Crypto venture fund giant Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) has highlighted that development and demand on Ethereum are “unmatched” despite the network’s high transaction fees. The firm does warn, however, that its “popularity is also a double-edged sword,” given that Ethereum prioritizes decentralization over scaling, resulting in competing blockchains stealing market share with “promises of better performance and lower fees.” The comments came via a blog post introducing a16z’s 2022 “State of Crypto” report, with the firm’s data scientist Daren Matsuoka, head of protocol design and engineering Eddy Lazzarin, general partner Chris Dixon and head of content Robert Hackett all working together …

The contentious Otherdeed for Otherside nonfungible token (NFT) floor price has dropped below its mint price to 2.45 Ether (ETH), worth about $5,713 at the time of writing, as other major collections are also getting hit. The Otherdeed for Otherside collection from Yuga Labs, makers of the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) collection, was a highly anticipated NFT mint for land in their upcoming metaverse platform. Users paid for the land with 20 Apecoin (APE) tokens and paid gas fees in Ether (ETH). The Otherside is now below mint price (including gas)... If you got gassed out or failed to …

The nonfungible token (NFT) collections by Yuga Labs have experienced a dramatic downturn in transaction volume over the past 24 hours. Otherdeed is down just over 50%, Mutant Ape Yacht Club (MAYC) is down 46% and Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) is down 25%, according to data from NFT market tracker NFTGo. Over the past 24 hours, general NFT market activity has mirrored Yuga’s collections, where volume has dropped 31% to $113 million. However, prices have not yet followed suit, as the total NFT market cap has dropped marginally to $19.5 billion in the same period. Those collections comprise three …

Collectors of nonfungible tokens (NFTs) have already sent more than $37 billion in value to NFT marketplaces this year as of Sunday, a figure that nearly exceeds the total amount in all of 2021. According to a report from Chainalysis, investors sent $40 billion worth of cryptocurrency to smart contracts associated with NFT collections and marketplaces throughout 2021. Since the beginning of last year, NFT transaction volume has grown considerably, but the overall growth of the industry has been inconsistent. The report outlines that NFT transaction volume occurs sporadically and has been in a downturn since mid-February. The NFT market …

Coinbase, one of the largest crypto exchanges by volume, opened its beta nonfungible token (NFT) marketplace to the public on Wednesday, with on-chain data showing a maximum of 150 total transactions on the day and a $75,000 volume. The transactions captured by Dune Analytics show the total amount which took place through the 0x Protocol, the infrastructure behind Coinbase’s marketplace. While not all transactions are guaranteed to be from Coinbase since 0x announced its support for NFTs in January, it has yet to announce any other partners apart from Coinbase. The number pales into insignificance compared to expectations arising from …

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin believes that layer-2 transaction fees need to be under $0.05 to be “truly acceptable.” Buterin made the latest comments in response to a Twitter post from the “Bankless” podcast host Ryan Sean Adams, who shared a screenshot of the average transaction fees for eight eight Ethereum layer-2 platforms. The data is from L2fees.info, a website that compares the cost of Ethereum’s layer-1 network in comparison to layer-2s built on top of it. The only layer-2 to meet Buterin’s desired transaction fee under $0.05 is the Metis Network at $0.02, however, a token swap on the platform …

The crypto community and Wall Street converged last week in Nassau, Bahamas, to discuss the future of digital assets during SALT’s Crypto Bahamas conference. The SkyBridge Alternatives Conference (SALT) was also co-hosted this year by FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency exchange. Anthony Scaramucci, founder of the hedge fund SkyBridge Capital, kicked off Crypto Bahamas with a press conference explaining that the goal behind the event was to merge the traditional financial world with the crypto community: “Crypto Bahamas combines the crypto native FTX audience with the SkyBridge asset management firm audience. We are bringing these two worlds together to create a …

Ethereum has proven to be a formidable force. While its major issues have spawned other coins aimed at addressing them, Ethereum looks to shed its old skin with the release of Ethereum 2.0. Despite the fact that Ethereum was created six years after Bitcoin (BTC) and the introduction of blockchain technology, the digital asset Ether (ETH) has grown to be the second most valuable cryptocurrency in terms of market capitalization, surpassing coins such as Litecoin (LTC), Ripple (XRP), Dash (DASH) and Monero (XMR), which were launched before it. The technology behind the Ethereum blockchain is the primary reason for its …

The Solana network faced its seventh outage on Saturday, resulting in a downtime of over seven hours. The developer team has released an outage report, along with three key mitigation steps to make the network more stable. The network outage on Solana was caused by a significant surge in the number of transactions due to nonfungible token (NFT) minting bots. The bots used Candy Machine, a popular application used by Solana NFT projects to launch collections. The transaction volume reached six million per second, overflowing individual nodes with 100 Gbps data. As a result, validators ran out of data memory, …

The Solana network suffered a seven-hour outage overnight between Saturday and Sunday due to a large number of transactions from the nonfungible token (NFT) minting bots. A record-breaking four million transactions, or 100 gigabits of data per second, congested the network causing validators to be knocked out of consensus resulting in Solana going dark at roughly 8:00 pm UTC on Saturday. It wasn’t until seven hours later on Sunday, 3:00 am UTC that validators were able to successfully restart the main network. Validator operators successfully completed a cluster restart of Mainnet Beta at 3:00 AM UTC, following a roughly 7 …

The roughly five million residents of the Central African Republic, or CAR, will now reportedly be able to use Bitcoin in addition to the country's franc as legal tender. According to a Wednesday report from news outlet Agence France-Presse, Central African Republic President Faustin-Archange Touadéra has signed a bill into law establishing a regulatory framework for the use of cryptocurrency in the country as well as adopting Bitcoin (BTC) as legal tender. Obed Namsio, the president’s chief of staff, said the move was aimed at making the CAR one of the “boldest and most visionary” in the world. #BREAKING Central …

The native token prices from multiple projects that employ Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution Optimism have spiked around 20% amid rumors that the network will soon launch a token and airdrop it to the community. Optimism is a layer-2 scaling solution that utilizes Optimistic Rollups to process a high amount of transactions off of the Ethereum blockchain. The project touts that it can operate smart contracts five- to 500-times cheaper than Ethereum’s layer 1. According to DefiLlama, the platform currently accounts for $496.47 million worth of total value locked (TVL) from 30 different projects that use it to scale such as …