DApp store for your wallet: Consensys readying cross-chain Metamask Snaps

September 6, 2023 Coin Telegraph

The upcoming MetaMask Snaps will allow users to interact with different blockchains like Bitcoin and Solana from inside their MetaMask wallet.

MetaMask’s eagerly awaited Snaps will allow users to interact with a variety of different blockchain networks, receive updates from projects and will help demystify what’s happening in complex transactions, says Consensys head of strategy Simon Morris.

Speaking to Cointelegraph on Sept. 6 at Korea Blockchain Week, Morris shared that MetaMask Snaps will function a lot like an Apple App Store for the crypto wallet, allowing third-party developers to launch new decentralized applications (DApps) — dubbed Snaps — that expand MetaMask’s functionality.

Morris explained the first round of released Snaps will undergo security checks and be whitelisted by developers at Consensys. In the future, the goal is to make the process as permissionless as releasing apps on the web.

The upgrade — which Morris said is coming sometime later this year — will see users download third-party extensions to their MetaMask wallet.

These will allow them to use their MetaMask wallet with non-EVM chains including Bitcoin, Solana, Avalanche and Starknet.

“MetaMask starts with a massive assumption there's going to be an EVM or something very like Ethereum, so what we’re targeting for the first release is making MetaMask interoperable with other non-EVM chains.”

Snaps will also help to reduce the obscurity around signing transactions. Morris admitted at present, users are oftentimes left feeling confused or intimidated when confirming transactions and hinted that some of the soon-to-be-released Snaps will help make the process of signing transactions and assessing smart contracts less opaque at first glance.

Another feature set to be enabled by Snaps will allow developers to send messages to users internally on MetaMask.

Instead of users having to navigate to the website or social media account of a project for updates — the upgrades will enable a “communication layer between DApp developers and their users.”

For those wanting a taste of Snaps, Morris said users can download an application called MetaMask Flask but warned that it’s very much a tool for developers.

On Sept. 5 MetaMask introduced its newest “sell” feature, allowing users in the United States, United Kingdom and parts of Europe to exchange Ether (ETH) for fiat currency that can be sent directly to a bank account.

We are beyond thrilled to announce our latest feature: Sell.

Yes, you read that right. Available on MetaMask Portfolio, ‘Sell’ allows you to cash out your crypto for fiat currency easily.

Discover more at https://t.co/aaSgTswEMo pic.twitter.com/pJa1ZndLQA
— MetaMask (@MetaMask) September 5, 2023

Magazine: How to protect your crypto in a volatile market — Bitcoin OGs and experts weigh in

BTC bull market began in March, more will realize in a year — Arthur Hayes

September 5, 2023 Coin Telegraph

Arthur Hayes

The BitMEX co-founder says Bitcoin has been on a bull run since the Fed’s $25 billion dollar program aimed at stabilizing the U.S. banking system.

Bitcoin (BTC) has been on a bull run for the past six months or so, and the market has yet to respond — but it will in around six to 12 months, according to BitMEX co-founder and former CEO Arthur Hayes.

In a Sept. 5 keynote speech at Korea Blockchain Week, Hayes argued Bitcoin’s bull run began on March 10, the day Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) was taken over by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

Two days before SVB’s takeover on March 8, Silvergate Bank went into liquidation. Two days later, on March 12, Signature Bank was forced to close by New York regulators.

In response, and in a bid to stop further possible collapses, the Federal Reserve created the Bank Term Funding Program (BTFP) — offering banking loans of up to a year in return for them posting “qualifying assets” as collateral.

*Hayes speaking at Korea Blockchain Week in Seoul. Source: Andrew Fenton/Cointelegraph*

“Essentially, what [the Fed] did was backstop the entire banking system by saying: ‘Please give me your underwater dogshit bonds, and I’ll give you fresh dollars,’” Hayes said.

“Me and the rest of the market rightly saw through this as basically them admitting that they caused this problem — the structure of the banking system — and this is one of the ways you can fix it, which is: print more money.”

Since then, Bitcoin’s price has increased — currently around 26% — which is why he claims the bull market started that day.

“We basically ditched this whole facade that we care about the value of the dollar and the value of any fiat currency.”

This pushed traders to consider fixed-supply assets such as Bitcoin, Hayes claimed.

However, the rest of the market market hasn’t yet responded, but he gave a timeline of six to 12 months for that to occur.

Hayes said even if the Fed and other central banks continued interest rate hikes to enable economic tightening or if they “print more money,” then Bitcoin would still perform well.

“On both scenarios, whether the Fed raises or cuts, we are in a good position as the cryptocurrency industry,” he said.

Collect this article as an NFT to preserve this moment in history and show your support for independent journalism in the crypto space.

Magazine: How to protect your crypto in a volatile market — Bitcoin OGs and experts weigh in

Artbitrum founder says Stylus is a game changer for EVMs

September 4, 2023 Coin Telegraph

Arbitrum

The Arbitrum-building Offchain Labs co-founder Ed Felten said its new tool would allow more seasoned devs to build EVMs, possibly making them safer.

