Smart Contract

Ethereum 2.0 Deposit Threshold Met: Proof-of-Stake ‘Beacon’ Chain Starts in 7 Days

24/11/2020 by Idelto Editor

The Ethereum network’s ETH 2.0 contract has crossed the threshold needed to initiate the upcoming upgrade. Currently, there’s more 694,368 ether worth over $422 million resting in the contract, as developers hope the proof-of-stake launch will begin on December 1.

At the end of the first week of November, the Ethereum Foundation initiated the first process of the highly anticipated Ethereum 2.0 (ETH 2.0) upgrade specifications, which detailed the initial rules of the genesis phase 0. The genesis phase 0 contract specification noted that there needed to be approximately 524,288 ETH and at least 16,384 validators to invoke the proof-of-stake process.

The requirements needed to kickstart Ethereum 2.0 for December 1, mandated that the threshold be met by November 24, 2020. Additionally, a web portal called Launch Pad was published so users can learn how to be an ETH validator and secure the blockchain.

The requirements needed to spark the genesis phase 0 process were officially completed on the 24th and there’s now 694,368 ether worth $422 million in the contract.

The contract address has seen approximately 16,736 transactions of around 32 ether per transaction. 32 ETH is what is needed to become a validator and earn a stake on the Ethereum chain. At the current exchange rate of $608 per ether, it costs close to $20k per staking validator. Roughly the last 25% of the ether needed to meet the threshold was deposited into the contract in less than a four-hour timespan.

Screenshot from an editorial called “The Genesis of a Beacon Chain” written by Ben Edgington.

Following the deposit milestone, a great number of Ethereum proponents and developers celebrated. “We reached it,” said Ethereum 2.0 R&D member Hsiao-Wei Wang. “Thanks to all the Eth2 teams and the community that wrote the history. And thanks to the Ethereum critics who made us stronger. Don’t forget to update your Eth2 client in a couple days,” Wang added.

The “Eth 2.0 Deposit Contract – Progress Meter Bot” also tweeted about the landmark occasion and stated:

We have liftoff. Thank you to the devs, the researchers, educators, and community members who made this happen. See you on December 1st @ noon UTC.

Many Ethereum supporters also understand that the Ethereum 2.0 genesis phase 0 will initially start with the “Beacon” blockchain, a baby-step that will make it so the upgrade will have less of an impact on the main network. The ETH 2.0 upgrade will start in seven days’ time and the Beacon chain will begin the first of four initial phases.

Estimates say that Ethereum 2.0 validators could earn about 20% in annualized rewards. After the requirements were filled, Ethereum proponent Tom Shaughnessy said that the Ethereum 2.0 launch “got more attention in an hour than every other layer 1 did this entire year put together.”

Ethereum Foundation member Hudson Jameson tweeted about how the Ethereum 2.0 Beacon chain launch will happen the day prior, and what needs to happen in order to create a successful launch.

“The beacon chain marks the beginning of the transition to Eth 2.0, but that doesn’t mean that everything immediately changes,” Jameson wrote. “Eth 2.0 is a multi-year process and the first few pieces of that process won’t heavily affect the current Ethereum mainnet.”

Jameson also stressed that whatever happens, the Ethereum community should be impressed with the Ethereum 2.0 development team. He also explained when he thought the Beacon chain launch would begin.

“My opinion (not an official stance of the Ethereum Foundation) is that we will launch between December 1st and December 5th,” Jameson concluded. “I base this on how quickly deposits are coming in as of the last 48 hours.”

At the time of publication, ethereum (ETH) is trading for $608 per ether, as the token has gained 26% during the last seven days and 49% in the last 30 days.

What do you think about the culmination of the highly anticipated Ethereum 2.0 launch? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.

The post Ethereum 2.0 Deposit Threshold Met: Proof-of-Stake ‘Beacon’ Chain Starts in 7 Days appeared first on Bitcoin News.

