Polkadot has become the latest Ethereum competitor to launch a decentralized finance alliance. Announced on Dec. 3, the alliance aims to overcome the decentralized nature of the Polkadot ecosystem, providing a platform for its community to discuss using the Polkadot Network and its underlying Substrate technology stack for DeFi. Oracle network Chainlink is among the alliance’s founding members. The company’s global head of business development, Dan Kochis, said: “Chainlink is excited to help steer the direction of Polkadot's growing ecosystem of decentralized financial applications. By promoting developer best practices for DeFi protocols, the Polkadot ecosystem can become stronger than ever.” …

How does a hosting provider tackle the dangers of running your own node? Allnodes can offer an affordable alternative to doing everything yourself, reducing the risks of financial penalties and slashing. The company offers an intuitive user interface, and two easy-to-understand hosting plans to ensure that customers can make an informed decision. This is coupled with support teams who are online 24/7, all year round, and free node maintenance with instant and unlimited upgrades. Validator keys are given multi-level protection to prevent them from being stolen and lost, and all of this is achieved while ensuring that only users have …

Crypto data aggregator Messari believes that roll-ups will beat out layer-one solutions in the race to scale Ethereum. Although Eth2’s beacon chain genesis successfully took place on Dec. 1, analysts predict the upgrades spanning the Ethereum 2.0 overhaul will not be completed until 2022. As such, Messari recently asserted the wait for Eth2’s completion “leaves an opportunity for other low-fee, low-latency competitors to eat into Ethereum’s monopoly.” “Those snake-bitten by rising fees will inevitably explore alternative platforms with better transaction throughput and lower fees if they haven’t already.” Despite praising efforts from Near, Cosmos and Solana to build interoperable bridges …

Ethereum 2.0 launched its Beacon Chain on Tuesday, marking the project's transition to a proof-of-stake, or PoS, mining algorithm. With Phase 0 now in the rearview mirror, the founder and CEO of MyEtherWallet, Kosala Hemachandra, recently explained the next hurdle for Eth2. “I think the question should be, what is not the next hurdle for ETH 2.0,” Hemachandra told Cointelegraph, adding: “Basically, after the beacon chain launch, Ethereum will focus on phase 1 specs. It will go through a lot of iterations similar to phase 0 and tons of bug fixes. It is hard to define a specific issue as …

Following the successful launch of Ethereum 2.0 Phase 0 — the first concrete step in building the next iteration of the protocol — Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published an updated roadmap of what comes next for the project. The current development of Ethereum 2.0 is generally divided into phases. Phase 0 is the barebones Beacon Chain that enables staking but has no effect on the application layer. Phase 1 introduces sharding of data, increasing storage capabilities without directly influencing application performance. Finally, Phase 2 fully introduces transaction sharding and enables the promised thousands of transactions per second of throughput. Buterin …

How does this ecosystem work? There are three key roles within the Stkr ecosystem. Providers deliver the computing resources that drive the Eth2 nodes — and they pay insurance that acts as a guarantee against poor hardware performance. These funds will be used to compensate stakers if there is an outage, but providers also stand to gain rewards if their infrastructure runs without a hitch. By building a good reputation, they are prioritized whenever new staking funds need to be allocated. Requesters, otherwise known as stakers, are those who want to lock up their ETH without hosting a node themselves. …

Withdrawal contracts for Ether staked on Ethereum 2.0 could become available as early as Q1 2021 allowing decentralized Eth2 staking service Rocket Pool to launch. While Phase 0 of Eth2’s roll-out was launched with its Beacon Chain on Dec. 1, the 900,000 Ether deposited by stakers will not be available for withdrawal until Phase 1.5 — which is expected to arrive around early 2022. Last week, Ethereum developer Danny Ryan introduced a new proposal that would allow for “Simple (but expressive) withdrawal contracts to be written today”. Should the proposal be implemented, he estimates that “80% of withdrawal contract use …

After years of delays and changes in plans, Ethereum 2.0 is finally approaching release on Dec. 1. Ethereum 2.0 Phase 0 is introducing the long-awaited mechanism of staking to the smart contract platform, in addition to launching the skeleton of a future Eth2 blockchain, the Beacon Chain. Progress in 2020 steadily picked up pace as more and more testnets were introduced and iterated on. While they were successful in aggregate, they were not exempt from problems related to synchronization and block production. Part of those issues came from the challenge of keeping the same pace between seven different clients, or …

U.S. digital currency exchange Coinbase has outlined plans for supporting Ethereum 2.0 staking rewards — possibly setting the stage for even wider adoption of the smart contract platform. In an official blog post, Coinbase says it plans to roll out Eth2 staking, trading and conversion services starting in early 2021. Once Eth2 is supported, existing Coinbase customers will be able to convert their Ether (ETH) tokens to ETH2 and earn staking rewards. The company said: "While staked ETH2 tokens remain locked on the beacon chain, Coinbase will also enable trading between ETH2, ETH, and all other supported currencies providing liquidity …

On June 19, 2020, Ethereum increased its gas limit by 25% from 10 million to 12.5 million. In no less than two days, this newfound capacity was used up, bringing the block use right back to 100%. This cat-and-mouse game between a higher gas limit and a surge in use has occurred the last three times Ethereum has raised its gas limit. There is evidently a genuine market demand to use Ethereum, but the gas prices are prohibitively expensive for most use cases. This is where Ethereum 2.0 comes in. What does Ethereum 2.0 bring to the table? In a …

A blockchain focused on decentralization has added 105 independent validators to its mainnet, with hundreds more to follow next month. More than 440 validators are set to be involved with Free TON by the end of the year, making it one of the largest and most scalable proof-of-stake networks that the industry has to offer. Free TON’s goal is to achieve “true decentralization.” At present, the blockchain’s multi-threaded architecture delivers an average block time of just 0.2 seconds, far faster than what’s currently offered by rivals. With 440 validators and a 0.2-second block time on the horizon, Free TON’s members …

Initial token sale platform CoinList has revealed that more than 6,700 investors participated in Oasis Network’s “ROSE Garden” token drop. The ROSE Garden token drop was designed to ensure an equitable token distribution and attract robust participation from stakers for the launch of the project’s mainnet. It allowed investors to lock up to 2,000 USDT or USDC before Nov. 18 for a period of one month in exchange for Oasis’ native ROSE token. Oasis is a privacy-focused network designed to support decentralized applications and confidential computing processes. The ROSE Garden has now amassed a total value locked of more than …