DeFi

Solana developer says new crypto phone ‘looks like madness’ – but it already has $65 million in pre-orders – DL News

Published

11 months ago

1 June, 2024

Financial Block Staff

Solana developer says new crypto phone 'looks like madness' – but it already has $65 million in pre-orders – DL News

Solana’s Steven Laver brings BlackBerry and Apple experience to the Chapter 2 handset.
Crypto needs to break free from the desktop if it wants to scale, says the Solana team.
Solana undertakes a Herculean task by embarking on manufacturing.

At first glance, Steven Laver does not seem like the one who would lead the most daring project in crypto.

The 43-year-old software engineer worked on the BlackBerry in the 2000s, then helped develop the Windows Phone app store at Microsoft.

He didn’t even work in crypto until early 2022.

Nonetheless, Laver is now the lead software engineer in Solana Labs’ drive to change the crypto experience by putting blockchain capabilities in the palm of your hand.

“It has such great energy that the sky is the limit,” Laver said. DL News in a rare interview. “It sounds like madness, but at the same time it feels like the end result.”

This result is Solana’s second cell phone.

It’s called Chapter 2 and is expected to be released in early 2025. Pre-orders for the new device cost $500, and Solana claims to have more than 130,000 pre-orders. This represents $65 million in pre-orders.

Daring bet

It’s a bold bet for the four-year-old blockchain network. Mobile telephony, one of the most regulated industries on the planet, is dominated by Apple and Samsung.

Join the community to receive our latest stories and updates

Why Solana, a pillar of DeFi with symbolic value 82 billion dollars and one of the hottest brands in crypto, making such a huge bet on hardware manufacturing?

“It’s a very difficult question,” said Chris Lewis, an independent telecommunications analyst with more than 40 years of experience in the industry. DL News.

The answer: control.

Chapter 2 is Solana’s attempt to free crypto from the desktop and the dominance of Apple and Google’s application platforms.

Silicon Valley powerhouses have long harassed crypto-friendly mobile developers by charging huge fees or banning apps from their platforms.

In a world where investing, shopping, banking, and everything else happens on a smartphone, crypto is still fighting to gain a foothold.

“We’re used to everyone bringing a laptop to dinner, so you don’t miss a drop or a claim,” said Emmett Hollyer, manager of business development and operations at Solana Labs. DL News.

The madness of Memecoins

Solana, of course, is not the first crypto company to attempt to open up the grip of incumbents.

Over the past decade, more than a dozen custom-built crypto phones have hit the market. But none gained popularity.

Last year, Solana took a chance with Android-based Solana Saga. Customers picked up about 20,000 of the $600 handsets, which was well short of the 50,000-unit goal.

In comparison, Apple shipped more than 80 million iPhones in the fourth quarter alone.

Graphic by Darren Joseph/DL News

But Saga discovered what appeared to be a not-so-secret weapon in crypto phone development: memecoins.

The device came with a dog-themed memecoin called BONK. Somehow, collectors fell in love with BONK and its price soared 560% last December.

When investors rushed to call secondary markets, Hollyer and his team realized they had stumbled upon a new type of marketing strategy.

Now they are producing a sequel.

“Consumer hardware is difficult, but phones are a much greater order of magnitude.”

—Steven Laver, Solana

Although the company declined to disclose how much money it is investing in Chapter 2, it’s not a small number.

“Consumer hardware, in general, is difficult, but phones are a much higher order of magnitude,” Laver said. “Building a phone is an exercise that is as much about operations, logistics and compliance as it is about the underlying technology. »

There was a time when BlackBerry dominated the smartphone market, and Steven Laver was there. Photo credit: Shutterstock

The project comes as Solana is riding a wave of momentum. Its native token, SOL, rose 78% this year, compared to a 64% rise in the price of Ethereum, according to CoinGecko.

With a market value of $81 billion, Solana is the fifth largest digital asset.

