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Ethereum dominates among developers but competitors growing faster

January 6, 2022 Coin Telegraph

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The total monthly active developers measured hit a record high of more than 18,000 but Ethereum retains the largest number of them.

The Ethereum ecosystem still has far more developers than rival networks, but they are catching up with a faster rate of growth.

Ethereum competitors such as Polkadot, Solana, and Binance Smart Chain are growing faster in terms of development activity according to crypto research firm Electric Capital which released its findings on the blockchain development ecosystem in a new report on Jan. 6.

It revealed that more than 4,000 monthly active open-source developers work on Ethereum — considerably more than the 680 who work on the Bitcoin network. Across all chains, the total monthly active developers measured was more than 18,400 and the record was broken for the number of code commits by new developers in 2021 with more than 34,000.

The measurements were gleaned by analyzing around 500,000 code repositories and 160 million code commits, which are changes or updates to the code. The report noted that Ethereum, Polkadot, Cosmos, Solana, and Bitcoin are the five largest developer ecosystems overall.

According to the report, Polkadot has around 1,500 developers in total, while Cosmos and Solana are around a thousand each.

Other active ecosystems in terms of monthly developers were Cosmos, NEAR which launched an $800 million developer fund in October, Tezos, Polygon, and Cardano each with more than 250 active monthly developers.

While Ethereum is still dominant — more than 20% of new Web3 developers joined its ecosystem — rival networks have seen greater growth.

“Polkadot, Solana, NEAR, BSC, Avalanche, and Terra are growing faster than Ethereum did at similar points in its history.”

Ecosystem dev growth since first commit - Electric Capital

The report compared the average monthly active developers between Dec. 2020 and Dec. 2021, noting that Solana grew by 4.9 times, NEAR had a 4X growth rate, and Polygon’s monthly developers more than doubled. Cosmos had a 70% increase in average monthly active developers and BSC 80% over the course of 2021.

While the development growth figures are impressive for more early-stage projects, Ethereum is still the king. The ecosystem continues to retain the largest network of tools, dapps, and protocols and is 2.8 times larger than its closest rival, Polkadot.

Solana, Avalanche, BSC, NEAR, and Terra have emerged as DeFi hubs over the past year or so, attracting more developers as adoption increases. DeFi full-time monthly active contributors grew by 64%, and more than 500 new developers contributed code to a DeFi project every month last year aside from January, it reported.

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January 4, 2022 Bitcoin.com

Binance Labs leads $12M round for DeFi platform WOO Network

January 4, 2022 Coin Telegraph

Binance

Binance's VC arm lea DeFi liquidity provider WOO Network's $12 million Series A+ funding round.

Decentralized finance (DeFi) liquidity provider WOO Network has secured additional funds in a Series A funding round.

Incubated by quantitative trading heavyweight Kronos Research, WOO Network has pocketed an additional $12 million strategic investment in a a Series A+ funding round led by Binance Labs. The fresh funding, announced by Binance Labs on Tuesday, builds upon WOO Network’s $30 million Series A funding round.

WOO Network is known for adding liquidity to tens of institutions, exchanges, trading teams, wallets and decentralized applications. DYDX, Matcha, ParaSwap, 1inch and DODO are the primary protocols supported by the DeFi platform. WOO claims to provide cheap liquidity thanks to algorithmic aggregation and trading techniques. Clients who want to facilitate the liquidity can use the API or the network’s own trading interface, WOO X.

The announcement highlights that WOO Network started providing liquidity on the Binance Smart Chain (BSC) last year.

WOO Network chief of ecosystem development Ran Yi pointed out that Binance has the highest concentration of volume and users. “Getting the opportunity to formalize our relationship with Binance will allow us to rapidly accelerate our growth by working closer with Binance across all their industry verticals,” he added.

Binance Labs investment director Peter Huo said that the new partnership would expand future collaborations on BSC.

Binance Labs, the venture capital and incubation arm of the largest crypto exchange by volume, led a number of investment deals in the DeFi ecosystem in 2021, including a $2.4 million funding round for Polkadot-based smart contract platform Plasm Network and $60 million in financing for cross-chain protocol Multichain.

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Binance VC arm leads $60M round in cross-chain protocol Multichain

December 21, 2021 Coin Telegraph

Binance

Shortly after rebranding from Anyswap last week, Multichain raised $60 million in a seed round led by Binance Labs.

Binance Labs, the venture capital and incubation arm of Binance cryptocurrency exchange, has led a financing round for the cross-chain protocol Multichain, previously known as Anyswap.

Shortly after rebranding from Anyswap last week, Multichain has raised $60 million in a seed funding round led by Binance Labs, the firm officially announced on Dec. 21.