Uncollaterized Power: A Makerdao Governance Vote Was Swayed by a Defi Flash Loan

02/11/2020 by Idelto Editor

The Makerdao and the stablecoin DAI has been a popular project in the decentralized finance (defi) space and it’s also had its share of problems. This week the project called Bprotocol leveraged a defi flash loan in order to sway a Makerdao governance vote. The development team behind the Maker project aims to make it harder for problems like defi flash loans going forward.

Since the project’s inception, Makerdao, often referred to as Maker, has been a defi project that has seen a lot of demand. The Maker project is responsible for creating one of the first decentralized stablecoins called DAI, which leverages overcollateralization and oracles to hold a peg.

DAI is used on exchanges and is regularly used within the defi world on various applications like Compound, Uniswap, and Aave. The project has also seen a number of issues over the years and skeptics have questioned the integrity of the Makerdao protocol.

A few examples include the stablecoin having issues holding its $1 peg, as there have been various votes held to address the issue. Then on March 12, 2020, otherwise known as ‘Black Thursday,’ the Maker project had major difficulties when the price of ETH crashed, as many Collateralized Debt Positions (CDP) were ravaged.

This caused the Maker project to get sued in a class action lawsuit, which is still ongoing. This week the crypto community has been complaining about Makerdao’s recent governance ballot, which saw the Bprotocol project sway a Maker governance vote.

Basically, by leveraging the controversial flash loan process, Bprotocol used an uncollaterized loan to borrow roughly $7 million worth of MKR. With the requirement to vote with MKR, the flash loan made it so Bprotocol could influence the poll a great deal.

Another vote is taking place to tackle the issue, so it won’t happen again including raising the amount of MKR needed to apply governance stake. Makerdao’s governance coordinator, ‘Longforwisdom,’ and other community members conversed about the topic in a Maker forum discussion called: “Updates – Flash Loans and securing the Maker Protocol.”

“As promised, I’m providing an update now [that] the current hat exceeded 100k MKR,” Longforwisdom wrote. “As mentioned previously, the contents of this spell are as follows:

A GSM pause delay increase from 12 hours to 72 hours.
The Oracle Freeze Module (OsmMom) will be deauthorized.
The Liquidations Freeze Module / Circuit Breaker (FlipperMom) will be deauthorized.”

The flash loan has Maker community members concerned that a malicious governance attack could severely hurt the project. Increasing the MKR requirement and the deactivation of the two modules may only lead to a temporary bandage.

Alongside this, crypto community members also wonder if other Ethereum-based defi governance protocols can be gamed by an uncollaterized flash loan.

What do you think about the Bprotocol swaying the governance vote using a flash loan? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.

The post Uncollaterized Power: A Makerdao Governance Vote Was Swayed by a Defi Flash Loan appeared first on Bitcoin News.

12 Defi Con Artists Exposed – Are Rug Pulling Incidents Threatening the Future of Defi?

12/10/2020 by Idelto Editor

The ongoing hype about the abnormally high returns from Defi tokens has naturally seen many more investors moving funds to decentralized protocols. As of October 10, total value locked in Defi protocols was nearly $11 billion. However, despite this apparent endorsement of Defi, rug pulling incidents and outright scams now seem to be blighting this space.

News.bitcoin.com has been reporting on the growing popularity of Defi protocols as well as exposing the fact that some devs and founders wilfully engage in practices that harm interests of the burgeoning Defi community.

SBF’s Actions Were Not Approved by the Community

Just recently, Sam Bankman Fried (SBF), the individual that took over the reins at SushiSwap in early September, was accused of acting immorally. The allegations stem from SBF’s use of FTT (a centralized token) as collateral for short selling other assets. It has emerged that SBF’s actions were not approved by the community and reports suggest the matter will be resolved via a vote which ends October 14.

However, before the vote is even closed, critics are making the argument that if “economically rational market participants such as SBF are able to take advantage these tools in a way that the community doesn’t approve of, the immaturity of both the market and its users are revealed.”

Meanwhile, SBF, who is defending his actions, is not the only influencer getting panned for using a privileged position to enrich himself. Blue Kirby, the YFI fanboy, is another prominent individual that has been criticized first for actively promoting Andre Cronje’s botched EMN before it got hacked. Secondly, Kirby faces accusations of dumping his YFI when the Defi token suffered losses in the past few weeks.

