EVM
XRP Ledger Now Closer Than Ever To Ethereum Compatibility As Second Audit Nears Completion: Developers
The XRP Ledger (XRPL) is almost ready for the launch of its much anticipated Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible sidechain, according to developers working on the project. The project aims to allow Ethereum (ETH) developers, who are used to Solidity, the main programming language for writing smart contracts on Ethereum, to access and build on […]
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Why a gold rush for inscriptions has broken half a dozen blockchains
Some suggest EVM inscriptions are the latest way for retail to access low-cap coins, while others argue it’s an over-hyped fad. Whatever it is, it’s clogging up the blockchain.
The latest degen “gold rush" to inscribe everything from profile pictures to memecoins has led to at least half a dozen blockchain networks cracking under pressure over the past week.
The last few days have seen Arbirtrum, Avalanche, Cronos, zkSync, and TON all suffering partial or full outages recently due to inscriptions, with modular data availability network Celestia the latest to succumb, according to industry researchers who posted a screenshot of its block explorer on Dec. 18.
Videos have also been posted of mass minting on the Celestia network.
Daily gas spent on EVM inscriptions surges to record high of $8M
Bitcoin is not the only network getting clogged up with Ordinals inscriptions, with weekend activity on EVM chains also spiking.
Network transaction fees across all blockchains have spiked over the weekend as the Ordinals inscriptions craze continues to push demand for blockspace — not just on the Bitcoin network.
Inscriptions on Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) chains skyrocketed over the weekend, causing a spike in gas spent on them.
On Dec. 16, gas spent on inscriptions surged to a record high of $8.3 million, according to data from Dune Analytics.
Polygon (MATIC) rally comes to an end as competitors devour market share
MATIC price has retraced a majority of its recent gains. Cointelegraph explores why.
Polygon’s native token (MATIC) experienced a 16.4% rally that coincided with the launch of Polygon 2.0 Goreli testnet on Oct. 4. However, the resistance at $0.60 proved stronger than anticipated and was followed by a 10.6% decline over the six days leading into Oct. 10.
This decline was exacerbated by negative news regarding the departure of a key co-founder and weak activity in Polygon’s zero-knowledge rollup (ZK-rollup) subnet.
MATIC’s price has wiped out previous gains from the early October rally, erasing the bullish momentum driven by the expectations of the protocol’s upgrades.
Rallies tend to follow mainnet and protocol updates
Polygon 2.0 is a network of ZK-based layer-2 chains unified via a novel cross-chain coordination protocol. Polygon’s 2.0 scaling technology was unveiled in June 2023 as a plan for a scaling ecosystem consisting of four layers: staking, execution, interoperability and proving. Each of these layers contributes to creating an interconnected ecosystem of chains that facilitate secure, fast and highly cost-effective transfers.
Among the benefits of Polygon 2.0 are enhanced security and privacy through ZK-proofs, full compatibility with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and instant cross-chain interactions without requiring additional security or trust assumptions. It’s worth noting that the project is continuing to develop its Zero-Knowledge Scalable Transparent Argument of Knowledge-based layer-2 solution, Miden.
One could argue that the recent 10.6% retracement merely reflects an adjustment to the overexcitement triggered by the testnet launch. However, other factors may have contributed to investors’ worsening sentiment toward Polygon. For instance, Polygon’s ZK subnet, zkEVM, has lagged behind competitors in activity and deposits.
Network data shows Polygon losing steam as new competition emerges
Metrics from Artemis, an on-chain data provider, reveal a significant disparity between Polygon zkEVM’s 6,210 active addresses compared to StarkNet’s 154,390 and zkSync ERA’s 239,810. A similar discrepancy exists when analyzing the number of daily transactions, with Polygon’s ZK-rollup also trailing competitors.
Taking a broader perspective on the total number of transactions and deposits in the Polygon network yields suboptimal results. For example, Polygon’s total value locked (TVL) stands at $756 million, according to DefiLlama, which is less than half of Arbitrum’s layer-2 scaling solution.
