Author: Matthew Willemsen

Matthew Willemsen is an Australian-based news journalist who covers the latest advancements relating to cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology. Upon graduating with a Bachelor of Business from Monash University - majoring in both accounting and economics - Matthew soon grew fascinated in blockchain technology, becoming enthralled by its potentially disruptive social and economic implications. You can reach him at willemsen.mb@gmail.com or on Twitter @mwill_crypto.

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Hackathon Winner DEX.AG Launches on Settle App Store, Giving Crypto Traders Best Available Price

The launch

The fervour surrounding non-custodial exchanges, or decentralized exchanges (DEXes) – as they are commonly referred to as – has eased dramatically in recent times, along with the price of bitcoin (BTC), ether (ETH), and the cryptocurrency market in general. A project called DEX.AG, however, is out to rekindle the haemorrhaging DEX narrative. That journey started today with the launch of DEX.AG’s alpha version.

Introduced via an announcement from Settle – a web-native operating system for decentralized finance – DEX.AG represents an app that lets users “instantly compare prices across decentralized exchanges.” Regarding why this is important for crypto traders and investors, the announcement went on to state that:

Until now, there hasn’t been an easy way to compare prices on different DEXes. It’s cumbersome to navigate each DEX’s interface and remember each price, and by time you finish checking them all, your opportunity may have slipped away.”

You see, by aggregating pricing data (i.e., the reason for the “AG” in DEX.AG) from various DEXes, the need for the user to onerously navigate between multiple DEX interfaces in search for the best price is eliminated. In many ways, DEX.AG’s solution is similar to what the likes of Fetch and Totle are offering.

At launch, DEX.AG users can compare prices between the following seven DEXes: Uniswap, DDEX, LedgerDex, Kyber, IDEX, Paradex and Radar Relay. Notably, the latter two are the most heavily used relayers built on 0x (ZRX). At the time of writing, they account for a collective 96.6 percent of trading volume (USD) over the past 24 hours – Paradex (70.2%) and Radar Relay (26.4%) – according to data retrieved from 0x Tracker.

As for what can currently be traded on DEX.AG, users have the option to buy and/or sell 23 different crypto tokens, all of which are paired against ether (ETH). Most of these – such as Augur (REP), FunFair (FUN) and 0x (ZRX) – are crypto tokens native to Ethereum-enabled ecosystems, whilst others – like Dai (DAI) and True USD (TUSD) – are stablecoins.

Earlier in January, Settle declared DEX.AG the winner of Settle Virtual Hackathon 2 (SVH2), which ran from November 26 until December 10. For their efforts, DEX.AG’s creator Timur Badretdinov won $3,000 worth of ETH.

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Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC) Goes Live on Ethereum Blockchain; Much-Needed Liquidity to DEX, DeFi Sectors

water

Well, they left it to the penultimate day of the month, but those behind the Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC) project have made good on their promise of a January launch after today saw the ERC20-compliant version of the bitcoin (BTC) cryptocurrency go live on the Ethereum (ETH) mainnet.

For those that need reminding, the Wrapped Bitcoin project was unveiled late last October by its three founding projects – Kyber Network (KNC), BitGo and (the formerly named) Republic Protocol (REN). It was borne out of a desire to add much-needed liquidity to the Ethereum network; a problem that has negatively impacted the user-experience on various Ethereum-powered non-custodial exchanges (e.g. IDEX, ForkDelta, Ethfinex Trustless) and lending platforms (e.g. Dharma, Lendroid, Compound).

Looking to the orderbook – where all minting and burning of WBTC is recorded – the first day of WBTC’s existence on the Ethereum mainnet has seen the supply of the bitcoin-backed ERC20 token balloon to 65.42, at the time of writing – the equivalent of $223,169 (USD).

Notably 50 of this 65.42 WTBC – or, 76.4 percent – was minted by Kyber early on Monday morning. Together with crypto liquidity firm Prycto – who has minted 12.18 WBTC – the two projects account for a whopping 95 percent of all WBTC in existence.

Whilst there is an impressive total of 24 launch partners for the WBTC project, just seven of these are so-called ‘merchants’, that is, the projects responsible for interacting with custodians so as to mint and burn WBTC and provide KYC/AML for users.

With Kyber and Prycto being two of these seven, the remaining five are as follows: AirSwap (AST), Dharma, Ethfinex, GOPAX, Ren (formerly Republic Protocol), and Set Protocol. Once these projects begin minting, expect to see the WBTC network total increase significantly. Currently, the only destination available for these seven projects to go to create wrapped tokens is WBTC co-founding corporation, BitGo.

