BNB Chain has announced the launch of a technical roadmap designed with the intention to enhance the network's decentralized structure, infrastructural capacity for sidechains and potential for developer-built decentralized applications (DApps) to improve performance and efficiency. Announced at the BNB Chain Revelation Summit, the document also revealed the latest iteration of the Most Valuable Builder incubation programme for aspiring Web3 software engineers. In February this year, Binance Chain and Binance Smart Chain were merged to form what is now referred to as BNB Chain, a multi-chain infrastructure layer supporting the new ecosystem, as well as BNB governance mechanisms. Related: Binance …

The plane touches down and comes to a halt. Heading to passport control, one of the passengers stops at a vending machine to buy a bottle of soda — but the device is absolutely indifferent to all of their credit cards, cash, coins and everything else. All of that is part of a foreign economy as far as the machine is concerned, and as such, they can’t buy even a droplet of Coke. In the real world, the machine would have been quite happy with a Mastercard or a Visa. And the cash exchange desk at the airport would have …

Chainalysis, a blockchain analytics provider, has announced its $170 million Series F funding round. The fresh funding succeeded its $100 million raise back in June 2021 and more than doubly exceeded its valuation of $4.2 billion at the same time. The raise was led by Singaporean sovereign wealth fund GIC and further participated in by investors Accel — who previously led Chainalysis' $30 million Series B round in 2019, as well as Blackstone, Dragoneer and FundersClub. Bank of New York Mellon and Emergence Capital also participated in the round as first entries. According to the announcement, the funds will be …

Interoperability network Interlay has released a 21-page technical whitepaper, titled XCC: Theft-Resilient and Collateral-Optimized Cryptocurrency-Backed Assets, advocating for the imminent development of cross-blockchain interoperability solutions to unlock a plethora of potential within the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem. As a Polkadot parachain, Interlay is focusing its efforts on opening pathways of communication and interaction between Bitcoin’s currency-native ecosystem, with the wider functionalities of the DeFi space with networks such as Ethereum and Polkadot. The newly-launched XCC protocol — serving as an additional layer of XCLAIM which was introduced to the market in 2018 — enables greater asset sovereignty during cross-chain activities …

With so many blockchain networks appearing all the time, new or even experienced crypto enthusiasts may feel overwhelmed when it comes to deciding which are the best to invest in. In this guide, we’ll outline the most important aspects of any blockchain project, and why one should pay close attention to such details when assessing the different chains on the crypto market. Use case Arguably the most important part of any blockchain project is its use case. What is the project’s reason for existing? Is the project here to enhance payment processing? To improve on a business supply chain or …

Open-source blockchain platform Polkadot announced the launch of its first parachains (or parallelized chain) aimed at improving the interoperability between multiple blockchains. According to the announcement, the Polkadot team invested five years into the development of the parachains, which were allocated to teams via auctions, namely, Acala, Moonbeam, Parallel Finance, Astar, and Clover. With individual blockchains running in parallel within the Polkadot ecosystem, the auction winners will be able to lease slots on Polkadot's Relay Chain for up to 96 weeks at a time. Developed by Polkadot Founder and Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood, the Relay Chain helps in coordinating the …

The Uniswap community has approved the governance proposal that sought deployment of Uniswap v3 contracts over the Polygon PoS Chain. The approval comes in the form of an on-chain vote that saw the participation of over 72.6 million users from the community. Uniswap Labs announced to deploy Uniswap v3 contracts based on the votes that reflected over 99.3% approval consensus and will be supported by a $20 million fund — $15 million for long-term liquidity mining campaign and $5 million for the overall adoption of Uniswap on Polygon (MATIC). The Uniswap community has voted to deploy v3 on @0xPolygon through …

Cross-chain protocols are continuing to face challenges, with Synapse Bridge narrowly averting a multi-million exploit. On Nov. 7, Synapse Bridge announced on Discord they had prevented a hacker from draining approximately $8 million USD from the Avalanche Neutral Dollar (nUSD) Metapool. The hacker attempted to exploit a vulnerability using the bridge to transfer assets from Polygon (MATIC) to Avalanche (AVAX). Synapse is a cross-chain bridge designed to facilitate swaps and transfers between a range of layer-one and layer-two protocols using an automated market maker (AMM). Synapse Bridge stated: “Over the past 16 hours, we encountered and discovered a contract bug …

American social media giant, Reddit, may soon convert users’ karma points into Ethereum-based (ERC-20) tokens and onboard 500 million new crypto users in the process, according to a newly hired Reddit engineer. A series of tweets made by Reddit engineer, Rahul, highlights Reddit’s efforts to improve user interaction through various cryptocurrency initiatives. As Cointelegraph reported in July 2021, the platform had launched its own layer-2 rollup using Arbitrum technology for its rewards points, named Community Points. According to the website: “Your Community Points exist on the blockchain, independently of Reddit, where they can only be controlled by you (just like …

“Yahoo users will not be able to interact via mail with Google email (Gmail) users,” — If tomorrow’s headlines sounded like this, the earth would come to a halt. This headline shall never see the light for all the right reasons. However, blockchain tech and its favorite son, decentralized finance (DeFi), are heading towards this rabbit hole. Siloed blockchains with no window for external communication are dominating the nascent space. Interconnectivity is elementary and synonymous with the primitive human quality of being social. From the days of the barter system, transfer and exchange have been the two core practices on …

A major consensus bug has affected more than half the Ethereum network’s nodes, causing those running older versions of Geth to split from the main network. According to Ethereum software developer Marius van der Wijden, an unknown individual or group exploited a vulnerability affecting earlier versions of Geth, one of Ethereum's software clients. According to the developer, Geth clients and Ethereum nodes running software v1.10.7 or earlier are at risk of splitting from the network. “Users that run validators need to update their nodes quickly (in the next 10h I think) as they would otherwise vote on invalid committees," said …

Long stuck in the shadows of Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH) finally took hold of the market in 2020 during the decentralized finance summer. Designed to recreate traditional financial systems with fewer middlemen, DeFi is now being used across lending, borrowing, and the buying and selling of tokens. The majority of these decentralized applications (DApps) are run on Ethereum, which saw activity on the network increase during 2020. This activity also trended upwards due to yield farming, also known as liquidity mining, which enables holders to generate rewards with their crypto capital. But as activity on Ethereum increased, so too did …