecutive days of deflationary issuance for the network, meaning that more ETH has been removed from supply than created through mining.In order for Ethereum to consistently produce deflationary blocks, gas prices must consistently remain roughly …

Amid the ongoing rally of Binance’s native token, Binance Coin (BNB), the developers of Binance Smart Chain (BSC) have proposed more measures to maintain the token’s deflationary model and improve its intrinsic value. According to a new Binance Evolution Protocol, BEP-95, BSC developers are considering introducing a real-time burning mechanism for a portion of gas fees to reduce BNB supply and drive BNB value higher by increasing the demand. According to the BEP, BNB holders will decide how to dispatch the BSC gas reward. Releasing the proposal on Friday, BSC developers noted that the new BEP might decrease the total …

Nonfungible token (NFT) marketplace Rarible has introduced a new functionality titled “lazy minting” that promises users the ability to create nonfungible tokens at zero cost — all while enhancing environmental sustainability on the platform. Instead of the traditional method whereby data is stored on the blockchain immediately after minting, Rarible announced Monday that, under its new program, NFTs are “minted not at the moment of creation, but at the moment of purchase. It’s the buyer who pays the gas fees when purchasing the item.” In this case, data will be stored on a decentralized peer-to-peer storage system called IPFS. Amid …

FTX.US’s nonfungible token (NFT) marketplace has expanded support to the Solana blockchain, enabling users to trade, deposit and withdraw NFTs that conform to the Metaplex token standard. The United States registered branch of FTX announced the expanded functionality on Tuesday, revealing the marketplace also plans to support Ethereum-based tokens in the near future. The marketplace is open to both U.S. and non-U.S. customers from a long list of jurisdictions, however, New York residents are unable to sign up for the platform. Brett Harrison, president of FTX.US, said that the firm is looking to provide “simpler, safer and easier tools” for …

Whether it’s baseball players or shiny Pokemon cards, collectibles have been a cultural mainstay in human behavior since the Renaissance. Memorabilia from famous films or items of clothing worn by a celebrity can be auctioned and sold for eye-watering amounts. Take the prototype Batmobile from the 1960s Batman TV show, it was sold for $4.2 million. With collectibles, the concept itself is simple: An item has value based on its scarcity. The less of it there is, the more it’s worth. It is this concept that is the driving principle behind the explosive growth of nonfungible tokens (NFTs). Largely bought …

Abracadabra.Money’s stablecoin, Magic Internet Money (MIM), has surged past a $1-billion total supply this month as the project works to provide competition to MakerDAO. Abracadabra is a cross-chain stablecoin lending protocol that operates on Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain (BSC), Fantom, Avalanche and Arbitrum. Along with MIM, the project also has a SPELL governance token that can be staked on the protocol. The project describes itself as a “spell book” that enables users to provide collateral via interest-bearing tokens, such as yvUSDC and xSUSHI, and to borrow the MIM stablecoin against their tokens. “To reverse the spell, the caster simply returns …

A crypto hodler is outraged after allegedly copping a $954,135 fee from centralized exchange FTX. The trader claims the fee was charged over a mistaken deposit they believe was the exchange’s fault. On Wednesday, the Rekt blog published screenshots of correspondence that suggest the problems began when the customer deposited around $6.3 million in USDP, the stablecoin token for decentralized finance borrowing platform Unit Protocol, in late September. Unfortunately, the Paxos stablecoin has also rebranded to USDP and the exchange changed the PAX ticker to USDP in late August. So, the user apparently deposited $6.3 million of unsupported USDP tokens …

High transaction costs have been a thorn in the side of investors and developers for more than a decade and the issue became worse in 2021 after the emergence of decentralized finance (DeFi) and nonfungible tokens (NFT) led to record-high levels of activity across the cryptocurrency ecosystem. Since the completion of Ethereum's London hard fork, cross-chain bridges and layer-2 solutions have been revised as options for mitigating the high fees on the Ethereum network. In the past two weeks, Celer, a layer-two scaling solution that utilizes off-chain transaction handling to help increase the throughput capacity of its network, has seen …

Crypto exchange Bitfinex completed a highly consequential transaction on Sept. 27 when sending $100,000 of the stablecoin Tether (USDT) to the layer-2 subsidiary platform DeversiFi. For reasons unknown, the exchange paid 7,626 ETH, equivalent to $23.7 million, marking quite possibly the largest gas fee ever recorded on the Ethereum blockchain. According to blockchain data from EtherScan, the deposit transaction was initiated at 11:10 UTC this morning from Bitfinex’s second-largest wallet, via a second address, to the wallet of DeversiFi. The transaction carried an “erroneously high gas fee”, even though DeversiFi promotes a service to “avoid gas costs and frustration, saving …