The Ethereum blockchain's Sepolia testnet has undergone a successful upgrade that simulates the upcoming Shanghai hard fork that is expected to take place in March on the network's mainnet. The "Shapella" upgrade, which combines the names of the upcoming Shanghai and Capella hard forks, was successfully implemented on the testnet on Feb. 28. Sepolia testnet has successfully upgraded to Shapella! Some of the Prsym validators are offline due to the old geth version. They will come online in the next 10 mins! Next stop: Goerli pic.twitter.com/pb43Gq7w9C — terence.eth (@terencechain) February 28, 2023 Shanghai is the fork’s name on the execution …

Solana network faced a slowdown in block production on Fev. 25 following the upgrade in the validator software. The incident resulted in disruptions to transactions and led validators to downgrade the software in an attempt to restore network performance. The technical issue started around 6:00 AM (UTC), leading validators to downgrade to version 1.13 in an effort to restore transactions in the network. The downgrade, however, was not enough to restore Solana to normal operations, forcing the decision to restart the network on v1.13.6. The Solana network is currently restarting after an issue during the upgrade from 1.13 to 1.14 …

A small monetary bounty and an aptitude for coding were all it took to fork the Ordinals protocol to the world’s second-ever cryptocurrency network, Litecoin (LTC) earlier this week, its creator told Cointelegraph. On Feb. 18, an Australian software engineer by the name of Anthony Guerrera posted a repository to GitHub that forked the Bitcoin (BTC) Ordinals protocol to Litecoin. This allowed for nonfungible token (NFT)-like assets on the Litecoin network in much the same way it had made it to Bitcoin earlier in the year. In an interview with Cointelegraph, Guerrera said he was spurred to make a Litecoin …

What is the next upgrade for Ethereum? The Shanghai upgrade is a stepping stone toward making the Ethereum blockchain more scalable. Features like sharding, zero-knowledge (ZK)-SNARKs and more, decorate the Ethereum roadmap. The EIPs included in the Shanghai upgrade will be a good step toward achieving sharding later in 2023. Sharding is extremely important to improve higher transaction throughputs as the chain will be able to perform “parallel processing.” Sharding is expected to be achieved in two stages in 2023 and 2024. The first stage brings better data availability to the Ethereum blockchain. Combining that with the rollup feature that …

The Ethereum Foundation team announced another milestone on the road to the Shanghai upgrade, with the Shapella fork on the Zhejiang testnet moving into the final pre-launch sequence, according to a blog post on Feb 10. The Shapella transition includes "many features," and "most importantly to stakers and the consensus-layer, is the enabling of withdrawals," notes the post, adding that: "Full withdrawals will be available for exited validators, whereas partial withdrawals will be available for active validator balances in excess of 32 ETH." As per the announcement, validators to participate in withdrawals must have a 0x01 execution-layer withdrawal credential. "If …

Stepping into the year 2023, it's time to pause and reflect on the accomplishments and struggles the global crypto community witnessed over the last 365 days. Starting from the very beginning of 2022, no investment strategy could help recover the falling portfolios across traditional and crypto ecosystems. January 2022 inherited a slightly collapsing market, wherein investments made on 2021 all-time high prices resulted in immediate losses. For many, especially the new entrants, falling crypto prices were perceived as an end game. But what went widely unnoticed was the community’s resilience and accomplishments against a global recession, orchestrated attacks and scams …

Solana's developers forked the widely used token liquidity hub Serum, after being compromised by a hack on the bankruptcy exchange FTX on Nov. 11 that led to a series of unauthorized transactions. According to pseudonymous developer Mango Max on Twitter, a "verified build of the same version has been made and deployed" on Nov 12. Additionaly, the upgrade authority and fee revenues "have been changed and are now managed by a multi-sig controlled by a team of trusted developers." Serum (SRM) and megaserum (MSRM) tokens, as well as fee discounts were not changed and were working as before. The development …

Ethereum blockchain shifted from a proof-of-work (PoW) to a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism on Sept. 15, 2022. Along with this move, ETHPoW, a distinct PoW blockchain (basically the old pre-Merge Ethereum) forked from Ethereum's Merge, became live. This forked version of Ethereum aims to maintain the proof-of-work mining process for ETH miners. Any miner is permitted to add a block to the PoW network with the clear stipulation that the first valid block published is the correct one. In reality, more than one legitimate block is occasionally discovered by the network due to the latency of data propagation, creating numerous …

After several delays and some setbacks, Cardano’s long-awaited Vasil upgrade finally went live on Sept. 22. From the outside looking in, the hard fork is designed to help improve the ecosystem’s scalability and general transaction throughput capacity as well as advance Cardano’s decentralized applications (DApps) development capacity. To commemorate the event, an announcement was made by blockchain firm Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK) — which currently oversees the design, building and maintenance of the Cardano platform — just minutes after the development. To obtain a more holistic overview of what the upgrade represents and its potential impact on Cardano (as …

After several months of delays, the Cardano Vasil upgrade and hard fork has finally gone live as of Thursday at 9:44 pm UTC, bringing “significant performance and capability” enhancements to the blockchain. The success of the Cardano mainnet hard fork was announced by blockchain company Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK) on Twitter on Thursday, while others also observed the hard fork tick over in a live Twitter Spaces with Cardano co-founder Charles Hoskinson. #Vasil mainnet HFC event successful! We’re happy to announce that today, at 21:44:00 UTC, the IOG team, in collaboration with the @CardanoStiftung, successfully hard forked the Cardano …

The Cardano Vasil upgrade is set to take place in less than 24 hours on Sept. 22, with the Cardano team noting all three “critical mass indicators” needed to trigger the upgrade are now met. A Sept. 21 update on Twitter by the company behind Cardano, Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK) states within the last 48 hours 13 cryptocurrency exchanges had confirmed their readiness for the hard fork, representing over 87% of Cardano’s (ADA) liquidity. With this latest addition we have met all 3 critical mass indicators: 39 exchanges upgraded (87,59% by liquidity) Over 98% of mainnet blocks are now …

Major cryptocurrency exchanges, FTX and Bybit, are among the first crypto trading platforms to launch spot trading for Ethereum proof-of-work (PoW) tokens. While the Ethereum blockchain has not forked into two separate networks just yet, crypto exchanges are rushing to start trading of the EthereumPoW (ETHW) tokens. At the time of writing, ETHW Fork IOU token is now trading on five exchanges, including the global FTX exchange, the FTX US platform, Bybit, Gate.io and MEXC Global, according to data from CoinGecko. According to the data, FTX is handling more than 80% of ETHW trading, which is estimated to amount to …