Welcome to The Protocol, CoinDesk's weekly round-up of the most important stories in cryptocurrency technology development. I'm Marc Hochstein, CoinDesk's Associate Editor for Features, Opinion, and Standards.
In this issue:
Ethereum Blobmob Staking on StarknetAvalanche's Big UpgradeL2 Team Crosses Beam ChainBeam Sui Hits Brief OutageBitcoin Bridged Trustless
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network news
Beam across the beam chain: What's good for L1 is also good for L2. This is the rating the teams behind zkSync and Polygon, two of the major layer 2 networks running on Ethereum, gave to Justin Drake's proposal to overhaul the $400 billion blockchain. , and rejected the proposal that the auxiliary network would be redundant. “That's really a misconception,” said Alex Gluchowski, CEO of Matter Labs, the development company behind zkSync. “The changes Justin announced are focused on the consensus layer, not the execution layer; they do not affect the execution layer.” In addition to incorporating ZK, Drake's proposal aims to reduce blocking times. This has the potential to reduce L2 transaction costs settled on Ethereum. Drake also said he would like to introduce single-slot finality. This means that blocks containing transaction data are finalized immediately and that information is persisted immediately. “All of this is great because we rely on Ethereum as a global payments layer,” Glukowski said. Polygon co-founder Brendan Farmer also told CoinDesk that he does not believe Beamchain will eliminate Layer 2. Rather, he said, the upgrade “improves the functionality of rollups.” But others in the crypto community are underwhelmed by the whole plan, especially as they don't think Drake's five-year timetable is ambitious enough and leaves enough room for central development chains like Solana to eat Ethereum's lunch. I was saddened by the fact that “read more
SUI Outage: Sui Network (SUI), a relatively new blockchain, experienced an unexpected two-hour outage on Thursday. The downtime was caused by a bug in the transaction scheduling logic, which caused the validator network to crash. The network said the issue has been resolved. Blockchain outages can occur for a variety of reasons, from 51% attacks to technical errors. A common error is when nodes (individual entities that process transactions) fail to synchronize with each other, causing the blockchain to go offline. Software bugs can also be an error vector, with outdated code potentially rendering processes in your network inoperable. read more
Staking on STARKNET: Starknet will be the first major rollup blockchain to run on Ethereum, allowing users to earn money by staking their tokens and validating transactions. (Metis was the first Layer 2 to do this, but on a much smaller scale and with a different kind of L2: “Optimium.”) Currently, at least 20,000 STRK tokens (about $12,000 at recent prices) Anyone who owns it can pledge that asset. Use it as collateral and earn rewards by validating transactions. Users with less than 20,000 STRK can delegate their tokens to validators to stake on their behalf. (Validators who act in bad faith or neglect their obligations may have their staked tokens forfeited.) Validators and delegators who wish to withdraw their staked tokens may You must wait 21 days to receive the rewards you earned from your subscription. Implementing staking on Starknet is part of a multi-phase plan. In this first phase, StarkWare, the company developing Starknet, studied staking habits on the network and from there encouraged validators to create additional blocks within the protocol and “proof” or verify them. Assess whether and how you can give them responsibility. read more
AVALANCHE BIG UPGRADE: Avalanche, the eighth largest Total Value Locked (TVL) blockchain, is undergoing a major technological transformation. The Avalanche9000 upgrade went live in a test network environment on Monday, bringing the changes one step closer to the main network. Avalanche9000 will be the biggest upgrade Avalanche has ever seen. It is designed to reduce the cost of sending transactions, operating validators, and building apps on the network, and its native token (AVAX) is the 11th largest cryptocurrency with a market capitalization of $16 billion. is. The foundation aims to attract developers to Avalanche and encourage users to create customized blockchains using its technology, known as Subnet. Somewhat confusingly, subnets are roughly similar to the Layer 2 (L2) networks that extend Ethereum and other blockchains, although they are now officially referred to as “L1” by the Avalanche community. (Avalanche's “primary network” corresponds to Layer 1 of the rest of the ecosystem and is considered a subnet.) The team hopes to deploy Avalanche9000 to mainnet by the end of the year. Among other changes, the 9000 enables a new type of validator that allows anyone to launch their own subnet. read more
One-way ticket: BitcoinOS, the smart contract project led by crypto industry OG Edan Yago, has executed what it claims is blockchain's first trustless bridge transaction. Using zero-knowledge cryptography, a nominal amount of Bitcoin (0.0002 BTC, approximately $19 plus change) is locked up on the main blockchain testnet, and tokens are minted on the Marlin Chain testnet, a layer 2 network. Evidence has been generated. BitcoinOS said that no oracles or administrators were involved. But for now, the Merlin chain is like Hotel California, or a cockroach motel for bridged BTC. “This is one half of the bridge demonstrating the ability to bridge assets from Bitcoin to EVM,” BitcoinOS said in a press release. “Once the other half of the bridge is completed, Merlin Chain users will be able to transfer their assets secured in Bitcoin back to the main chain by proving that their tokens have been burned.”
Ethereum blobmob
The use of binary large objects (BLOBs) is rapidly increasing on the Ethereum network, indicating that more users are adopting layer 2 scaling techniques to achieve faster and more affordable transactions. .
This year, Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade introduced BLOBs, which allow large amounts of data to be temporarily attached to transactions and deleted once the data has been verified. (BLOBs can be thought of as sidecars that temporarily travel with the bike, but are eventually detached and discarded.) Layer 2 protocols such as BASE, Arbitrum, and Optimism use BLOBs. bundle transactions and process them off. Add it to the chain and post it to the Ethereum main chain for validation without permanently gumming up your work.
The number of blobs posted to the network has consistently averaged over 21,000 this month, matching the amount of activity recorded in March, according to the Dune Analytics dashboard of Hildby, a pseudonymous data analyst. .
There is a fee for posting BLOBs, and the fee varies depending on network conditions. The fees are paid in Ethereum's native token Ether and are burned like regular transaction fees, removing the supply of ETH from the market and adding to the price of the coin.
In this way, the blob alleviates the much-discussed cannibalization of the backbone by L2.
The basic sending fee for blobs soared to $80 on Monday, the highest since March, and the average number of blobs posted to each Ethereum block increased to 4.3. More importantly, according to data from ultrasound.money, BLOB fees have consumed over 214 ETH ($723,000 worth) in the past seven days, making them the sixth largest source of fee consumption on the network over the same period. I am.
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money center
vibe shift
Isn't it just about fun and games?
bring in the big sun
“The reports are greatly exaggerated.”
calendar
December 4-5: India Blockchain Week, Bangalore 5-6: Emergence, Prague December. 9-12: Abu Dhabi Financial Week December. 11-12: AI Summit New York City December 11-14: Taipei Blockchain Week January 9-12, 2025: CES, Las Vegas January. 15-19: World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland 21-25 January: WAGMI Conference, Miami. 24-25: Bitcoin Adoption, Cape Town, South Africa. 30-31: PLAN B Forum, San Salvador, El Salvador. February. 1-6: Satoshi Roundtable, Dubai, February 19-20, 2025: ConsensusHK, Hong Kong. 23-24: NFT Paris February 23-March 2: ETHD Denver May 14-16: Consensus, Toronto. May 27-29: Bitcoin 2025, Las Vegas.
