Mainnet

Terra lending protocol Mars to launch mainnet

The Mars Hub will launch an independent Cosmos application chain and issue MARS to users who hold the token during the two snapshots on Terra Classic.

The original Terra lending protocol, Mars Hub, has announced it will launch its independent Cosmos application chain on Jan. 31, as well as issue MARS tokens to users who hold it during two snapshots on Terra Classic.

According to a Jan. 20 statement, the Mars Hub mainnet will go live with 16 genesis validators, including Block Pane, Chill Validation, Chorus One, Cosmology, CryptoCrew Validators, ECO Stake and others. An additional 34 slots for permissionless validators will be available post-launch.

A total of 50 million MARS tokens will be delegated to genesis validators for the launch and returned to the community pool one month later. “This temporary delegation will help protect the network from attack by a rogue validator that could potentially accumulate a large delegation of MARS shortly after genesis and begin manipulating transactions on-chain,” the statement said.

The mainnet debut is the third and last phase of a three steps process that began with a private testnet for developers and some community members, followed by a public testnet. The first Mars outpost will follow on the Osmosis blockchain in early February.

Related: BIS proposes research model to study DeFi’s integration with TradFi and its risks

MARS tokens will be made claimable by eligible addresses via an airdrop that goes live with the mainnet, unlocking 64.4 million tokens for those who held MARS during the two historical snapshots on Terra Classic. A snapshot is a file with the recording state of a blockchain at a particular time, including all existing address and transactions data.

MARS tokens distribution was determined by snapshots taken before and after the depeg of Terra Class USD (UST): block 7544910 (May 7, 2022, ~11 a.m. Eastern Time), and block 7816580 (May 28, 2022, ~11 a.m. EST).

The tokens will be available for six months after the launch via Station, Terra’s new interchain wallet. Users who held MARS on Terra Classic will also inherit governance power.

The collapse of Terra (LUNA) and its stablecoin, TerraUSD (UST), in May had a wide impact on crypto markets, hammering the prices of decentralized finance (DeFi) projects hosted on the Terra protocol, such as Mars Protocol.

‘Performing as expected’ — Aptos Labs defends day 1 criticism

Aptos’ blockchain claims to handle three times the amount of transactions per second than Solana but day one of its launch saw the network transacting a much lower amount.

After four years of development and millions in funding, the layer-1 blockchain Aptos (APT) finally launched its mainnet on Oct. 17, albeit to somewhat mixed reception.

The proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain has seen millions invested in it from venture capital firms and has previously claimed the ability to process 160,000 transactions per second (TPS).

However, some members of the community have pointed out that the claimed TPS is falling far short of expectations on the mainnet.

According to Aptos’ blockchain explorer, the network is seeing around 4 TPS at the time of writing, while some users on Twitter have reported not being able to send transactions.

Others on Twitter noticed the Aptos Discord was closed for a few hours after the launch of the mainnet, accusing the team was attempting to stop discussion around potential launch issues.

Cointelegraph reached out to Aptos for comment and was directed to a “Day one update” tweet by Aptos on Oct. 18. 

In the tweet, Aptos said the network is “performing as expected” with activity increasing as more ecosystem participants join. Cointelegraph was able to view a variety of transactions from users using its blockchain explorer.

Aptos also said it closed comments on its Discord and Telegram channels to “protect the community from scams” and they will “return to normal when appropriate.”

The tokenomics of Aptos is not yet publicly available, leading some to cite concerns that cryptocurrency exchanges such as Binance and FTX are listing its token without such information available to their customers.

Related: Court partially denies Aptos Labs’ motion to dismiss Glazer’s $1 billion lawsuit

Aptos has seen millions invested from venture capital firms, with the most recent round of funding in July netting Aptos Labs $150 million. A prior round in March raised $200 million with participants including Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), FTX Ventures and Coinbase Ventures.

Aptos Labs was created by former Meta employees Mo Shaikh and Avery Ching, who were involved in the failed Diem blockchain project, which wound down ​​in February of this year and sold its intellectual property and other assets.

The blockchain is built on a programming language originally developed for the defunct Meta-built Diem blockchain.

GEM Digital commits $50M to ParallelChain Lab for L1 protocol development

As a proof-of-stake layer-1 protocol, ParallelChain intends to deliver an architecture that operates in confidentiality while allowing to validate transactions.

Digital asset investment firm GEM Digital Limited (GEM) has committed $50 million to finance ParallelChain Lab following the launch of its mainnet and native token listing, XPLL, in Q4 2022.

As a proof-of-stake (PoS) layer-1 protocol, ParallelChain aims to bridge the infrastructure divide between centralized fi(CeFi) and decentralized finance (DeFi). The soon-to-be-launched ParallelChain mainnet is open source and based on a PoS consensus mechanism dedicated to maintaining a fair distribution of power.

The permissioned ParallelChain Enterprise, on the other hand, will ensure the secrecy of transactions using a patented proof-of-immutability mechanism. The two platforms, together, intend to deliver an architecture that operates in confidentiality while allowing to validate transactions. Speaking about the innovation, ParallelChain CEO Ian Huang stated:

“We see this solution as the answer to enterprises’ privacy and compliance demands while simultaneously addressing the need for scalability across many public applications, namely DeFi.”

GEM’s $50 million investment in ParallelChain is planned to be redirected to market expansion, community development, research and development and funding of decentralized projects and decentralized app (DApp) developers.

Related: Sports metaverse company secures $200M funding

Showcasing the diverse interest of crypto investors, institutional crypto lending protocol Maple Finance announced its commitment of up to $300 million in secured debt financing to public and private Bitcoin (BTC) mining firms.