It will be interesting to note the rate of adoption WBTC sees moving forward. Certainly, it appears a godsend for the nascent open finance space running on Ethereum, not to mention the numerous non-custodial exchanges that, due primarily to debilitated liquidity, are seeing all-time lows in terms of USD traded value – according to the most recent issue (i.e., v3.3) of Diar.

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Leading Crypto Projects, dApp Devs Flock to San Francisco to Talk Ethereum, Web3 at The Graph’s Graph Day

Golden Gate bridge in San Francisco

Some of the most innovative minds in the crypto industry are uniting at Graph Day today, where the future of the emerging Web3 movement will be explored from a range of perspectives such as that of software developers, investors, and community members.

Located at the Grand Theater in the heart of San Francisco, Graph Day, which is organized by The Graph, an indexing and query protocol for Web3 using GraphQL, has been in the making for several months.

Speaking at the one-day event are members from various San Francisco-headquartered projects, including Josh Fraser (Co-Founder & CTO, Origin Protocol), Alex Skidanov (CEO, Near Protocol), Robert Leshner (CEO, Compound).

Many others are flying in from all over the United States to present at Graph Day, too. Specifically, these people are: Lane Rettig (Independent Core Developer, eWASM), Eric Tang (Co-Founder & CTO, Livepeer), Esteban Ordano (Co-Founder & CTO, Decentraland), Tara Tan* (Venture Studio Lead, IDEO CoLab) and Josh Nussbaum (Founding Partner, Compound VC).

Of course, it couldn’t be Graph Day without some representation from The Graph team. The following three members from the team are presenting: Yani Tal (Project Lead), Brandon Ramirez (Research Lead) and Rodrigo Coelho (Community Lead). Additionally, Jannis Pohlmann (Tech Lead) will feature alongside Tal and Ramirez in will be a 30-minute-long, Q&A-style panel.

In his keynote presentation earlier in the day, Yaniv Tal unveiled The Graph’s new explorer user-interface and hosted service, according to the below tweet from Ramirez.

The explorer – which lets users discover so-called subgraphs – has been released in collaboration with the following seven Web3- and Ethereum-oriented projects: Dharma, Compound, Uniswap, Ethereum Name Service (ENS), Origin Protocol, Decentraland (MANA), and Livepeer (LPT). The page for each of the seven subgraphs contains a playground that lets you query that subgraph’s data with GraphQL, a query language for APIs and a runtime for fulfilling those queries with your existing data.

*According to her LinkedIn profile, Tan is in fact based out of San Francisco. IDEO CoLab, however, is headquartered in Massachusetts.

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Enjin (ENJ) Welcomes 2nd Most Popular Ethereum ERC721 dApp To Its Gaming Blockchain Ecosystem

looking at phone

Blockchain game development platform Enjin (ENJ) has been selected by augmented reality (AR) app developer VREX Lab as the host network of fast-rising Dyverse, a blockchain-based marketplace dApp that allows users to collect, breed, and play with 3D crypto-collectible monsters – called Kydys – which can be plugged into VREX Lab’s AR video messaging app, Kydy.

The news that VREX Lab would be collaborating with Enjin to integrate Kydys and other items and characters from Enjin’s partner games (i.e., the Enjin Multiverse) into the Dyverse marketplace and the Enjin Wallet dropped on Thursday via this announcement. In it, the AR app developer also revealed that they had launched the blockchain-based Dyverse platform on Product Hunt, a popular website that lets users share and discover new products.

Dyverse Soars to 2nd Among Ethereum NFTs

The dual-announcements from VREX Lab regarding Dyverse appear to have sparked interest within the budding crypto-gaming and crypto-collectible community. Looking to leading Ethereum block explorer Etherscan, Dyverse is ranked – at the time of writing – second for 24-hour transfers in and out of smart contracts that comply with ERC-721 (i.e., Ethereum’s standard for non-fungible tokens (NFTs)).

Helping convey the significance of Dyverse’s second-place ranking, Etherscan tracks a total of 998 ERC-721 token contracts. The only dApp responsible for more transfers is the highly popular, heavily funded CryptoKitties, which has recorded 4,636 transfers over the past 24 hours (vs. 979 for Dyverse).

Enjin CEO Teases Upcoming Crypto Exchange Feature

Despite being busy working with South Korea- and China-headquartered VREX Lab to integrate the Dyverse marketplace dApp, there remains plenty down the short-term pipeline for the development of Enjin’s own product suite.