12 Defi Con Artists Exposed

The complaints against SBF and Blue Kirby are just two of the many cases where influential individuals are caught acting contrary to the values they publicly espouse. In many cases, however, Defi con artists are only exposed after making off with millions of dollars in investor funds. Below News.bitcoin.com lists some Defi projects or tokens, which according to a Boxmining newsletter, have turned out to be scams.

Amplyfi.money: Rug pulled after collecting 2,500 ETH from investors. According to a message left on the website, the Amplyfi.money team claim that “one of the devs compromised wallet and was able to use a little-known vulnerability in the compiler itself.” It adds that “devs are receiving a fair amount of threats so we decided to terminate the project.”

Beer Garden Finance: According to the newsletter, the founder holds over 50% of the token supply in his personal wallet. When the community asked for more details such as a Github link for the project, or timelocks for the tokens they were banned from the Telegram group.

Burn Vault Finance ($BFV): The newsletter says the team behind this protocol rug pulled. News.bitcoin.com also confirmed the community Telegram account is no longer active.

CBDAO ($BREE): According to the Newsletter, the project had a presale for $SBREE tokens which would be swapped for $BREE. One of the admin wallets exploited a backdoor in the SBREE token contract, minted 50,000 SBREE. After that, the SBREE was converted into BREE and sold it on the market thus pushing down the price of BREE at the expense of other holders. The 50,000 BREE was sold for under 200 ETH.

Degenballz: The Boxmining newsletter says staking “may steal 1% of your LP tokens.” On Twitter, one user is seemingly complaining about the 1% LP staking fee paid to developers. The user known as HuntingtheCoins expresses disappointment that this fact had not been disclosed upfront.

Emerald Mine (EMD): According to the newsletter, user tokens worth nearly USD$2.5mil that were supposedly locked under a smart contract were moved to another account. Fortunately, cryptocurrency exchange Changenow managed to stop the sale of 135,020 EOS. However, this only represents a tiny portion of the total amount of funds stolen.

Lv.finance: Falsified audit results, after investors deposited their funds in they found they were unable to withdraw. The team has since disappeared and the website was down at the time of writing.

Minions Farm: Minions will access all your assets when you connect your wallet to the Minions Wallet site. According to the message left Minions Farm’s page on Medium, the post(s) was under investigation for alleged violation of posting rules. The official website was also down at the time of writing.

Tomatoes.finance: The newsletter says a hacker allegedly triggered simple permission granting and withdrew tokens. News.bitcoin.com observed that since September 23, there has been no activity on their Medium page.

UniCat ($MEOW): A back door in smart contracts allowed UniCat to keep control over users’ tokens even after they were withdrawn from the pool. Around USD$200,000 worth of crypto has supposedly been stolen.

Unirocket ($URCKT): The newsletter says creators of this token rug-pulled and now cannot be located on social media. Similarly, News.bitcoin.com could not find any information on Unirocket on social media.

Yfdex.finance: Project promoted themselves on Twitter for 2 days, took a total of USD$20million of investor funds and disappeared. News.bitcoin.com reported on Yfdex.finance scam in September.

From the list, prospective Defi token investors can see common methods and tactics that have been used by fraudsters to engineer theft of funds. Since there is no regulation and the fact that most of the tokens are issued by anonymous entities, once defrauded, investors have no chance of recovering lost funds.

Rug Pulling Threatens Defi

In the medium to long term, continuing incidents of rug pulling will hurt the belief that decentralized finance can be the panacea to the longstanding problem of financial exclusion. Influencers and community leaders have an obligation to help fix these problems as doing this is the only way to maintain the public’s interest in Defi. More importantly, such an effort could help stave off regulators from imposing restrictive rules that curtail further growth of the space.

Do you think Defi will survive rug pull scams? Share your views in the comments section below.

The post 12 Defi Con Artists Exposed – Are Rug Pulling Incidents Threatening the Future of Defi? appeared first on Bitcoin News.