Solana has also largely conquered the hot memecoin market. Activity was so strong in March that the network generated more costs than heavyweight Ethereum – no small feat.

Lingering Questions

Still, questions remain about whether to launch a mobile phone.

“What are you bringing,” Lewis said. “Is it just security? Is this a new interface? Is this the latest chip power? I think those are the questions you ask yourself, and then being able to build the brand and market it.

And, perhaps more importantly, is there actually a demand for a crypto phone?

Deep roots

Solana’s project is deeply rooted in Silicon Valley’s mobile scene.

It grew out of a little-known but much-loved project called Essential, founded by Andy Rubin, the brains behind Android at Google.

After Essential closed in 2020, some employees started another cell phone company called OSOM. A few years later, it developed the OV1 phone, which, featuring a ceramic and titanium body, became a cult favorite.

If you look closely, it also looks a lot like the Solana saga. This is because they are almost the same. Solana Labs and OSOM announced a Partnership in June 2022.

Solana CEO Anatoly Yakovenko appeared at an event in Indonesia in May with a cellphone emblazoned with the Solana logo. Photo credit: Muhammad Alimaki/Shutterstock

In February 2022, Laver landed in Solana right in the heart of Saga development.

Originally from Canada, Laver studied computer engineering at the University of Waterloo in Ontario (the same alma mater as Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin).

Iconic products

Laver was present at the creation of several iconic products. He worked on a range of BlackBerrys, made by Canadian company Research in Motion, which introduced portable email and texting to business life.

At Microsoft, Laver worked on what would become the Windows Phone app store. He has also worked on other consumer electronics products such as smartwatch maker Fitbit, as well as at Apple and Google.

“There are many low- and mid-budget Android phones that look like a cheap car dashboard from the late 90s.”

—Steven Laver, Solana Labs

From the start, Laver said the Saga was designed to have a satisfying weight in hand and a sleek matte finish.

“There are many low- and mid-budget Android phones that look like a cheap car dashboard from the late ’90s,” Laver said.

Solana’s device was designed with three features not found on normal handsets.

The first one was called Seed Vault.

This stores the seed phrases that users use to send and receive cryptocurrencies. Saga’s security falls somewhere between an internet-connected crypto wallet such as Phantom or MetaMask and the vault-style Ledger, Laver said.

It’s not intended to hold millions of dollars of crypto, but you can buy a few cocktails with it.

Challenge Apple and Google

The Solana Mobile Stack allows mobile app developers to create crypto apps for the phone. And the Solana dApp Store gives projects a marketplace for their work.

It is designed to be a purpose around the Apple App Store, which has taken down a few of the largest crypto apps in the industry, perhaps most notably MetaMask in October. It was later reinstated.

In-app purchases on the Apple App Store are also subject to a whopping 30% fee.

As for Google’s Play Store, it relaxed its crypto policy last summer. But he also generally charges developer fees between 15% and 30%.

Laver says the Solana Labs team is going to let crypto be crypto.

“We are adopting a much lighter policy,” he said. “We’re doing our best to get out of the way.”

Profit center

Solana Labs does not charge any fees, except for the fee for publishing application metadata on the Solana blockchain.

“It’s not a profit center for us,” Laver said.

The platform already includes NFT marketplace Magic Eden and decentralized exchange Jupiter.

“We need to find a way to give manufacturers a reasonable path to distribution.”

—Emmett Hollyer, Solana Labs

Hollyer hopes this will put pressure on Silicon Valley to take a more enlightened approach to crypto.

“Hopefully Google and Apple will come to their senses and see what might be possible if they relax some of their pricing structures and some of their restrictive policies,” he said. “Until then, we need to find a way to give manufacturers a reasonable path to distribution.”

Solana recently registered its 100th dapp.

“We’re just starting to get to that point where developers are starting to see the value in building a phone like Saga,” Laver said.