Indeed, early Thursday evening saw Maxim Blagov (CEO, Co-Founder & Creative Director) tweet that soon, users will be able to “use the Enjin Mobile Wallet to seamlessly exchange hundreds of trading pairs.” Included are Enjin’s very own Enjin Coin (ENJ), as well as ether (ETH), bitcoin (BTC), litecoin (LTC) and numerous ERC-20-compliant tokens.

The release of this exchange feature, according to Blagov’s tweet, will “all [be] thanks to the world’s first native, decentralized, in-app multi-exchange integration,” enabled by Kyber Network (KNC), Bancor (BNT) and Changelly.

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Blockchain Tech Startup Cred Launches CredEarn Financial Product; Earn 10% APY on Bitcoin (BTC) Loans

watering plant

A new financial solution called CredEarn has launched today, and it allows holders of various assets – including cryptocurrencies bitcoin (BTC), ether (ETH) and XRP (XRP) – to earn interest on their holdings.

The company behind the CredEarn innovation is blockchain-powered global lending network Cred, whose ERC20-compliant LBA token can be used for accessing and using Cred platform services – which eventually will include crypto-to-crypto lending.

The only way to access CredEarn is via the exchange feature offered through Uphold, a fintech startup that, along with Cred and two other blockchain-friendly entities (i.e., Brave and Blockchain at Berkeley), founded the Universal Protocol alliance last August (see: whitepaper v5.3).

The announcement – made jointly by Dan Schatt (Co-Founder & President, Cred LLC) and J.P. Thieriot (CEO, Uphold) – was broadcast to the public via a Periscope livestream early Thursday evening. In highlighting just how significant the launch of CredEarn is for asset holders around the world, Schatt stated that:

For the first time in 183 countries around the world, Uphold customers now have the opportunity to earn on their crypto and several [other] digital assets.”

Regarding the annual percentage yield (APY) being offered through CredEarn, Uphold members will earn varying amounts based on the type of digital asset they decide to loan to Cred. Unsurprisingly, the largest APY (i.e., 10%) relates to BTC-denominated loans. Other APYs currently offered through CredEarn are 5% (XRP) and 3% (ETH, USD, EUR, and GOLD). The minimum earn period is six months with the option to renew in six-month increments at the term end. Interest payments are made quarterly.

Whilst the United States is not one of the 183 countries CredEarn is available in at the time of launch, Uphold stated on their official Twitter account that the Cred team “is working on” making their new product available to U.S. residents. They stopped short of providing a timeframe, however, adding that such a development is “coming soon!” Wording found in Uphold’s FAQ section was somewhat clearer, with this answer revealing CredEarn is currently expected to be made available “to the U.S. market in the coming months.”

CryptoCoinSpy readers can watch the full replay of Thursday evening’s Periscope livestream below:

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Top Gitcoin Grantee ‘Burner Wallet’ Ships v2.2; Adds On-Chain, Encrypted Chat, Uniswap-Powered Exchange

boat

In a video uploaded to YouTube earlier today, software engineer Austin Griffith (Director of Research, Gitcoin) demonstrated version 2.2 of his Ethereum-powered Burner Wallet.

The upgrade allows users to send encrypted on-chain messages to one another, as well as import their private key. Additionally, a fully functional xDai-to-DAI-to-ETH exchange was made available in the v2.2 update. Enabling such a feature is Ethereum Foundation Wave II grantee Uniswap, a protocol for automated token exchange on Ethereum.

The Burner Wallet runs on the xDai sidechain from POA Network (POA), an Ethereum-based platform offering an open-source framework for smart contracts. What does the Burner Wallet actually let you do, though? As Griffith explains:

One mobile phone can send DAI to another in 5 seconds with a simple QR code scan without any wallet download, this works on mobile web browsers.”

The exchange function of the Burner Wallet – demonstrated by Griffith in today’s video (shown below) – works regardless of whether or not the user has MetaMask installed; removing a demanding requirement that has continuously seen otherwise curious laypeople refrain from interacting with the Ethereum/web3 ecosystem.

At the time of writing, the Burner Wallet has attracted the largest amount of crowdfunding on Gitcoin’s Gitcoin Grants feature. Unveiled earlier this week, Gitcoin Grants allows anyone to commit recurring token contributions (i.e., made possible by the EIP-1337 Ethereum standard for subscription payments) toward their favourite open-source software projects within the Ethereum ecosystem.

