Ethereum’s second-layer growth is all about the rollup race |
Breaking down Ethereum’s evolution and its impact on crypto markets Was this newsletter forwarded to you?Sign up here. |
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As of October 11, 2022 @ 21:32:21 UTC. |
Welcome to Valid Points! I’m on the ground this week in Bogotá, Colombia, at Devcon – a massive gathering of Ethereum builders and community members, and the first major Ethereum event to follow the Merge. It’s the first time the Ethereum Foundation has held the conference in three years, and speakers have repeatedly mentioned how much more organized this year’s edition of Devcon has been in comparison with years previous. Sure, the WiFi is atrocious, but the food is solid, the agenda feels well-curated, and there are barely any lines for the bathrooms despite the event’s thousands of attendees. Much has changed in three years. Rather than a hodgepodge group of hackers and idealists, Ethereum’s ecosystem has grown to include billions of new dollars and hundreds of startups that didn’t exist just a few years ago. Ethereum is growing up, but speakers point out that questions still remain: Can the Ethereum apps find new revenue models that don’t rely on risky money games? What is Ethereum’s “killer app” if not less-regulated finance and tradable JPEGS? Rather than a Merge victory lap, Ethereum’s keystone developer event has been refreshingly self-critical – or at least as critical as one might hope for in an industry as hype-based as crypto. And a key issue on the agenda at Devcon – the one we will dive into in this week’s newsletter – is how third parties are working to solve Ethereum’s biggest outstanding issues post-Merge: high fees and slow transaction speeds. – Sam Kessler |
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Ethereum’s Second- Layer Projects Duke It Out for Dominance |
An update to Ethereum last month dubbed “The Merge” cut the second-largest blockchain’s energy costs by more than 99%, but it didn’t address its largest barriers to user adoption: high fees and slow speeds. As more updates aimed at these problems lie around the corner, several projects and companies are duking it out with their own solutions for solving Etheruem’s user experience shortcomings. The winner (or winners) of this competition will play a major role in defining Ethereum – and assuring its survival – in the years to come. But the shift to this new future has been slow going. Read the full article here. |
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The following is an overview of network activity on the Ethereum Beacon Chain over the past week. For more information about the metrics featured in this section, check out our 101 explainer on ETH metrics. |
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Disclaimer: All profits made from CoinDesk’s Eth 2.0 staking venture will be donated to a charity of the company’s choosing once transfers are enabled on the network. |
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Polygon launched its zkEVM public testnet. WHY IT MATTERS: Polygon, a scaling tool for the Ethereum blockchain that aims to reduce transaction costs, said Monday its zero-knowledge EVM public testnet went live. “It was widely believed that zkEVM will take several more years to ship, which makes this an even more groundbreaking milestone, not only for Polygon but for the whole Web3 industry,” said Polygon co-founder Mihailo Bjelic in a statement to CoinDesk. The company continues to target a mainnet launch in early 2023. Read more here. European Union Commission launched a proposal to study “embedded supervision” of decentralized protocols on the Ethereum blockchain. WHY IT MATTERS: The pilot aims to “develop, deploy and test” a built-in technology to supervise activities in the decentralized space. Researchers will gather automated supervisory data directly from the Ethereum blockchain to monitor decentralized finance (DeFi) activity in real time. Signaling tighter EU regulation, the study will likely cost 250,000 euros (about $243,701) and take 15 months to complete.Read more here. Partnering with Coinbase, Google will start accepting crypto payments for cloud services. WHY IT MATTERS: On Tuesday at Google’s Cloud Next conference, the tech giant indicated that by early next year it will receive crypto payments via an integration with Coinbase. “We want to make building in Web3 faster and easier, and this partnership with Coinbase helps developers get one step closer to that goal,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud. Read more here. |
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Valid Points incorporates information and data about CoinDesk’s own Eth 2.0 validator. All profits made from this staking venture will be donated to a charity of our choosing once transfers are enabled on the network. For a full overview of the project, check out our announcement post. You can verify the activity of the CoinDesk Eth 2.0 validator in real time through our public validator key, which is: 0xad7fef3b2350d220de3ae360c70d7f488926b6117e5f785a8995487c46d323ddad0f574fdcc50eeefec34ed9d2039ecb. Search for it on any Ethereum block explorer site! |
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