It’s noteworthy that despite being launched much earlier than most Ethereum layer-2 solutions in June 2020, Polygon is now facing direct competition from Optimism and Base.
The departure of Polygon’s co-founder, Jaynti Kanani, on Oct. 4 after six years with the project also triggered some degree of discomfort among investors, given the project’s proximity to the crucial completion of its improved multiple-layer scalability solution. Interestingly, this decision follows the departure of Polygon Lab’s CEO, Ryan Wyatt, in July 2023, not long after joining the company in February 2022.
Further impacting MATIC’s performance was a decline in the number of active addresses using the Polygon network’s decentralized applications (DApps).
On average, the top 12 DApps on the Polygon network experienced a 17% decline in the number of active addresses over the last 30 days. This issue was particularly concerning in the NFT and decentralized finance markets, notably affecting applications like Uniswap, OpenSea and Move Stake.
Related: Circle rolls out native USDC tokens on Polygon
Regardless of the reasons behind MATIC’s token surge earlier in October, the recent 10.6% negative performance can be attributed to reduced network activity, the departure of a co-founder during a critical upgrade phase and stiff competition from other ZK scaling solutions.
Ultimately, there is enough bearish news flow to justify this correction, although the team has been consistently delivering the necessary updates and improvements to the Polygon network. Investors should closely monitor the project’s progress in addressing these challenges and capitalizing on the innovations of Polygon 2.0.
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.
Avalanche’s HyperSDK blockchain upgrade hits 143K TPS on testnet
Ava Labs is testing a high-throughput framework that will enable developers to build their own virtual machines.
Smart contract layer-1 blockchain network Avalanche's testnet has reportedly hit over 140,000 transactions per second during testing of its HyperSDK blockchain upgrade.
Avalanche is currently testing a framework for building high-performance Virtual Machines (VMs) from scratch on the network.
According to Ava Labs, HyperSDK is structured so that developers can “plug into a lightning-fast execution environment without writing massive amounts of code from scratch.”
This enables the simplification and acceleration of custom VM development, making it easier for developers to launch optimized blockchains.
HyperSDK reached a whopping 143,322 transactions per second in a controlled testing environment, according to a screenshot shared on GitHub.
In comparison, Avalanche claims to currently process up to 4,500 TPS, Solana claims between 2,000 and 3,000 TPS, and Ethereum does just 15-20, according to data from Coincodex.
#Avalanche HyperSDK, 143k TPS!!! https://t.co/LPBs9zO0Nk pic.twitter.com/m66EisQ9Ux
— JonB (@Jonbros01) September 2, 2023
Speaking to Cointelegraph’s Andrew Fenton at the Korea Blockchain Week 2023, the head of product at Ava Labs, Nick Mussallem, said he expects real-world throughput to eventually settle around 50,000 TPS.
“They've clocked at it at 141,000. But that's in a very controlled environment. So I think if you were to cut that in half, it would still be very generous and probably will do more than that.”
Referring to the blockchain trilemma, which is the delicate balance between decentralization, scalability, and security, he said nothing was sacrificed, adding that the Avalanche developers wrote it from scratch to better handle state management:
“Basically took out a lot of the stuff that was in the EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) that they felt was unnecessary on the networking layer, or at the storage layer, and then put our consensus algorithm underneath it. And it just goes fast. Now it's optimized.”
Blockchains built with HyperSDK will operate as subnets called HyperChains and can be adapted for any function the developer wishes.
There will be a user interface (GUI) that doesn’t require additional coding and developers will also have a choice of VM. “You can literally launch it in five minutes,” said Mussallem.
Related: Marketing company wants 90% of Japanese population on Web3: KBW 2023
Mussallem said HyperSDK was open source and available right now, “but it's very much in the early beta stages.”
It hasn't been launched and is not production ready yet as the target for that is by the end of the year, he added.