A recently released tool for Arbitrum developers could onboard more devs to Ethereum Virtual Machines (EVM) and improve its code, says Offchain Labs co-founder Ed Felten.

Speaking to Cointelegraph at Korea Blockchain Week, Felten lauded Arbitrum Stylus, which Offchain released on a testnet on Aug. 31, allowing developers to use languages including Rust, C, and C++ to build Arbitrum apps.

Felten said Stylus would allow non-Web3 native devs to “use the languages and the development tools that they're used to.”

Today is Arbitrum Day

Last year we took one giant leap with the launch of Arbitrum Nitro.

Today we’re excited to announce that we are taking another big leap with the release of the code and public testnet for Arbitrum Stylus. https://t.co/NaxOuir5WH
— Offchain Labs (@OffchainLabs) August 31, 2023

He added it would onboard “a lot more developers” to building EVMs with more mature tools and cited the larger number of devs that program in Rust over Solidity — the latter being the programming language for building Ethereum smart contracts.

“One of the things that comes from those much more mature tools is it's much faster. So it's 10 to 15 times faster for typical computations than EVM.”

According to Felten, the benefit of supporting legacy languages is the amount of code that already exists written in languages such as Rust which is already “battle-tested and audited.”

Felten identified Rust as a language that was designed to help catch development errors, with its tools being “really good at reducing the odds that you'll introduce a bug in your code.”

“You can just use it. Now you can use that directly on-chain. You're gonna build less from scratch and you're gonna be able to take better advantage of things that other people have done.”

Felten also highlighted the gas cost was 10 to 15 times lower, which allows for “more complex stuff [to be] done in the same transaction” and opens up the possibility of being able to perform iPhone-compatible cryptography.

Felten explained that iPhones use a different digital signature standard than Ethereum, which is not supported well, so “cryptography on Ethereum that’s compatible with the iPhone has an extremely high gas cost.”

“But in Stylus, you can drive that down so it becomes really feasible. It’s not prohibitively expensive.”

This could give way to having a crypto wallet integrated on an iPhone — unlocking the ability to use Apple’s FaceID to verify wallet transactions similar to bank card purchases.

Other use cases Felten saw with the lower gas fees were higher levels of realism in blockchain-based games and the on-chain evaluation of machine learning models against live application data.

Ultimately, Felten thought Stylus could help burgeoning projects ship faster as allowing for mature programming languages means they may be better protected against bugs, and errors along with having extra performance.

“You don't have to squeeze out every last tiny bit of performance in your code and that also reduces a lot of friction for developing protocols.”

Magazine: How to protect your crypto in a volatile market — Bitcoin OGs and experts weigh in

Additional reporting by Andrew Fenton.

Axie Infinity looking to ‘double-down’ on Korean market: KBW

August 9, 2022 Coin Telegraph

Axie Infinity

Sky Mavis co-founder and growth lead Jeffrey Zirlin says Axie Infinity wants to double down in South Korea, which they see as one of the most important gaming markets in the world.

Sky Mavis, the firm behind Play-to-Earn (P2E) heavyweight Axie Infinity is looking to “double down” in South Korea and ramp up adoption despite the regulatory hurdles.

Speaking with Cointelegraph at the Korea Blockchain Week on Aug. 9 (local time), Sky Mavis co-founder and growth lead Jeffrey Zirlin stated that despite the domestic ban on P2E games still being in place, the “Korean market is one of the most important gaming markets in the world, and we have tons of players in South Korea.”

Zirlin added that the company is currently looking at ways to tailor the Axie Infinity game to its cohort of Korean gamers:

“I think you know, we want to double down. We want to localize for example, Koreans don't speak much English, right? So there are actually a lot of barriers to actually getting the game into the hands of Korean players.”

“But a lot of our top players on the leaderboard are Korean [...] Koreans are some of the best gamers in the world,” he added.

South Korea Game Rating and Administration Committee prohibits the release of domestic blockchain P2E games as a result of strict anti-gambling policies. In December, the government also moved to prohibit Google Play and the Apple Store from listing such games in Korea.

“In terms of the regulation, it's still quite early. It's similar to the app stores where you know, it's gonna be a process of negotiation and education,” Zirlin noted, adding that he hopes P2E adoption is enough to sway the government to walk back its hawkish regulation in the future:

“It's really Uber as an approach right? They just launched, they got it into the hands of as many people as possible and once they had a critical mass the regulators had to go with it.”

The Axie Infinity project is still in its early access stage and is yet to roll out an app via Google Play or the Apple Store. According to Active Player, the game had roughly 766,000 people that logged in to play the game last month, a far cry from the heights of 2.7 million recorded in January this year.

As it stands, Axie Infinity is looking to ramp up adoption — in Korea and globally — by improving the gaming experience and expanding out its ecosystem via new battle modes such as Origin, which topped more than 600,000 sign ups as of mid-June.