Indicative of just how much the community values the need for a user-friendly solution like the Burner Wallet, Griffith has managed to attract 1,349 DAI in funding within a couple of days, surpassing his monthly goal of 1,000 DAI.

Notable Burner Wallet funders include Igor Barinov (Tech Lead, POA Network), Kevin Owocki (Founder, Gitcoin), Michael Dunworth (Co-Founder & CEO, Wyre) and Richard Brown (Head of Core Community, MakerDAO).

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NEO to Ethereum: NKN Seeking “Improved Liquidity” as Token Swap Announced

water ripple

The team behind NKN (NKN) – described as “a new generation of highly scalable, self-evolving and self-incentivized blockchain network infrastructure” in its whitepaper – have proposed a one-to-one token swap from the extant NEP-5-compliant NKN token to one that is compliant with the Ethereum network’s ERC-20 standard.

NKN’s decision, according to their announcement published on Friday, was “based on feedback from community members, institutional investors and leading digital asset exchanges.” Without knowing for certain, one would suspect that much of this feedback concerned a lack of liquidity regarding NKN’s token. Indeed, NKN made a point of suggesting “improved liquidity” would come about as a result of the token swap.

Until today, just five cryptocurrency exchanges – gate.io, Switcheo, BCEX, Bitrue, and LATOKEN – had listed NKN’s NEP-5-compliant token. For one reason or another, a lack of liquidity appears a common problem facing projects who decided to conduct their initial coin offering (ICO) on top of the NEO blockchain.

When one takes a look at the listed digital assets on top-tier crypto exchanges like Binance, Bithumb, Huobi Global and Coinbase, the dearth of NEP-5-compliant tokens quickly becomes telling.

It is worth noting that the liquidity of the NEP-5 NKN token – a so-called ‘placeholder’ token (i.e., another token swap will occur once NKN launches on mainnet (planned for June 2019)) – was close to being a non-issue for the NKN team and its investors.

Indeed, last July, NKN featured in the controversial eighth round of Binance’s Community Coin of the Month event whereby Polymath (POLY) was declared the winner despite tallying less votes than each of Mithril (MITH), NKN (NKN), and Libra Credit (LBA).

NKN stated on Friday that NKN token holders can swap to the ERC-20 variety up until March 31st, pending any change “due to demand.” Importantly, holders of the current NEP-5-compliant token are not required to partake in the token swap. For those that wish to, we encourage you to check out this step-by-step guide created by NKN.

The NKN team also reinforced that, because the optional token swap is to be executed at a ratio of one-to-one, “there [will be] no change to total number of NKN token issued or token economics.”

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WBTC’s Ethereum-powered Bitcoin “on track” for mid-January launch as more blockchain startups lend support

water

A community-driven initiative aiming to bring Bitcoin (BTC), and potentially other cryptocurrencies, to the Ethereum (ETH) network has updated the public on its progress for the first time since being announced.

For those unaware, the initiative, dubbed Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC), was unveiled in late October by its three founding projects – Kyber Network (KNC), BitGo and Republic Protocol (REN).

The idea was born out of a need to solve a pain point of the Ethereum network, that is, a general lack of liquidity; a problem that has negatively impacting the user-experience on various Ethereum-powered decentralized exchanges and lending platforms.

Count us in

It was evident by reading through today’s announcement, authored by Anton Buenavista (Developer, Kyber Network), that the ecosystem has indeed rallied behind the WBTC project; indicating just how pressing Ethereum’s need for an injection of liquidity really is.

At the time of its unveiling almost two months ago, WBTC had already attracted a host of launch partners – sixteen to be precise. These included some of the most prominent projects in the Ethereum ecosystem such as MakerDAO (MKR), Gnosis (GNO) and Dharma.

Today’s announcement revealed that interest in WBTC – which is anticipated to go live in mid-January – has only strengthened ever since, with the following six teams now also on-board as launch partners: OmiseGO (OMG), dYdX, Loopring (LRC), GOPAX, bZx and TheOcean.

Brace yourselves, WBTC-related announcements are coming

With WBTC going live in a matter of weeks, expect to see a blitz of announcements from Ethereum-powered projects coming out. As per today’s announcement on Kyber Network’s blog, each of DDEX, IDEX, RadarRelay and AirSwap (AST) have committed to supporting WBTC trading pairs from launch date.

Additionally, fellow launch partners Dharma and Compound will have support for WBTC integrated on their respective financial dApps upon its launch. Another member of the budding DeFi movement, Set Protocol, has agreed to support WBTC, too, when it launches on mainnet at some stage next quarter.

