The difficulty bomb-delaying Gray Glacier hard fork went live on Ethereum on Thursday without a hitch, according to the network’s core devs including Ethereum Foundation’s Tim Beiko. The Sepolia testnet is also set to run through its Merge trial over the next few days and is the second last testnet to go through the trial before the official Merge. According to Etherscan, the Gray Glacier hard fork was initiated on block number 15050000 at roughly 6:54 am EST on Thursday. The hard fork will now delay the difficulty bomb by roughly 700,000 blocks or 100 days, giving devs until mid-October …

Anchorage Digital, a San-Francisco-based digital platform that owns the first federally chartered crypto bank, will open an option for institutions to stake Ethereum (ETH). This move comes in anticipation of the Ethereum network’s long-promised shift from proof-of-work (PoW) to the proof-of-stake (PoS) protocol. Anchorage announced on Tuesday its intention to introduce ETH staking — a practice of earning rewards for serving as a transaction validator in the Ethereum blockchain — for institutions. Diogo Mónica, co-founder and president of Anchorage Digital, called staking a win-win for institutional investors and the ecosystem: “By paving the way for institutions to stake their Ethereum, …

The TON Foundation, an organization developing the Telegram-initiated blockchain project, the TON blockchain, on Tuesday officially announced that TON miners have mined the final toncoin. "Tens of thousands of miners have mined the entire issuance of toncoins, which was about 5 billion tokens,” TON Foundation founding member and core developer Anatoly Makosov said in a statement to Cointelegraph. The last toncoin was mined on June 28, he noted. The end of toncoin mining marks a major milestone in TON's distribution, starting its new era as an entirely PoS blockchain. From now on, new toncoins will only enter circulation via PoS …

The recent downturn in the broader crypto landscape has highlighted several flaws inherent with proof-of-stake (PoS) networks and Web3 protocols. Mechanisms such as bonding/unbonding and lock-up periods were architecturally built into many PoS networks and liquidity pools with the intent of mitigating a total bank run and promoting decentralization. Yet, the inability to quickly withdraw funds has become a reason why many are losing money, including some of the most prominent crypto companies. At their most fundamental level, PoS networks like Polkadot, Solana and the ill-fated Terra rely on validators that verify transactions while securing the blockchain by keeping it …

Ethereum's token Ether (ETH) could be entering a "bull trap" zone after rebounding back above the $1,000 mark from 18-month lows of $885. Ether price paints a "rising wedge" The first among these indicators is a "rising wedge," a classic bearish reversal setup that forms after the price trends upward inside a range defined by two ascending but converging trendlines. The wedge setup gains further confirmation if the trading volume drops alongside the rising prices. Theoretically, a rising wedge resolves after the price breaks below its lower trendline and eyes a run-down toward the level at length equal to the …

A week after the major American crypto lending platform Celsius had to freeze the withdrawal option for its users, European Central Bank (ECB) president Christine Lagarde voiced her conviction on the necessity of tighter scrutiny over this part of the crypto market. During a testimony before the European Parliament on Monday, Lagarde expressed her thoughts not only about the looming inflation in Europe and around the globe but also about the increasing activities of crypto-asset staking and lending. In Lagarde’s opinion, this trend demands additional regulatory efforts from the European Union. Referring to the major regulatory package making its way …

The Sepolia testnet Beacon Chain has gone live, setting the stage for its merge dress rehearsal to give Ethereum network developers valuable technical insights. Upon merging with its dedicated Beacon Chain, the Sepolia testnet will begin reaching consensus using proof-of-stake (PoS) rather than proof-of-work (PoW), which will provide data on what may happen when the Ethereum mainnet performs its merge. The Ethereum Sepolia Beacon Chain has been deployed! The Merge is coming https://t.co/IuJBnFp0Xx — Crypto-Gucci.eth ᵍᵐ (@CryptoGucci) June 20, 2022 The exact date of the Sepolia merge has not been determined. Testnet merges are essential for Ethereum developers and independent …

Ether (ETH) price is down 37.5% in the last seven days and recent news reported that developers decided to postpone the network's migration to a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus. This upgrade is expected to end the dependency on proof-of-work (PoW) mining and the Merge scalability solution that has been pursued for the past six years. Competing smart contracts like BNB, Cardano (ADA) and Solana (SOL) outperformed Ether by 13% to 17% since June 8 even though there was a market-wide correction in the cryptocurrency sector. This suggests that the Ethereum network's issues also weighed on the ETH price. The "difficulty bomb," …

With more interest in blockchain development comes more technology platforms to develop on. The industry, which started with only a select handful of relevant blockchains in the 2010s, has grown to include hundreds of chains today. The sheer volume of platforms, although offering different benefits, has also shed light on a few unintended consequences, including assets, applications and users siloed in their native blockchains due to the lack of interoperability between platforms. Not surprisingly, ad-hoc solutions have emerged since the problem is far from new. Among them are bridges. In application, bridges store liquidity between two networks, taking wrapped assets …

Ethereum network developers have decided to delay the difficulty bomb, a major step leading up to the highly anticipated Merge upgrade for the layer-1 blockchain. They set the delay to two months in order to “be sure that we sanity check all the numbers before selecting an exact delay and deployment time,” according to core developer Tim Beiko in a Sunday tweet. In short, we agreed to the bomb delay. We were already over time, and want to be sure that we sanity check all the numbers before selecting an exact delay and deployment time, but we are aiming for …

The Carbon Bankroll Report was released on May 17 as a collaboration among the Climate Safe Lending Network, The Outdoor Policy Outfit and Bank FWD. The collaboration made it possible to calculate the emissions generated due to a company’s cash and investments, such as cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities. The report revealed that for several large companies, such as Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft and Salesforce, the cash and investments are their largest source of emissions. The energy consumption of the flagship proof-of-work (PoW) blockchain network, Bitcoin, has been a matter of debate in which the network and its participants, especially …

Ethereum's native token Ether (ETH) resumed its decline against Bitcoin (BTC) two days after a successful rehearsal of its proof-of-stake (PoS) algorithm on its longest-running testnet "Ropsten." The ETH/BTC fell by 2.5% to 0.0586 on June 10. The pair's downside move came as a part of a correction that had started a day before when it reached a local peak of 0.0598, hinting at weaker bullish sentiment despite the optimistic "Merge" update. Interestingly, the selloff occurred near ETH/BTC's 50-4H exponential moving average (50-4H EMA; the red wave) around 0.06. This technical resistance has been capping the pair's bullish attempts since …