Ethereum layer 2 scaling solution StarkWare announced plans to open source its proprietary Starknet Prover under the Apache 2.0 license, which has processed 327 million transactions and minted 95 million nonfungible tokens (NFTs) to date. The prover is the crucial engine Starkware uses to roll up hundreds of thousands of transactions and compress them into a tiny cryptographic proof written on the Ethereum blockchain. “We think of the Prover as the magic wand of Stark technology. It wondrously generates the proofs that allow unimaginable scaling,” said Eli Ben-Sasson, president and co-founder of Starkware. Starkware has faced criticism from the crypto …

With the internal investigation led by Elon Musk identifying censorship-related issues on Twitter, the social platform’s former CEO Jack Dorsey has promoted the idea of a “free and open protocol” for social media. In a post, Dorsey highlighted some potential solutions to the current problems of the Twitter platform. According to the former Twitter CEO, this includes making it resilient from corporate or government control, giving the right to remove content solely to the original author and implementing moderation through algorithmic choice. He explained that: “I’m a strong believer that any content produced by someone for the internet should be …

Matter Labs, the developer behind the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible zkSync, has received major industry backing as it pledges to fully open source its platform — marking the first such initiative for a ZK-rollup technology. Matter Labs confirmed on Nov. 16 that it had closed a $200 million Series C funding round co-led by Blockchain Capital and Dragonfly, with additional participation from LightSpeed Venture Partners, Variant and existing investor Andreessen Horowitz. The company has now raised $458 million in financing across all rounds, including $200 million from BitDAO that’s earmarked for funding ecosystem projects. Founded in 2018, Matter Labs is …

ShapeShift, a noncustodial crypto exchange and decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), has taken additional steps toward complete decentralization by migrating users to a new open-source application — a move the organization said would enhance user mobility. The organization announced that as of Oct. 19, all native web users of the ShapeShift platform have migrated to a decentralized version of the application. The announcement also coincided with the release of a new mobile app that the organization said would provide an “authentic DeFi universe” experience. The new mobile app is said to provide users with additional flexibility, mobility and features when connecting …

Ethereum development company Nethermind has announced it has “transpiled and compiled” decentralized exchange (DEX) Uniswap v3 on “Warp” — a project designed to allow Ethereum users to swap tokens on the more scalable Ethereum layer-2 network StarkNet. The milestone was announced by team lead Jorik Schellekens in an Oct. 9 Medium post. Nethermind describes Warp as a “Solidity to Cairo Transpiler” which enables Ethereum-based projects written in Solidity to transition its codebase onto StarkNet, allowing them to capitalize on cheaper fees. Transpiling is the process of taking source code written in one programming language and transforming it into another language …

Jim Blasko, a crypto enthusiast, has claimed to have unearthed “the official oldest known uploaded copy of Satoshi's Bitcoin” code, originally uploaded in August 2009. In an Oct. 7 post on Facebook, Blasko said he found code dating back prior to the earliest days Satoshi went public with Bitcoin BTC by “using some browser hacking” on open-source software development platform SourceForge, where the cryptocurrency was registered in November 2008. He included claims that it took the BTC creator six months to mine 1 million coins “as block 20,000 wouldn't come until July 22nd 2009 and others like Hal [Finney]” were …

A judge in the Netherlands ruled that Tornado Cash developer Alexey Pertsev has to stay in jail for 90 more days while waiting for charges. Puzzled by the decision, the crypto community rallied to demand the release of the developer. In a Tweet, crypto investo Ryan Adams argued that the developer did something good for the public as he wrote the code for Tornado Cash. The community member then highlighted that "a few bad guys" decided to use Pertsev’s code and now the developer has to suffer the consequences. Apart from Adams, crypto researcher Jill Gunter also noted that there …

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 …

Cryptocurrency mixer Tornado Cash has fully open-sourced its user interface (UI) code — a move its developers say fulfills their mandate of complete decentralization and transparency. Tornado Cash Classic UI became fully open-sourced on Thursday, the protocol’s anonymous developers announced in a Medium blog post. Although the protocol’s UI has been decentralized since 2020, its open sourcing means anyone can analyze Tornado Cash’s UI pools and make pull requests to improve the project. In the software development world, a pull request is when a developer is ready to merge new code changes with the project's main repository. Technically, Tornado Cash’s …

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has donated $4 million worth of USD Coin (USDC) to the University of New South Wales (UNSW) to support the development of a pandemic detection tool. The capital, which equates to roughly 5.3 million Australian dollars, is part of Buterin’s self-described “moonshot anti-COVID effort” dubbed Balvi Filantropic Fund in partnership with the Shiba Inu (SHIB) memecoin project and Crypto Relief. The funds will further support the development of the Shiba Inu Open-Source Intelligence- (OISNT)-based EPIWATCH tool, which utilizes artificial intelligence (AI) and open-source data to create early pandemic warning signs. Created by Kirby Institute professor and …

Whose side are you on? The Ukraine-Russia war is forcing people to answer that question. For some in the crypto community, this can be uncomfortable because if an individual or project stands with the West against Russia, it also means it abides by sanctions. This can be tough to square with crypto/blockchain’s supposed decentralized system and its claims on being borderless, censorship-free and distributed. Take OpenSea, the NFT marketplace, which really isn’t a decentralized project but is often described as such. “OpenSea is a decentralized peer-to-peer marketplace for buying, selling and trading rare digital goods,” according to CoinMarketCap, for instance. …

Bitcoin (BTC) hash rate has returned to all-time highs despite losing a key hash rate contributor. Meanwhile, amid lackluster price action, Block CEO Jack Dorsey confirmed the creation of an open Bitcoin mining system. The BTC space continues to surprise and bewilder critics and fanatics alike. Kazakhstan, the network's second most important BTC mining country, experienced an internet blackout last week due to civil unrest. However, the hash rate faltered no more than 13.4% before regathering to reach all-time highs. As shown in the below data from Glassnode, with the price checking into the $42,000 range yesterday, the mean hash …