Tech
Ethereum Learns of Potential Defector as ‘Supreme Court’ Questioned.
The blockchain industry remains mired in cryptocurrency winter, with the price of bitcoin bellwether (Bitcoin) down 11% over the past month. But there’s no slowing down in the race among technologists to position themselves for the future. Last week Rune Christensen of MakerDAO, a pioneer of decentralized finance, reported his openness to abandoning the Ethereum blockchain ecosystem for rival technology from Solana or Cosmos, while the project seeks its own dedicated blockchain. Separately, a debate has erupted over whether or not Ethereum should have its own “Supreme Court“to arbitrate disputes.
This week’s column focuses on blockchain “sequencers” – a crucial piece of the rapidly growing infrastructure for “layer-2” networks on Ethereum. Sequencers have been in the headlines recently, in part because they are sometimes considered single points of failure that could undermine the design principle of decentralization. Our Sam Kessler explains.
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SOLAN SEDUCTION: MakerDAO, one of the oldest and largest decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols. on the Ethereum blockchain, it is considering switching to its own dedicated blockchain. And instead of simply starting a new layer 2 network within the dominant Ethereum ecosystem, as crypto-friendly companies prefer Coinbase AND Consents have chosen to do: MakerDAO may want to ditch the tents altogether. Runa Christensenthe founder of MakerDAO, suggested last week that the project’s best solution might be to clone or “fork” the Solana blockchain – as it has the “most promising code base”. In a post on the governance forum, said Solana demonstrated “technical quality” and “resilience after going through the FTX explosion.” (Solana was famously promoted from the collapsed FTX cryptocurrency exchange the founder now in prison, Sam Bankman-Fried.) Christensen went so far as to suggest the Cosmos blockchain technology as the “other major contender.” Co-founder of Ethereum Vitalik Buterin He apparently wasn’t too happy, raising the question – in a post on a rival stablecoin project’s Discord channel – whether “MakerDAO is torpedoing itself in strange directions” and then selling about 500 of the project’s MKR tokens (worth $579,000) that it had held since 2020. (Separately, in what could be a salt moment in the wound, the credit card network Visa announced Tuesday that it had done so has expanded its stablecoin settlement capabilities to SolanaFurthermore Ethereum.) On Wednesday, Solana Co-founder of Labs Raj Gokal he told CoinDesk TV that the network was “battle-tested” and “ready for prime time.”
CODE VS. HUMANS: There is an oft-repeated mantra in blockchain ideology that “the code is law” – the idea that a network’s core programming should be sacrosanct, providing ultimate authority to resolve disputes even when grave emergencies or existential threats arise. Now, a top executive in the Ethereum blockchain ecosystem is explicitly embracing the idea that, in some extreme scenarios, humans, rather than hardcoding, could be the superior arbiters of justice. Alex Gluchowski, CEO of Matter Labsthe developer of a higher layer 2 network on Ethereum, floated the idea of a “Ethereum Supreme Court” to arbitrate disputes that escalate to the point that they threaten the integrity of the main blockchain. The system, which Gluchowski described on who they do it. get hacked or face some other type of security crisis. “Code is law, bugs = death,” Gluchowski wrote in a next comment to his post of September 2nd.
THE NEW FAN BASE: Just like the The Friend.tech fad is goneundermining some of the post-launch adoration of Coinbase’s new Basic layer 2 blockchain (as reported in last week’s blog The protocol), there’s a new kid in town: Airport finance. The platform, which presents itself as the “Basic ecosystem”world-class liquidity engine and hub,” quickly attracted more than $170 million in TVL or “total value locked,” helping to push the overall TVL of protocols on Base to more than 400 million dollars. The secret? According to the newsletter Wu Blockchainthe “native token” of the project, $AEROoffers liquidity mining rewards with an annualized return close to 1,000% without capitalization.” That’s a lot, even in cryptocurrency. The airport’s TVL has now exceeded – “upside down” in cryptocurrency jargon: $158 million more Velodromethe predecessor project of Aerodome, which is on the old layer-2 chain Optimism. Is it sustainable? “Money does not materialize out of thin air,” Wu Blockchain noted dryly, so “it is worth considering when this spiral might end.” (A basic pimple: On Tuesday the network suffered a “serious interruption” which lasted just over three hours, his biggest glitch since the launched last month.)
MetaMaskthe popular crypto wallet, introduced a new “Sell” feature. which “allows you to easily cash out your cryptocurrency into fiat currency,” in a post on Ethereum mainnet, with plans to soon expand to native gas tokens on layer 2 networks,” according to the company. Funds can be sent to a bank account or PayPal balance.
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At least four Ethereum liquid staking providers have agreed to a self-imposed limit under which they would never own more than 22% of the Ethereum staking market, Cointelegraph reportedquoting the story superphiz.eth. Noticeably absent from the list is the largest among them, Lido Finance, which invested 32% of the total ETH invested.