The recent 256% recovery by Polkadot (DOT) over the past 56 days has been nothing short of spectacular. Although the price is 23% below its $49.80 all-time high from four months ago, the altcoin's $39 billion market capitalization has outperformed Ether (ETH) by 66% over the past thirty days. Polkadot is a blockchain network designed to support various interconnected, application-specific parallel chains — known as parachains. This scalability-focused project breaks transactions up into many shards and processes them in parallel, similar to what ETH 2.0 aims to achieve. Polkadot refers to the entire ecosystem of parachains that plug into a …

Polkadot (DOT) is a blockchain project designed to interconnect sub-chains called parallel chains or parachains. Each application-specific chain built within Polkadot uses the Substrate modular framework, and this is meant to ease the development process. The project has been at the center of developers' and investors' attention for most of 2021, but the sharp market-wide correction on May 19 dealt a heavy blow to the DOT price, and the team has been relatively quiet for the past two months. On July 22, Karura Swap, the first decentralized exchange (DEX) in the Polkadot ecosystem, was launched. The project was created by …

Karura, the Kusama implementation of the Acala protocol, has launched its decentralized exchange (DEX) platform, Karura Swap. According to the announcement issued on Friday, the DEX platform is now live, with KSM/KAR being the first trading pair on the exchange. Per details provided by the announcement, Karura Swap has gone live with an initial total value locked north of $3.4 million, with more than 1,000 unique liquidity providers (LP). The team revealed that the DEX launch highlighted the benefits of its “Bootstrap feature” that provides a liquidity sandbox for trading pairs with the walled environment, reportedly preventing front-running and market …

Eleven projects joined the race when Kusama parachain auctions started on June 15. A few more got in during the latter auctions of the first batch. With impressive gains to the tune of 900,000 KSM (approximately $180 million, at the time of writing), are Kusama auctions still fair and democratic, or is everything already decided by whales? Let’s analyze the available data and attempt to illuminate the current standings. Where we are now As announced on June 8, the first batch of parachain auctions on Kusama includes five events, each of them one week long. During the auction, projects are …

Ethereum (ETH) scalability infrastructure developer Polygon has announced the rollout of a general-purpose, scalable data availability solution called Avail. According to a release issued on Monday, Polygon revealed that Avail will function as a data available tool for execution layers like sidechains, standalone networks, and layer-two protocols. One of the major hurdles for effective blockchain scaling is the data availability problem. Malicious actors can broadcast blocks to the network with incomplete data and other participants will be none the wiser. To tackle this problem, the Polygon team stated that Avail utilizes erasure coding and polynomial commitment to combat data encoding …

A blockchain application platform has proudly unveiled a brand-new interoperability solution at an annual event held for developers. In total, eight roadmap objectives were unveiled by Lisk during the self-titled Lisk.js conference, which was held virtually and live-streamed from a stage in Berlin. One of the most significant of these is cross-chain update transactions, which ensure that information can be carried securely and quickly between networks. Details were also revealed about how sidechains will be introduced to the Lisk ecosystem — and the safeguards in place that ensure sidechains can be terminated if necessary. Support is also going to be …

Karura network has emerged as the winner of the maiden Kusama parachain slot auction. According to an announcement issued on Tuesday, Karura pulled support from over 15,000 entities who staked Kusama (KSM) tokens in favor of adding the decentralized finance hub as the first Kusama parachain. In total, Karura locked up over 500,000 KSM currently valued at $90 million based on the Kusama market price as of the time of writing. Earlier in June, United States crypto trading platform Kraken launched a parachain auction platform for users to support bids for Karura. The first-ever @kusamanetwork parachain slot auction has been …

Polkadot's Kusama council passed Motion 310 on Tuesday, confirming the start of the first slot auction on the Kusama network. According to details shared on the Polkadot governance platform Polkassembly, 13 out of the 19 “seats” on the Kusama council voted in favor of commencing the slot auction process. As previously reported by Cointelegraph, Polkadot and Kusama co-founder Gavin Wood had published a tentative schedule for the Kusama slot auctions back on June 8. These slot auctions will decide the parachains that will be added to the Kusama relay chain. Kusama functions as a canary network for Polkadot, which according …

Polkadot and Kusama creator Gavin Wood has published a tentative schedule for the much-anticipated Kusama parachain slot auctions. According to a blog post posted on Tuesday, the first parachain auction slot will open on June 15 at 12:00 pm Central European Summer Time. The tentative schedule, subject to the approval of the Kusama Council and other KSM stakeholders, will see the maiden parachain auction concluded by June 17, with the bidding period continuing until June 22. If the Kusama Council approves the schedule, then the first-ever parachain slot auction winner could emerge by 11:00 am on June 22. The second …

Two sweltering blocks from the gated entrance of Bitcoin Miami I managed to track down a core contributor for one of the most important projects in decentralized finance (DeFi). Flanked on all sides by clueless Bitcoiners, pseudonymous Yearn Finance vault security specialist "Doggy B" chatted with Cointelegraph about the future of the yield vault protocol — the anoles scurrying by our feet just as oblivious to the alpha being leaked as the maxis chatting about Tony Hawk and Floyd Mayweather. Describing without doxxing is a delicate exercise, but here goes: think a late Che Guevara beard, Unibomber sunglasses, and his …

Playboy, the lifestyle and entertainment brand famous for its distinctive logo — among other things, has launched its first collection of five animated NFTs, on a new NFT market placed dubbed “Raretoshi” which is backed by Blockstream’s Liquid sidechain. The NFTs were unveiled during the lead up to the 2021 Bitcoin Miami conference on June 3: Announcing Reimagining the Rabbit: Miami, Playboy’s first collection of animated NFTs, featuring @aylaelmoussa @mbsjq @rek0de @JonNoorlander- Debuting 6.3.21 at Bitcoin 2021 on the Raretoshi marketplace. Video credit: Ayla El-Moussa. Learn more at https://t.co/2JkHnyq3J9 pic.twitter.com/fUSCHuvYuS — Playboy (@Playboy) June 2, 2021 All of the NFTs …

In a landscape of so-called scaling solutions primarily composed of sidechains and EMV-enabled competitors, one widely anticipated “rollup” layer 2 sidechain for Ethereum has finally arrived. Offchain Labs announced the launch of Abritrum One with a blog post late last night. Arbitrum One is currently live on Ethereum in a beta state, though teams that wish to participate and build implementations with the rollup tech need to apply for access: Introducing Arbitrum One, our mainnet beta: live on Ethereum and open to developers now!https://t.co/3Jca2dZw0D — Arbitrum (@arbitrum) May 29, 2021 The market has long been eager for a true layer …