Other participants in the raise included major VC firms and industry investors like Sequoia China, IDG Capital, Three Arrows Capital, Primitive Ventures, DeFiance Capital, Circle Ventures, Hypersphere Ventures, HashKey and Magic Ventures.

Apart from providing capital investment for Multichain, Binance is also building a stronger relationship with the cross-chain protocol. On Dec. 20, Multichain announced that it is now officially recommended as a tool to bridge bToken across chains through Binance’s smart contract platform, the Binance Smart Chain (BSC).

BSC said that Multichain is “one of the biggest routers on BSC,” providing “non-custodial plus multi-party computation model to guarantee the security of on-chain assets.”

Thanks Binance Smart Chain @BinanceChain for promoting #Multichain as officially recommended bridge#Multichain's top priority is to guarantee the security of on-chain assets https://t.co/CEocRygXzq
— Multichain (Previously Anyswap) (@AnyswapNetwork) December 20, 2021

Founded in July 2020, Anyswap was originally positioned as a cross-chain decentralized exchange. The platform gradually evolved into Multichain, a cross-chain router protocol (CRP) providing a mature real-time CRP system, enabling interoperability on multiple networks including Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Avalanche, Moonriver and others.

According to the announcement, the total value locked on Multichain now amounts to more than $5 billion, with the number of users exceeding 300,000. Multichain co-founder Zhaojun said that the protocol connects “more public blockchains and crypto assets than anyone else, with lower transaction fees, shorter bridging time and higher security levels.”

The funds raised in the seed round will be used in the growth of the team and ecosystem, including the research and development teams focused on crypto algorithms, audits and security, the firm said.

Officially launched in September 2020, BSC is a decentralized finance solution to bring programmability and interoperability to the Binance Chain, relying on a system of 21 validators with Proof of Staked Authority consensus. BSC has been growing increasingly popular this year, with the network hitting a historical high of over 16 million daily transactions on Nov. 25.

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Ascendex Hacked — Exchange Loses $77 Million in ERC20, BSC, Polygon Tokens

December 12, 2021 Bitcoin.com

AscendEX loses $80M following ERC-20, BSC, Polygon hot wallet compromise

December 12, 2021 Coin Telegraph

AscendEX loses M following ERC-20, BSC, Polygon hot wallet compromise

Binance

Out of the lot, around $60 million worth of tokens were transferred over the Ethereum blockchain alone. Tokens stolen from BSC and Polygon are worth $9.2 million and $8.5 million respectively.

Crypto trading platform AscendEX suffered a loss of $77.7 million in a hot wallet compromise that allowed hackers to access and transfer tokens hosted over the Ethereum (ETH), Binance Smart Chain (BSC) and Polygon (POLY) blockchains.

Soon after realization, AscendEX proactively warned its users about the stolen funds, confirming that the hackers were not able to access the company’s cold wallet reserves.

22:00 UTC 12/11, We have detected a number of ERC-20, BSC, and Polygon tokens transferred from our hot wallet. Cold Wallet is NOT affected. Investigation underway. If any user’s funds are affected by the incident, they will be covered completely by AscendEX.
— AscendEX (@AscendEX_Global) December 12, 2021

According to PeckShield, a blockchain security and data analytics company, around $60 million worth of tokens were transferred over the Ethereum blockchain. Tokens stolen from the Binance Smart Chain and Polygon are worth $9.2 million and $8.5 million respectively, as evidenced by EtherScan data.

Estimated loss @AscendEX_Global: $77.7M in total ($60M on @ethereum $9.2M @BinanceChain $8.5M @0xPolygon). Here is the list of the transferred-out assets and their amounts on @ethereum pic.twitter.com/VC4DKOwu4f
— PeckShield Inc. (@peckshield) December 12, 2021

Some of the popular tokens stolen in this hack include USD Coin (USDC), Tether (USDT), and Shiba Inu (SHIB). However, AscendEX is yet to officially confirm the exact worth of the tokens taken away by the hackers.

The company also announced to help the affected users by covering up their losses due to this attack.

Just last week on Dec. 05, a similar attack on crypto exchange BitMart resulted in a loss of nearly $200 million due to a hot wallet compromise hosted over the Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain blockchains.

As reported by Cointelegraph, the hack was a straightforward case of transfer-out, swap, and wash:

Transfer of stolen tokens on Bitmart. Source: PeckShield

While BitMart CEO Sheldon Xia confirmed the losses over Twitter, he announced a temporary stop on all withdrawals and deposits while further investigations were underway.

The deposit and withdrawal function of all tokens will be resumed step by step, along with the recovery progress of security testing and public chain development. No worries, we are marching forward, security will be always the first priority.
— Sheldon Xia (@sheldonbitmart) December 8, 2021

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