Demand for Crypto Experts in India Hikes Remuneration, Vacancies Spike

October 14, 2021 Bitcoin.com

Stellar Blockchain Faces Outage as Some Validators Go Offline

April 6, 2021 The Crypto Briefing

The Stellar blockchain is currently facing a serious network outage due to an unknown bug.

Bitstamp Halts Stellar XLM

According to Stellar’s official update, an unknown technical glitch has caused some important validators to drop off the network.

As of 13:26 UTC, Stellar Development Fund (SDF) engineers are busy investigating the technical issues that caused the validators to drop off.

As validators are currently offline, the blockchain is unable to process new blocks.

The block explorer shows that the network processed its last transaction six hours ago.

“At this moment, we are unable to provide ETA for a fix,” the update says.

Meanwhile, crypto exchange Bitstamp has temporarily halted deposits and withdrawals of XLM, Stellar’s native token, due to ongoing issues.

Since the outage news, its token price has taken a hit, coming all the way from ~$0.57 to ~0.49 at press time.

We've temporarily stopped $XLM deposits and withdrawals due to issues on the @StellarOrg network. We are monitoring the situation and will keep you updated. Stellar's status page: https://t.co/iL7a31OgaL

— Bitstamp (@Bitstamp) April 6, 2021

The incident has been unprecedented for Stellar–a blockchain worth $11 billion that hosts several crypto projects, including the second-largest stablecoin USD Coin (USDC).

Blockchains depend on complex encryption and continuous sync among validators to keep the network running; Stellar is no different. However, small software bugs may cause sporadic disruptions.

In December 2020, Solana, a proof-of-stake blockchain, faced an outage as an unknown software error prevented validators from confirming new blocks.

Note: This is a developing story and will be updated with new information.

“Tweet-Sized” Blockchain Mina Launches, Announces Token Sale

March 23, 2021 The Crypto Briefing

Altcoins

Mina, the world’s lightest blockchain, has launched its mainnet.

Mina Launches “Tweet-Sized” Blockchain

Backed by leading venture funds like Coinbase Ventures, Three Arrows, and Polychain, the Mina protocol leverages zk-SNARKs for scalability. This technology allows the chain to always remains 22kb–the size of a couple of tweets.

Since its inception in 2015, the Ethereum blockchain size has grown over 200GB in transactional data, as per Blockchair. The Bitcoin blockchain is much larger and growing fast.

Instead of saving every transaction, Mina’s zk-SNARKs innovation compresses the chain into a small proof and distributes this proof for validation.

With the mainnet launch, developers will leverage the protocol to build scalable apps, which the team calls “SNARK-powered applications (Snapps).” Snapps will bank on Mina’s unique ability to connect to any website and use web data with the blockchain in a privacy-preserving manner.

According to Evan Shapiro, CEO and co-founder of O(1) Labs, the creators behind Mina, the mainnet features allow developers to build a “seamless gateway to privately connect the real world with crypto.”

Besides the mainnet release, the team has organized a community sale of native MINA tokens in partnership with crypto exchange CoinList. This includes 75 million tokens or 7.5% of the initial distribution of 1 billion tokens offered to non-US persons only.

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