A crypto protocol says that it delivers fast and feeless transactions that will boost blockchain adoption and open the door to micropayments. Stealth’s native cryptocurrency is based on a Bitcoin-type UTXO ledger that allows it to deliver multi-signature transactions, something that’s essential for custodial applications. The project aims to stand head and shoulders above what it describes as “hundreds of projects that fail to offer acceptable user experiences.” Presently, all of the major crypto networks suffer massive levels of congestion, hiking up costs for everyday users. Stealth aims to solve this problem with an efficient chain that improves Bitcoin’s throughput …

Tokenized cats have once again caused chaos on the Ethereum network after a nonfungible token (NFT) project from actress Mila Kunis sold out in 35 minutes. It echoes the launch of another cat-based NFT project, CryptoKitties, which infamously gummed up the Ethereum network in 2017. The launch of Stoner Cats was initially delayed by a day after the team found a bug in the underlying art layers. However, the second attempt was successful and sold out in just “35 meow-nutes,” according to a catastrophic pun from Stoner Cats. We SOLD OUT in 35 meow-nutes! If you got a TOKEn, drop …

DeFi has grown exceedingly fast — and when this happens, it’s inevitable that teething problems will emerge. Here, we talk to Piers Ridyard, the CEO of Radix. He tells us what his company is doing to address some of the main pain points in this sector — and the challenges that consumers and developers currently face. 1. Hello! Can you tell us about Radix? Absolutely. Radix is the first public decentralized network built specifically to serve decentralized finance (DeFi). This was necessary because with DeFi on Ethereum, building sucks — there have been over $285 million in hacks in the …

Ethereum appears to be extending its fee dominance over Bitcoin by roughly 10 times, with Bitcoin currently ranking just sixth by weekly fee generation. According to CryptoFees’ data for Sunday, the Bitcoin network had generated $725.7 million in daily fees on average over the past seven days and less than $400,000 worth of fees for the day. Ethereum tops the rankings by far, generating more than $6.1 million in daily fees on average for the week and more than $5 million for the day. As such, Ethereum’s daily fees beat out Bitcoin’s by 8.4 times for the past week and …

Amid the ongoing crackdown on cryptocurrency mining in China, mining new Bitcoin (BTC) continues getting easier as BTC has experienced another mining difficulty drop. On July 18, the Bitcoin network posted its fourth consecutive negative adjustment of mining difficulty, dropping 4.8%, according to data from Bitcoin explorer BTC.com. The latest mining difficulty adjustment occurred at block 691,488, reducing the difficulty rate from 14.4 trillion to 13.7 trillion, the lowest level recorded since June 2020. The difficulty metrics have now almost halved over the past two months, after reaching over 25 trillion on May 13. The latest Bitcoin mining adjustment follows …

The concerns voiced about the consensus mechanisms of Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) have played a part in the sideways price action both assets have seen over the past two months, opening the door for other competing projects to gain attention. One project that managed to overcome the sideways action in the market and rally to a new record high on July 10 is Constellation (DAG), a protocol that utilizes a directed acyclic graph architecture to achieve a consensus that is theoretically capable of infinite scaling. Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView shows that the price of DAG rallied …

Ernest & Young's (EY's) attempts to promote secure and private transactions over public blockchains at cheaper costs has culminated in the release of Nightfall 3. The company announced the news via a release on July 1, stating that Nightfall 3 combines zero-knowledge proofs with optimistic rollups — zk-Optimistic Rollups — to improve transaction efficiency on Ethereum. Indeed, zk-Rollups are one of the layer-two scaling solutions being developed to achieve scalability for networks like Ethereum, using a process of batched transfers “rolled” into one transaction. EY’s first contribution to ZK proofs was in April 2019, previously reported by Cointelegraph at the …

Elon Musk, the at-times controversial SpaceX founder and stop-and-go crypto supporter, voiced his support late Sunday for a set of major updates to the Dogecoin blockchain. The changes would drastically redesign the cryptocurrency’s software architecture and alter its tokenomics. The popular “joke crypto” appears to be gearing up to become a serious utility coin after a massive influx of capitalization earlier this year. It remains to be seen whether the updates Musk supports would be good or bad for the coin’s holders should they be adopted. In a Reddit thread Sunday, Dogecoin core developer Patrick Lodder summarized the proposed updates: …

The cost of using the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains is on the rapid decline, as evidenced by a 93%–95% reduction in average transaction fees over the past couple of months. Fees are paid to the miners who process transactions on a typical proof-of-work blockchain. The size of the fee depends on the size of the transaction in bytes and how many transactions a coin has gone through in the past (as these need to be checked every time a coin is moved). Supply and demand for space also dictate the size of a transaction fee since blockchains have limited capacity. …

The transaction fees of Bitcoin and Ethereum have slumped to six-month lows as the markets cool after the recent crypto downturn. According to BitInfoCharts, the average price of performing a transaction using Bitcoin has fallen from an early-April all-time high of $62.77 to around $7.20 — an 88% drop over just six weeks. The falling Bitcoin transaction fees appear to have been driven by a decline in overall market activity, with daily volumes evaporating from more than $67 billion on May 10 to $30 billion as of this writing, according to CoinGecko. The meteoric 2021 crypto bull run has seen …

In a blog post today, noncustodial wallet and decentralized exchange aggregator ShapeShift announced expanded functionality for its FOX rewards token designed to mitigate gas fees — or, as the project put it, turn the token into “the Gas-Guzzling Philanthropist of the DeFi Forest.” “FOX Tokens now have the added superpower of helping you pay for gas when you trade on ShapeShift,” reads the blog. “ShapeShift will now help cover your gas costs on trades by reimbursing you with FOX.” Users will be able to offset certain portions of their fees dependent on the amount of FOX that they hold, and …

Ethereum fees surged to record highs amid the recent crypto downturn, with users paying more than 2,000 gwei to execute transactions. Digital asset research firm Delphi Digital noted gas prices oscillated between 1,500 and 1,700 gwei for approximately one hour as DeFi liquidations drove “gas wars amongst liquidators and arbitrageurs.” In the May 19 Daily Gwei newsletter, Ethereum developer Anthony Sassano speculated the fee frenzy was likely triggered by on-chain margin traders racing to exit their leveraged positions: “The price was falling so fast that people were getting scared for their on-chain leveraged positions and were willing to pay anything …