Original: https://decrypt.co/112606/aptos-market-debut-1-billion-apt-traded-first-week
By: Stacy Elliott
Posted: October 21, 2022, 8:48 pm

Original: https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2022/10/21/bitcoins-slump-could-continue-as-goldman-sees-several-more-quarters-of-dollar-strength/?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=rss&utm_campaign=headlines
By: Stephen Alpher
Posted: October 21, 2022, 7:40 pm

Original: https://decrypt.co/112595/solana-enforceable-nft-royalties-new-metaplex-standard
By: Andrew Hayward
Posted: October 21, 2022, 7:26 pm

Original: https://decrypt.co/112544/tether-usdt-will-be-available-from-24000-atms-across-brazil
By: Sander Lutz
Posted: October 21, 2022, 12:56 am

Original: https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/10/11/crypto-mixers-havent-slowed-doj-investigations-director-says/?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=rss&utm_campaign=headlines
By: Nikhilesh De
Posted: October 11, 2022, 9:26 pm

Original: https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2022/10/11/market-wrap-bitcoin-remains-in-a-quiet-place-ahead-of-fomc-minutes/?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=rss&utm_campaign=headlines
By: Glenn Williams, Jocelyn Yang
Posted: October 11, 2022, 9:15 pm

The Soroban Adoption Fund incentivizes developers to begin building products and tools on the new smart contract platform.

Stellar Development Foundation (SDF), the non-profit organization supporting the development of the Stellar network, has launched a new funding initiative to encourage developers to build on the Soroban smart contract platform, which officially went live on Futurenet Tuesday. 

Soroban brings Turing-complete smart contracts to the Stellar blockchain, enabling developers to build new financial services rails on the network, SDF said. Tomer Weller, SDF’s vice president of technology strategy, said Soroban was developed to overcome the “friction” of other blockchain networks. In an emailed response to Cointelegraph, Weller further explained:

"When we looked at what was out there in the market today, the smart contract landscape is predominantly made up of solutions that are patchworked together, peppered with varying quality of tooling, hard to implement, and to top it all off, pretty expensive. It made us want to build something better."

With Soroban going live on Futurenet, developers can begin testing the smart contract platform and potentially receive rewards for doing so. The foundation has allocated $100 million to support Soroban adoption, with the first incentive program soliciting feedback through code examples, tutorials and identifying Github issues.

Related: Vyper, Solidity and Scrypto: How the smart contract languages compare

SDF said the new funding initiative is designed to attract more builders to the Stellar network at a time when competition for Web3 developers and researchers is far outpacing the available supply. Although several crypto firms have laid off staff amid the bear market, demand for talent remains high and is gradually decoupling from short-term market trends.

As far as blockchain projects are concerned, Stellar is among the oldest and most established, having been founded in 2014 by Jed McCaleb. Before Stellar, McCaleb founded Bitcoin (BTC) exchange Mt. Gox and was the co-creator of Ripple.

Original: https://cointelegraph.com/news/stellar-development-foundation-launches-100m-fund-to-support-native-smart-contract-adoption
By: Sam Bourgi
Posted: October 11, 2022, 9:00 pm

Original: https://decrypt.co/111698/how-a-web3-data-storage-startup-got-microsoft-to-invest
By: Jason Nelson
Posted: October 11, 2022, 8:47 pm

The upgrade is intended to fix the exploit that drained the platform of $100 million.

A hard fork to the BNB Smart Chain, the blockchain of crypto exchange Binance, will take place as a fix for the exploit that drained the platform of an estimated $100 million on Oct. 6, according to a post on GitHub. 

The release for mainnet and testnet is a "temporary urgent patch to mitigate the cross-chain infrastructure between Beacon Chain and Smart Chain", said the post, aiming to re-enable the cross-chain back.

The BNB hard fork, dubbed Moran, will take place at block height 22,107,423 — estimated to occur on Oct. 12 at 4:00am EST . Changes will include fixing a vulnerability in the iavl hash check, as well as introducing block header in sequence checks.

While the fork does not affect regular users, node operators will have to follow a few steps, such as stopping the actual node if it's still running, and replacing it with a new binary. 

In short, a hard fork is an upgrade meant to improve a blockchain. It's a permanent divergence from a blockchain's most recent version, leading to a separation of the chain. As some nodes no longer meet consensus, two versions of the network are run separately. In this way, a fork on the blockchain is created where one path keeps following its current set of rules, whereas the second path follows a new set.

A vulnerability in the cross-chain bridge on BNB Chain caused its pause on Oct. 6, with attackers making off with $100 million in cryptocurrency. The exploit, which was perpetrated on the BSC Token Hub, created "extra BNB", explained the company.