Magazine: How to protect your crypto in a volatile market: Bitcoin OGs and experts weigh in
MakerDAO co-founder proposes fork of Solana codebase for native chain
Rune Christensen stated that Solana’s codebase should be the foundation of MakerDAO’s upcoming blockchain, as he highlighted that it’s optimized for building “highly efficient blockchains.”
MakerDAO co-founder Rune Christensen has submitted a proposal to build the decentralized finance project’s upcoming native chain off of a fork of Solana’s codebase, and not the Ethereum Virtual Machine despite its long-running ties with Ethereum.
MakerDAO’s native chain or what is currently dubbed as “NewChain,” is part of the fifth and final phase of the MakerDAO “Endgame” upgrade announced in May.
The final phase is expected to take around three years to complete, and it will see the full re-implementation of the Maker Protocol into a new stand-alone blockchain.
In a Sept. 1 X (Twitter) post highlighting the proposal, Christensen stated that: “After some research, I believe the Solana codebase should be considered as the basis for NewChain.”
The last phase of Endgame is the launch of a native blockchain for Maker with the codename NewChain
— Rune (@RuneKek) September 1, 2023
It will make the ecosystem more secure and efficient
After some research, I believe the Solana codebase should be considered as the basis for NewChainhttps://t.co/KyGxBBGlVH
In the proposal on the MakerDAO forum, Christensen described Solana’s codebase as the “most promising” option to explore, as he offered three key reasons why he thinks it should be used as the foundation for NewChain.
Firstly, he highlighted the “technical quality” of the Solana codebase, and argued that it is “highly optimized for the purpose of operating a singular, highly efficient blockchain.”
“The Solana codebase is engineered well and benefits from being designed long after the bottlenecks and challenges of blockchains were already well understood, which fits nicely with the objective of NewChain itself in fixing the technical debt of Maker.”
Secondly, Christensen argued that the Solana ecosystem has “proven its resilience by having gone through the FTX blowup” and several other challenges without crumbling.
Co-founder @RuneKek of @MakerDAO, a DeFi protocol, proposes leveraging the Solana codebase for NewChain following extensive research.
— Solana (@solana) September 1, 2023
He cites Solana’s technical quality, strong developer ecosystem, and resilience as primary reasons and suggests potential mutual benefits to the… https://t.co/p5w7pGf47h
As such, the MakerDAO co-founder suggested that the Solana ecosystem is likely to stick around long term, maintain a “high-quality pool of talent available for Maker to access and contribute to” while also providing a cost-effective avenue to build and maintain NewChain with.
Related: Controversy as MakerDAO’s Spark Protocol blocks users with VPNs
Finally, Christensen noted that as “there already exists examples of the Solana codebase being forked and adapted to act as appchains,” MakerDAO could follow a similar process to develop NewChain.
Back on Twitter, Christensen was questioned on why favored using Solana code over EVM.
Christensen noted that while the EVM is the “most important when it comes to building stuff for users, since that’s where the users are,” it doesn’t suit MakerDAO’s specific requirements on the backend.
EVM is still the most important when it comes to building stuff for users, since that’s where the users are. But for a specialized backend for Maker’s specific needs it is not ideal, and solutions like Solana or something like Sei are a much better fit.
— Rune (@RuneKek) September 1, 2023
NewChain will essentially serve as a back-end for the project’s SubDAO tokenomics and governance security. On the other side of things, Its governance token Maker (MKR) and stablecoin Dai (DAI) will continue to function as usual on Ethereum.
Magazine: Recursive inscriptions — Bitcoin ‘supercomputer’ and BTC DeFi coming soon
Stellar joins Bytecode Alliance to help develop EVM alternative Wasm
Stellar joined the industry group developing Wasm, an alternative computation engine for running smart contracts.