“Origin is our main focus right now. So building that out and making it more immersive, adding in vertical progression, like runes and charms and body part upgrades to act as sustainable sinks [burning mechanisms] for tokens and making it more fun.”

“Origin crucially comes with three free starter Axies (NFT characters) so that people can fall in love with the game [without having] to make any economic or financial decisions,” he added.

Web2 adoption key to Metaverse success, Klaytn Foundation — KBW 2022

August 8, 2022 Coin Telegraph

Coin Telegraph

“Even though it's hard, adapting Web3 technologies to Web2 platforms could be a way to bring mass adoption,” says Klaytn Foundation director Sam Seo.

Sam Seo, the director of metaverse-focused blockchain Klaytn Foundation believes widespread adoption of the Metaverse will be “easier” if Web2 companies integrate the tech with their products and services.

Speaking to Cointelegraph during the Korea Blockchain Week (KBW) on Aug. 8, Seo suggested that Web3 Metaverse projects generally have issues attracting a mainstream audience, as normal people often have a hesitancy to use new technology from companies that they have never heard of.

“If new ideas are combined with Web2 platforms like [social media app] Kakao, especially in South Korea, there's accessibility to these new ideas for new services that could be easier than just starting from scratch.”

“Even though it's hard, adapting Web3 technologies to Web2 platforms could be a way to bring mass adoption,” he explained.

Klaytn’s blockchain is primarily geared towards hosting Metaverse, GameFi, and creator economy applications, and is one of the biggest projects of its type in South Korea.

During a presentation at KBW, Seo said the team is hoping to scale up its transaction throughput and while also bringing the cost of transaction fees down.

“We're smart enough to know that people are still hesitating about using this platform because anyway, they have to pay something right. So we believe that gas fees should be as low as possible. So they can have the people enter this area. That's our thought. And that's why we are trying to reduce the gas prices,” he said.

Seo also revealed that Klaytn will roll out an open-source Metaverse package with tools for builders to foster development on the blockchain later this year.

[Klaytn at #KBW2022]

We hope you enjoyed Sam Seo's Keynote speech, here's a short recap of what he shared:

Why choose #Klaytn
Open Source package for the #Metaverse
Upcoming events #KlayDevDay #Klaymakers22
Klaytn's 2022 Roadmap pic.twitter.com/jukNUne0Mr
— Klaytn (@klaytn_official) August 8, 2022

Vitalik: Layer-2 scaling will make crypto payments ‘make sense’ again — KBW 2022

August 8, 2022 Coin Telegraph

Bitcoin Payments

“It's a vision that has been, I think, forgotten a little bit and I think one of the reasons why it has been forgotten is basically because it got priced out of the market,” Vitalik Buterin said.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has argued that crypto payments will once again “make sense” as transaction costs will soon fall to fractions of a cent due to layer-2 rollups.

The Cointelegraph team currently on the ground at Korea Blockchain Week (KBW) quoted Buterin as stating that the final hurdle to getting transactions down to fractions of a cent at scale is blockchain data compression.

He pointed to “solid work happening” with roll-ups at the moment such as Optimism’s layer-2 scaling solution for Ethereum, which has worked to get the size and cost of data in blockchain transactions down by introducing zero byte compression.

“So today with roll ups, transaction fees are generally somewhere between $0.25, sometimes $0.10, and in the future with roll ups with all of the improvements to efficiency that I talked about. The transaction costs could go down to $0.05, or even maybe as low as $0.02. So much cheaper, much more affordable, and a complete game changer.”

Despite primarily functioning as a speculative store of value, Buterin emphasized the key use case of Bitcoin (BTC) presented in its white paper from 2008 was to provide a “peer-to-peer electronic cash system” that was cheaper than traditional payment methods.

However, while that was true up until 2013 according to Buterin, this became no longer the case in 2018 when adoption increased and blockchain transactions became too expensive.

“It's a vision that has been, I think, forgotten a little bit and I think one of the reasons why it has been forgotten is basically because it got priced out of the market,” he said.

In the Ethereum co-founder’s view, BTC and other assets will soon be able to provide this use case once again as scaling solutions — such as the lightning network in the case of BTC — gradually bring the costs down to fractions of a cent.

Crypto payment use cases

Buterin outlined a couple of different areas that cheap crypto transaction will be particularly important. Firstly he pointed to “lower income countries or places where the existing financial system is not very effective,” as it will give citizens access to vital payments structure over the internet, something which is already adopted despite the cost for international remittances.

Secondly, he noted that in the context of Ethereum, cheap crypto transactions will also help ramp up adoption for non-financial applications such as domain name system (DNS) servers, humanity proof of attendance protocols and Web3 account management services.

“You need to actually send a transaction to create a DNS name, you need to actually send the transaction to recover your account, you need to actually send a transaction to meet some of these adaptations. If doing each of those operations costs like $11, then people are not going into it.”

“Scalability isn't just like some boring thing where you just need like cost numbers go down scalability, I think actually enables and unlocks entirely new classes of applications,” he added.

Korea Blockchain Week

Crypto payment use cases

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