Mining firms from North America and Australia that meet the treasury management and power strategies standards are eligible to apply for the funding. Sidney Powell, CEO and co-founder of Maple Finance, highlighted the recent pullback from lenders, adding that:

“Miners play an essential role in growing the crypto ecosystem and local economies, and we are proud to extend a new financing vehicle to direct capital where it is needed the most.”

As Cointelegraph reported, Maple currently holds 50% of the institutional crypto lending market as measured by total loans outstanding.

The Ethereum Merge is completed: Here’s what’s next

Ethereum’s long-awaited Merge with the Beacon Chain is complete — here’s what the long-term roadmap for the continued development of the protocol looks like.

The Ethereum blockchain has successfully completed its shift away from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus following the merge of the Mainnet and the Beacon Chain.

The Merge took place on Sep.15 as the network shifted to PoS seamlessly, seeing hardware-based miners replaced by validators that stake Ether (ETH) to process transactions, add new blocks and maintain the network.

The most pertinent question in the cryptocurrency space is, what happens next? The Ethereum Foundation has always worked on a long roadmap of development milestones, and The Merge is no different.

Ethereum’s co-founder Vitalik Buterin previously outlined a five-step, gradual process that will bring the smart contract blockchain to what he described as the “endgame” of Ethereum’s development.

The end goal would see the network capable of high block frequency and block size as well as the ability to process thousands of transactions per second while remaining sufficiently trustless and censorship-resistant.

The Merge

The Merge was the first step in this five-part process, which has since been elaborated upon by a number of Ethereum developers, ecosystem participants and commentators. The key change of the Merge is the drastic reduction in power consumption, reducing Ethereum’s energy usage by 99%.

Hours before the Merge took place, Buterin quoted Ethereum researcher Justin Drake’s estimate that the event would also reduce global electricity consumption by 0.2%.

The second important change brought about by the shift to PoS is the reduced issuance of ETH through rewards to validators for their work maintaining the network, turning ETH into a deflationary asset.

The Surge

2023 is earmarked as the year that Ethereum will implement sharding, an important step in increasing the scalability of the blockchain’s ability to store and access data.

The Ethereum Foundation describes sharding as the process of separating a database horizontally to spread the network’s workload. Ethereum will use sharding in synergy with layer-2 rollups by splitting the large amount of data across the network.

This is envisaged to reduce network congestion and increase transactions per second. It’s the decentralized alternative to making a database bigger, alleviating the need for validators to store all of the network’s data, themselves, which would require powerful hardware.

It also means that the average user could run an Ethereum node or clients on personal devices such as PCs and mobile devices, making the network more robust due to its increased decentralization.

The Verge, Purge and Splurge

The last three steps in Ethereum’s ongoing development following the Merge are set to take place over the next few years.

The verge is the third part of Ethereum’s ongoing roadmap outlined by Buterin. Without getting too technical, this step will involve the introduction of verkle trees, which will optimize data storage and node size.

As Buterin explained in a deep dive in June 2021, Verkle trees serve a similar function to Merkle trees, which total all transactions in a block and produce proof of the entire set of data for a user looking to verify its authenticity:

“The key property that Verkle trees provide, however, is that they are much more efficient in proof size.”

The cryptography is slightly more complicated, but Buterin highlighted that the reduction in data size of proof would be sufficient to make stateless clients viable.

The Purge will involve removing spare historical data in an effort to alleviate network congestion by purging superfluous data. This will essentially reduce the amount of data needed to be stored by a validator, with Buterin touting this step allows the network to handle around 100,000 transactions per second.

What else should I know?

As Cointelegraph previously explored, stakers looking to become full validators of the Ethereum blockchain have to commit 32 ETH to do so. A common misconception was that these stakers might remove their staked ETH once the Merge was complete.

To ensure network stability, validators will only be able to withdraw their staked ETH once the Shanghai upgrade takes place, which is earmarked to take place in the next 12 months. Validators can also receive fees for processing transactions (miner extractable value) — which are credited to their non-staking validator account. 

Ethereum ready for The Merge as last shadow fork completes successfully

The successful completion of the last shadow fork signaled the readiness of the Ethereum network for migrating to a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism.

Ethereum (ETH) developers confirmed the successful completion of the prerequisites — shadow forks — required for the highly anticipated blockchain upgrade, The Merge. 

Shadow forks help developers stress test synchronization assumptions to ensure network safety during permanent upgrades. In light of The Merge, Ethereum developers implemented the first shadow fork on Apr. 11, 2022.

Nearly six months in, Ethereum research and engineering company Nethermind confirmed that the transition in Mainnet-Shadowfork-13 — the last shadow fork — was successful, signaling the readiness of the network for migrating to a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism.

The testnet allowed Ethereum developers to practice running nodes, deploying contracts and testing the infrastructure, among other functionalities. As a result, shadow forks allow developers to gauge the implications of network upgrades before they happen.

As part of the upgrade, the community needs to update their Ethereum clients and run the combination of an execution layer and consensus layer.

Related: The Merge: Top 5 misconceptions about the anticipated Ethereum upgrade

The CEO of crypto exchange BitMEX, Alexander Höptner, highlighted the need for paying close attention during the Ethereum upgrade to avoid service downtime.

Speaking to Cointelegraph, Höptner explained:

“You have to be just, let’s say, awake and see what happens. There’s a chance for high volatility. And so you have to make sure that your services are up and running. […] We don’t expect any major disruptions outside of volatility.”

The CEO further stated that the success of The Merge would be dependent on the support of the community.