The Stellar Development Foundation has joined the Bytecode Alliance, an industry group promoting the development of WebAssembly (Wasm), according to an Aug. 21 announcement. Wasm is a competitor to the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) used by the Ethereum ecosystem. It is also used in non-blockchain, browser-based applications.
We are officially members of @bytecodeallies! Our goal? To shape the future and development of WebAssembly for blockchain developers.
— Stellar (@StellarOrg) August 21, 2023
Time to get to work https://t.co/MBLkWoNlDl
EVM is a virtual machine or computation engine used to execute smart contracts. It is used by most blockchain networks, including Ethereum, BNB Smart Chain, Avalanche and many others. But a few networks use Wasm instead, including Polkadot, MultiversX (formerly Elrond) and Internet Computer.
Stellar began as a payments network in 2014. But in 2022, it implemented smart contracts to provide more functionality to the network. In April 2022, Stellar developers chose Wasm as their computation engine. They argued that despite the popularity of EVM, its “storage and execution models are expensive and challenging to parallelize,” which “gets in the way of scalability,” making transactions more expensive.
Related: Stellar dips into treasury to buy minority stake in MoneyGram
Stellar also argued that Wasm was perfect for “extremely adversarial” environments like blockchains, as it was originally developed for browser applications. This was another reason the team chose Wasm over EVM.
But much of the development work for Wasm is produced by the Bytecode Alliance, a nonprofit organization made up of internet companies such as Amazon, Cisco, Intel, Microsoft and others. When Stellar chose Wasm as its computation engine, Internet Computer developer Dfinity was the only member of the alliance representing a blockchain network.
In its Aug. 21 announcement, Stellar argued that joining the Bytecode Alliance was a “no-brainer,” as it would allow the team to “influence standards and tooling” within the Wasm development community. The team emphasized that its goal was to not only represent Stellar but to “advocate for all of blockchain and its developers.” According to Stellar, its participation in the organization will help the alliance support the needs of Web3 and blockchain developers:
“This influence ensures that the Alliance considers the unique needs of blockchain and non-web use cases, moving the Wasm ecosystem towards accommodating and supporting a broader range of applications, like [...] Smart contract platforms.”
The Wasm community continues to make inroads into the EVM-dominated Web3 world. On April 3, the Astar network announced that it would allow both EVM and Wasm contracts to be deployed on the same network, allowing developers to use either virtual machine. Astar labeled the event “Wasm launch day.” On Aug. 22, Binance announced it would provide $2.2 million in funding for a zero-knowledge proof application platform using Wasm called “zkWASMHub.”
ChatGPT can’t beat human smart contract auditors yet: OpenZeppelin’s Ethernaut challenges
While ChatGPT-4 can’t compete with human auditors yet, OpenZeppelin noted it was not optimized to do so, and AI models trained for this purpose would likely be more accurate.
While generative artificial intelligence (AI) is capable of doing a vast variety of tasks, OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4 is currently unable to audit smart contracts as effectively as human auditors, according to recent testing.
In an effort to determine whether AI tools could replace human auditors, blockchain security firm OpenZeppelin’s Mariko Wakabayashi and Felix Wegener pitted ChatGPT-4 against the firm’s Ethernaut security challenge.
Although the AI model passed a majority of the levels, it struggled with newer ones introduced after its September 2021 training data cutoff date, as the plugin enabling web connectivity was not included in the test.
Ethernaut is a wargame played within the Ethereum Virtual Machine consisting of 28 smart contracts — or levels — to be hacked. In other words, levels are completed once the correct exploit is found.
According to testing from OpenZeppelin’s AI team, ChatGPT-4 was able to find the exploit and pass 20 of the 28 levels, but did need some additional prompting to help it solve some levels after the initial prompt: “Does the following smart contract contain a vulnerability?”
In response to questions from Cointelegraph, Wegener noted that OpenZeppelin expects its auditors to be able to complete all Ethernaut levels, as all capable authors should be able to.
