It's been a big year for Ethereum — with The Merge heralding the switch from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake. But there are still issues looming for the network, issues significant to the health of the entire industry, with scalability chief among them. We were able to talk with Cartesi founder Erick de Moura about what his project is doing to tackle this issue and what steps need to be taken to refine DeFi and make good on its promise. You say The Merge was an important step but doesn't solve scalability issues. Why's that? Whoever had the chance to attend the …

Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution Arbitrum has seen a massive surge in activity since its Nitro update in August, having just clocked around 62% as many transactions as the Ethereum base layer. In a Nov. 1 report, crypto research firm Delphi Digital noted that as of the week ended Oct. 24, Arbitrum’s number of total transactions has increased by 550% since August, citing data from Dune Analytics. This week, @arbitrum had ~62% as many transactions as Ethereum L1. pic.twitter.com/DyuDNAjRGz — Delphi Digital (@Delphi_Digital) November 3, 2022 In an earlier Tweet, Delphi Digital initially phrased Arbitrum as accounting for 62% of all …

Celestia Foundation announced on Oct. 18 that it had raised $55 million in a funding round led by Bain Capital Crypto, Polychain Capital, Placeholder, Galaxy, Delphi Digital, Blockchain Capital, NFX, Protocol Labs, Figment, Maven 11, Spartan Group, FTX Ventures, Jump Crypto, and angel investors; Balaji Srinivasan, Eric Wall, and Jutta Steiner. Celestia is building a modular blockchain architecture with the hope of solving challenges inherent when deploying and scaling blockchains. The company suggested that it intends to build infrastructure that will make it easy for anyone with the technical know-how to deploy their own blockchain at minimal expense. The company …

Fan token company Chiliz has continued to expand its workforce despite the ongoing bear market, reflecting a growing trend in the fan token sector. The overall cryptocurrency market has seen a massive selloff in 2022, with the total market capitalization plummeting 60% since the beginning of the year. Some major crypto companies, including Coinbase and Gemini, had to cut their workforce by 10%-20% to maintain operations and continue serving their clients. While a wide number of crypto businesses have faced challenges amid the cryptocurrency winter, the fan token industry appears to have shown some resilience. Chiliz has increased the company’s …

A new layer-3 (L3) prototype aimed at further solving Ethereum’s scalability issues is set to be deployed for testing as soon as Q1 2023. zkSync, a provider of zero-knowledge blockchain solutions on Oct. 10 announced it is aiming to deploy a new EVM-compatible layer-3 prototype called “Pathfinder” on testnet early next year. zkSync is a L2 Ethereum scaling protocol designed to bring down network usage costs. It launched a 1.0 version back in June 2020, and is now gearing up for the launch of zkSync 2.0 later this month. In its most recent blog post the team explained that the …

Although cryptocurrencies are known for their volatility, they give traders various opportunities to pocket and reinvest the gains. Scalp trading is a crypto strategy that helps scalpers to take risks and make the most of frequent price fluctuations by observing price movements. This article will discuss scalping, how it works in cryptocurrency, the advantages and disadvantages of scalp trading in crypto, whether it is complicated and how much money you need to engage in it. What is scalp trading? Crypto scalp traders target small profits by placing multiple trades over a short period, leading to a considerable yield generated from …

While Ethereum-based layer-2 solutions have been focused on hyperscaling the network, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin believes layer 3s will serve a far different purpose — providing “customized functionality.” Buterin shared his thoughts in a Sept. 17 post, providing three “visions” of what layer 3s will be used for in the future. The Ethereum co-founder said a third layer on the blockchain makes sense only if it provides a different function to layer 2s, which have been used mainly to enhance scaling via Zero-Knowledge (ZK) Rollup technology. “A three-layer scaling architecture that consists of stacking the same scaling scheme on top …

Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution Arbitrum is set to undergo one of its most significant upgrades on Wednesday, set to increase transaction throughput, slash transaction fees and simplify cross-chain communication between Arbitrum and Ethereum. Referred to as the “Nitro” upgrade, Arbitrum reconfirmed the date of the upgrade in a Twitter post on Aug. 29, confirming that the upgrade will take effect on Aug. 31 at 10:30 AM Eastern Time, while noting a two to four hours of network downtime period is to be expected. Reminder — Arbitrum One is upgrading to Nitro on Wednesday 8/31. There will be 2-4 hours of …

The aggregate total value locked (TVL) in the crypto market measures the amount of funds deposited in smart contracts and this figure declined from $160 billion in mid-April to the current $70 billion, which is the lowest level since March 2021. While this 66% contraction is worrying, a great deal of data suggests that the decentralized finance (DeFi) sector is resilient. The issue with using TVL as a broad metric is the lack of detail that is not shown. For example, the number of DeFi transactions, growth of layer-2 scaling solutions and venture capital inflows in the ecosystem are not …

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has argued that crypto payments will once again “make sense” as transaction costs will soon fall to fractions of a cent due to layer-2 rollups. The Cointelegraph team currently on the ground at Korea Blockchain Week (KBW) quoted Buterin as stating that the final hurdle to getting transactions down to fractions of a cent at scale is blockchain data compression. He pointed to “solid work happening” with roll-ups at the moment such as Optimism’s layer-2 scaling solution for Ethereum, which has worked to get the size and cost of data in blockchain transactions down by introducing …

Zero-knowledge (ZK) rollup tech company StarkWare founder Eli Ben-Sasson says its new Recursive validity proofs could theoretically roll up as many as 60 million transactions into one on the Ethereum blockchain. The zkSTARK co-inventor made the comments to Cointelegraph during ETH Seoul on Aug. 7 after announcing the start of production of StarkWare’s new Recursive validity proof technology during a presentation. Speaking to Cointelegraph, Ben-Sasson said that recursive validity proofs could further scale up transaction throughput to a factor of at least ten compared to standard Validium scaling, noting that they’ve already been rolling up 600,000 mints of nonfungible tokens …

It’s weird to think that anyone could look forward to downturns in the crypto market, but that is precisely the position held by many developers and project creators who enjoy the low-pressure environment that exists during a bear market. As the saying goes, bear markets are for building, and now is one of the best times to survey the landscape to see which sectors of the market are most active in designing the platforms that will soar to new heights in the next bull cycle. Here’s a look at five sectors of the blockchain ecosystem that may present some of …