Kyber Network used the announcement to reveal that its KyberSwap product will list WBTC once it launches. What’s more, they “have developed the implementation of a new trading algorithm to support WBTC on the Kyber reserve;” just one of the various initiatives Kyber Network’s developers have completed to help spur along adoption of the WBTC ecosystem.

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Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin YOLOs it, Turns ‘Giver of Ether’ With $100,000 ETH Donation to Prysmatic Labs

yolo on fist

The boy genius behind Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, has spontaneously sent 1,000 ether (ETH) – the equivalent of $102,950 – to a wallet address belonging to Prysmatic Labs, a team of blockchain engineers pivotal toward any would-be future success of the Ethereum network.

Prompting the generous donation from Buterin was, of all things, a Twitter discussion between (amongst others) he, SpankChain’s Ameen Soleimani and Prysmatic Labs’ Preston Van Loon.

The discourse came about by way of Mythos Capital’s Ryan Adam’s sharing of a video uploaded today by one of the leading crypto investment funds, Multicoin Capital. In the latter stages of the video – a 46-minute conversation between Multicoin’s Tushar Jain and Fred Wilson – the prominent venture capitalist voiced concern with the seemingly lethargic progress being made by developers working on scaling the Ethereum blockchain.

They (the Ethereum Foundation) don’t have enough money. They don’t have enough developers. Their go-to-market strategy is non-existent. They’re not behaving like a company.” – Wilson

In discussing Wilson’s assessment of Ethereum at the time of the New York-based Multicoin Summit (i.e., October 24th), Soleimani shared “I find myself agreeing” with the USV co-founder, and that “Ethereum has taken its lead for granted for too long.”

Having tagged Buterin in his commentary (along with fellow Ethereum Foundation co-founder Joe Lubin), the Russian-Canadian programmer replied with the following tweet:

As further discussion ensued from various members of the crypto community, Van Loon added that Prysmatic Labs’ “biggest distraction… is that [the team is] still working full time for other jobs.” He continues, “even with recent grants (Prysmatic Labs were granted $500,000 in mid-October), it’s hardly enough to take the whole team full time with significant pay cuts and it’s certainly not [enough] even for us to scale the team to where we need it.”

To that, Buterin replied with a late contender for tweet of the year:

Ever the man of the people, Buterin even had some fun with others who swarmed to the Twitter discussion, as seen below where he sent 100 Teleport tokens (TPT) to Daniel Goldman’s address.

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TomoChain (TOMO) Partners Enterprise-Focused OneLedger (OLT) as Blockchain Enters Mainnet

Traffic lights in the city

TomoChain (TOMO), the self-proclaimed “most efficient platform for the token economy”, has today announced a strategic partnership with one of the industry’s budding enterprise blockchain solution providers, OneLedger (OLT).

The intra-industry partnership will see both projects share technical resources, as well as cooperate in “marketing and co-branding activities to help build both ecosystems and communities,” according to an announcement published by the TomoChain team.

Additionally, it was revealed that OneLedger will explore the possibility of developing a OneLedger-TomoChain sidechain. For those unaware, a sidechain is basically a separate blockchain that is attached to a parent (or primary) blockchain via a two-way peg. OneLedger and a handful of other blockchain startups specialize in the development of sidechains.

According to David Cao (Founder & CEO, OneLedger), both TomoChain and OneLedger “have interacted on numerous occasions;” a testament to both startups’ willingness to collaborate with one another, given that TomoChain’s team works predominantly out of Singapore and Vietnam, and OneLedger’s mainly from Canada.

Commenting on what the partnership with OneLedger means for TomoChain was Long Vuong (CEO), who stated that:

It is our honour to work with the talented OneLedger team to facilitate enterprise integration of blockchain technology. Our collaboration goal is to make the process of onboarding blockchain technology more viable and efficient for enterprises. Enterprises are our important clients and partners, and will provide a great gateway for blockchain technology to reach the mass adoption.”

TomoChain Hits Mainnet Milestone

For TomoChain, the OneLedger partnership announcement came just hours before their public blockchain launched on the mainnet at 16:00 (UTC+8) on Friday. Following this, the TOMO ERC-20 token will migrate – at a one-to-one ratio – from the Ethereum blockchain to the TomoChain blockchain’s mainnet, officially becoming native TOMO. The token freeze date will be taking place on Monday (i.e., December 18th) at 14:00 (UTC+8) on Monday.