Original: https://cointelegraph.com/news/bnb-smart-chain-to-hard-fork-following-100m-exploit
By: Ana Paula Pereira
Posted: October 11, 2022, 8:30 pm

Original: https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2022/10/11/bitcoins-calm-amid-soaring-bond-market-volatility-points-to-hodler-dominated-crypto-market/?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=rss&utm_campaign=headlines
By: Omkar Godbole
Posted: October 11, 2022, 8:11 pm

Original: https://www.coindesk.com/web3/2022/10/11/opensea-aims-for-an-avalanche-of-nft-interest/?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=rss&utm_campaign=headlines
By: Cameron Thompson
Posted: October 11, 2022, 7:44 pm

Original: https://www.coindesk.com/layer2/2022/10/11/reversibility-on-ethereum-the-benefits-and-pitfalls/?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=rss&utm_campaign=headlines
By: JP Koning
Posted: October 11, 2022, 7:07 pm

From reversible transactions to increased regulation and a rising tide of censorship, mass adoption is going to make crypto look more like the systems we’re trying to escape.

For years, mass adoption has been pitched as the endgame of crypto. We’re supposed to envision a world where we can pay for our morning coffee with stablecoins and put mortgages on-chain to be used as collateral in decentralized finance (DeFi). In a world in which crypto has become mainstream, prices would likely reach all-time highs, but at what cost?

Concessions inevitably would be made to meet consumer expectations to realize this future.

Though the proliferation of online banking may seem like it set the stage for a seamless transition to DeFi, traditional finance (TradFi) customers are accustomed to a level of inherent security absent in DeFi. Unlike in traditional finance, where charges can be declared fraudulent and bad actors are prohibited from listing exchange-traded funds, there is no centralized authority to file a complaint with or review initial coin offerings in crypto. Though this may seem intimidating, it’s precisely what makes the space unique; users are given complete, sovereign control over their finances, and teams are able to build products permissionlessly.

The average consumer would expect to be protected from hacks and exploits and be offered chargeback protection in order to make the transition from TradFi. The measures required to match consumer expectations would derail future innovation and greatly diminish the immutability and decentralization of DeFi, one of its core principles. Though there are already plans to create opt-in reversible transactions to mitigate the damage of future hacks and exploits, consumer pressure would likely spark a top-down approach, which would almost certainly be implemented with far less finesse and care for the industry than current prospects.

Related: Reversible blockchain transactions are key to fighting crime in crypto

Increased consumer pressure would mean regulators would play a leading role in dictating crypto’s future, ensuring that on-chain activity meets their compliance and Know Your Customer standards. These moves would have an outsized impact on smaller teams, as large companies would be able to bring on new teams focused specifically on compliance or simply pay their way through the fines. But crypto is what it is today because of small teams; Ethereum was founded by a group of eight individuals. Small teams can innovate and make decisions at a far greater rate than larger organizations, which may be hampered by bureaucracy or various stakeholders. By increasing the barrier to entry for smaller teams, mass regulation would impede the very innovation DeFi is known for and effectively put an end to permissionless operations.

The recent sanctions against Tornado Cash are a great example of how quickly regulation can shift the industry. Following the sanctions, remote procedure calls, relayors and apps all moved quickly to comply — and understandably so, builders can’t be expected to face jail time in the name of upholding crypto’s principles. This instance demonstrates regulators’ ability to hamstring even the most immutable and decentralized projects. If we follow the precedent set in this example, it seems impossible that crypto could scale to mass adoption without losing its core principles.

While one of the central selling points of crypto is the censorship-resistant, permissionless and decentralized values that permeate throughout the industry, mass adoption would undoubtedly impede, if not outright halt, such principles. We’d likely see consolidations and concessions as companies face the reality of regulation. Soon, DeFi would appear eerily similar to the TradFi industry that users and developers were attempting to escape.

Related: Tax on income you never earned? It’s possible after Ethereum’s Merge

It doesn’t have to be this way.

One of the main reasons regulators are keen on going after crypto is that it’s been marketed to the average consumer. The fallout from Anchor and Celsius would have been far less if the damage had been limited to smaller groups of informed users who understood the risks.

For this reason, focusing on improving crypto UX without first building antifragile systems is a recipe for disaster. If the user interface is intuitive enough, many will overlook the underlying mechanics and assume they’re safe and sound. On the other hand, crypto wouldn’t need to meet the expectations of the average consumer (reversibility, rollbacks, etc.) if it were built for a user base that prioritized its principles.

Crypto can be the future of finance, or it can be permissionless, decentralized and censorship-resistant, but it likely can’t be both. While the idea of mass adoption as the end game has been taken for granted, perhaps we should be building for a future that preserves crypto’s core principles for those who want it, while accepting that this might be at the cost of mass adoption.

This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal or investment advice. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.

Original: https://cointelegraph.com/news/mass-adoption-will-be-terrible-for-crypto
By: Sam Forman
Posted: October 11, 2022, 6:12 pm

Original: https://www.coindesk.com/layer2/2022/10/11/public-key-infrastructure-for-a-decentralized-world/?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=rss&utm_campaign=headlines
By: Sage D. Young
Posted: October 11, 2022, 5:27 pm

Original: https://decrypt.co/111576/uniswap-aave-pile-polygon-speedy-rollup-testnet-ethereum
By: Ziwang
Posted: October 10, 2022, 3:57 pm