While Wakabayashi and Wegener concluded that ChatGPT-4 is currently unable to replace human auditors, they highlighted that it can still be used as a tool to boost the efficiency of smart contract auditors and detect security vulnerabilities, noting:
“To the community of Web3 BUIDLers, we have a word of comfort — your job is safe! If you know what you are doing, AI can be leveraged to improve your efficiency.“
When asked whether a tool that increases the efficiency of human auditors would mean firms like OpenZeppelin would not need as many, Wegener told Cointelegraph that the total demand for audits exceeds the capacity to provide high-quality audits, and they expect the number of people employed as auditors in Web3 to continue growing.
Related: Satoshi Nak-AI-moto: Bitcoin's creator has become an AI chatbot
In a May 31 Twitter thread, Wakabayashi said that large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are not yet ready for smart contract security auditing, as it is a task that requires a considerable degree of precision, and LLMs are optimized to generate text and have human-like conversations.
Because LLMs try to predict the most probable outcome every time, the output isn't consistent.
— Mariko (@mwkby) May 31, 2023
This is obviously a big problem for tasks requiring a high degree of certainty and accuracy in results.
However, Wakabayashi suggested that an AI model trained using tailored data and output goals could provide more reliable solutions than chatbots currently available to the public trained on large amounts of data.
What does this mean for AI in web3 security?
— Mariko (@mwkby) May 31, 2023
If we train an AI model with more targeted vulnerability data and specific output goals, we can build more accurate and reliable solutions than powerful LLMs trained on vast amounts of data.
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Flare integrates blockchain API on Google Cloud Marketplace
Google Cloud Marketplace adds support for nine different blockchain APIs, including Bitcoin and Ethereum, through integration with layer-1 Oracle network Flare.
Layer-1 Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) blockchain platform Flare has integrated its application programming interface (API) portal on Google Cloud Marketplace, onboarding a number of significant blockchain APIs to the ecosystem.
The integration of Google Cloud Marketplace will provide high-integrity blockchain data from Flare nodes and connected chain nodes to a large pool of developers and users of the software products and services platform. This includes blockchain APIs for Algorand, BNB Smart Chain, Bitcoin, Dogecoin, Ethereum, Flare, Litecoin, Songbird, XRP ledger and future-supported blockchain APIs.
Blockchain APIs are touted to free developers from having to run their own nodes for the respective blockchains they are interacting with. The data supplied powers applications that execute transactions and query the latest state of a blockchain by calling up on-chain data.
Flare highlights blockchain APIs as valuable for building cross-chain applications that query various data sources, including major cryptocurrency exchanges and wallets that use its API portal.
A statement from Flare’s vice president of engineering Josh Edwards highlighted that the provision of blockchain APIs to platforms like Google Cloud Marketplace will play a role in increased Web3 participation:
“It makes it easier for developers to experiment with blockchain technology and its many use cases without being burdened by onerous hardware costs and ongoing maintenance.”
Edwards also suggested that larger organizations and partners making use of Google Cloud Marketplace would potentially experiment with the secure and approved Web3 APIs.
The EVM-based layer 1 aims to extend the utility of blockchain technology by providing data from various chains and Web2 sources, which could climb to over 100 chains that form Flare’s oracle.
Related: Google Cloud broadens Web3 startup program with 11 blockchain firms
Flare’s integration comes just days after Polygon Labs and Google Cloud announced a multiyear partnership for the cloud computing service provider to boost the Ethereum scaling protocol’s tools and infrastructure development.
The deal sees Google Cloud’s framework and developer tools provided to Polygon’s core protocols, aimed at fostering the development of Web3 products and decentralized applications on Polygon.
Google Cloud’s partnership with the ecosystem is expected to advance Polygon’s zero-knowledge development. Testing of Polygon zkEVM’s zero-knowledge proofs on Google Cloud reportedly resulted in faster and cheaper transactions compared to the existing infrastructure available.
Magazine: Here’s how Ethereum’s ZK-rollups can become interoperable