SBTC Plummets by 99% as Devs Announce Dissolution of Token

23/09/2020 by Idelto Editor

The price of SBTC plunged by nearly 98% in just over an hour on September 21 as devs announced the dissolution of the token. The dissolution announcement came more than a month after the token reached an all-time high of $5.07. At the time of writing, the token was quoted at $0.007 down from $0.64.

In a short announcement issued via a Discord group, the SBTC team said they are no longer proceeding with the project while thanking those that stuck with the project until the end.

According to information on Coinmarketcap, creators of the SBTC aimed to peg the token price to 0.0001 BTC or 100,000 Satoshi by utilizing the built-in smart contract token contraction & expansion algorithm, variable staking policies, and SBTC Foundation reserves. This would then ensure that one SBTC will be mathematically guaranteed to be worth 0.0001 BTC in the short/medium term regardless of circumstances.

Meanwhile, in a message left of the SBTC website the team explained the steps holders of the token had to take before receiving the ETH airdrop:

In order to receive the airdrop of ETH/ULU, you are required to hold SBTC in a wallet that you control the private key to or at an exchange that supports SBTC airdrop. Do not hold SBTC in any other form other than SBTC the very basic token, holding it via liquidity pool or via contracts will not receive the airdrop. You should have done the above before September 21st regardless of what time zone you are in.

At the time of the announcement, the SBTC team said the “best effort estimation of airdrop is still around 0.002 ETH + some ULU tokens per SBTC. You will only receive airdrop if you hold more than 30 SBTC.”

At the time of writing, the airdrop had been completed and another announcement in the discord then concludes that the “SBTC token is now useless, you should all sell it if it pays for gas and time.” The ULU airdrop “will not happen unless it becomes more worthy” adds the announcement.

What are your thoughts about the dissolution of SBTC? Tell us what you think in the comments section below.

The post SBTC Plummets by 99% as Devs Announce Dissolution of Token appeared first on Bitcoin News.

Chainlink Competitor Band Token Grows 300% in 7 Days Setting New ATH

12/08/2020 by Idelto Editor

BAND, the native token of the Band Protocol, has grown by more 300% in just seven days. At the at time of writing, the token traded at $14.50 against the August 3 trading price of $3.86.

On August 10, the token also touched a new high of $17.78 while the 24 hours traded volumes were $167.4 million.

BAND’s surging price follows a flurry of new partnerships or integration announcements. The flow of positive news about the protocol climaxed with the listing of the token on Houbi August 9, a few days after another listing on Coinbase.

Before the Huobi listing, the Band Protocol team had announced another partnership with Ubik Capital, the ICON network’s “fourth-largest public representative.”

At the time of the announcement, the Band team suggested that Ubik Capital was chosen because it has among other things “over 14.5+ million ICX staked to them and 3800 unique delegators.”

The decentralised finance (defi) boom also appears to be another catalyst for the increased interest in the token.

Meanwhile, the BAND token price surge appears to be faster than that of LINK, the native token of Chainlink. Both Band and Chainlink are building infrastructure that enables interoperability of smart contracts.

When LINK was trading at $8.35 the BAND token traded at $3.86. However, after seven days, the former now trades at 13.20. LINK’s all-time high (ATH) of $14.45 is just over three dollars less than BAND’s ATH.

It is not clear why BAND’s growth is outpacing that of LINK although a top ten list of July’s busiest ERC-20 Dapps produced by Santiment might provide some clues. According to Santiment, Band protocol is ranked sixth on the list.

According to Santiment, the rankings are based on “development activity, the often-underrated indicator of project success.”

Some of the activities that earned Band sixth place include the release of “a mobile version of Cosmoscan, improved incentive systems in Bandchain, upgraded oracle scripts to support a wider range of utility libraries and also release the Guanyu Testnet #1 which had 50+ participating validators.”

As the cryptocurrency market outlook remains bullish, it remains to be seen if this token can continue to outperform LINK and other similar tokens.

What do you think of BAND’s surge? Tell us your thoughts in the comments section below.

The post Chainlink Competitor Band Token Grows 300% in 7 Days Setting New ATH appeared first on Bitcoin News.