BONK goes boom

But the big change in the development of the Solana phone was BONK, the $2.1 billion meme coin. Each phone purchased came with $750 worth of BONK tokens, redeemable using a non-transferable NFT – a digital identifier linking buyers to each phone.

When the token skyrocketed in December, 30 million BONK tokens were integrated directly into the Solana Saga phone. An arbitrage trade emerged.

“With BONK, I bought other memecoins,” said Lui Kohl, product manager at token acquisition platform Streamflow. DL News. “Overall, I think I turned $800 BONK into $4,000, so it was worth it financially.”

Thanks to the BONK buzz, Hollyer said Solana was able to sell the rest of its phones in three days.

The episode also sparked anticipation for Chapter 2, which is already eligible for five memecoins. Kohl’s, for its part, has already pre-ordered the phone.

Absorbing the lessons of crypto mobile marketing, Laver admitted he was “personally a little confused.”

“Blockchain is just a little bit different,” he said. “Ultimately, putting a real, physical, well-integrated product in people’s hands is why I do this.”

Liam Kelly is based in Berlin DL News’ corresponding. Contact him at liam@dlnews.com.

Fuente

DeFi

Haust Network Partners with Gateway to Connect to AggLayer

Published

9 months ago

1 August, 2024

Financial Block Staff

Haust Network Partners with Gateway to Connect to AggLayer

Dubai, United Arab Emirates, August 1, 2024, Chainwire

Consumer adoption of cryptocurrencies is a snowball that is accelerating by the day. More and more people around the world are clamoring for access to DeFi. However, the user interface and user experience of cryptocurrencies still lag behind their fundamental utility, and users lack the simple and secure access they need to truly on-chain products.

Haust Network is a network and suite of products focused on changing this paradigm and bringing DeFi to the masses. To achieve this goal, Haust Network has announced its far-reaching partnership with bridgeseasoned veterans in rapidly delivering revolutionary blockchain utilities for projects. The Gateway team empowers blockchain developers to build DAOs, NFT platforms, payment services, and more. They drive adoption of crypto primitives for individuals and institutions around the world by helping everyone build their on-chain presence.

Gateway specializes in connecting sovereign blockchains to the Aggregation Layer (AggLayer). The AggLayer is a single unified contract that powers the Ethereum bridge of many disparate blockchains, allowing them all to connect to a single unified liquidity pool. The AggLayer abstracts away the complexities of cross-chain DeFi, making tedious multi-chain transactions as easy for the end user as a single click. It’s all about creating access to DeFi, and with Polygon’s technology and the help of Gateways, Haust is doing just that.

As part of their partnership, Gateway will build an advanced zkEVM blockchain for Haust Network, leveraging its extensive experience to deploy ultra-fast sovereign applications with unmatched security, and enabling Haust Network to deliver its products to its audience.

The recently announced launch of the Haust Wallet is a Telegram mini-app that provides users with access to DeFi directly through the Telegram interface. Users who deposit funds into the wallet will have access to all standard send/receive services and generate an automatic yield on their funds. The yield is generated by Haust Network’s interconnected network of smart contracts, Haustoria, which provides automated and passive DeFi yielding.

As part of this partnership, the Haust Network development team will work closely with Gateway developers to launch Haust Network. Gateway is an implementation provider for Polygon CDK and zkEVM technology, which the Haust wallet will leverage to deliver advanced DeFi tools directly to the wallet users’ fingertips. Haust’s partnership with Gateway comes shortly after the announcement of a high-profile alliance with the Polygon community. Together, the three will work to build Haust Network and connect its products to the AggLayer.

About Haust Network

Haust Network is an application-based absolute liquidity network and will be built to be compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Haust aims to provide native yield to all users’ assets. In Telegram’s Haust Wallet, users can spend and collect their cryptocurrencies in one easy place, at the same time. Haust operates its network of self-balancing smart contracts that interact across multiple blockchains and then efficiently funnel what has been generated to Haust users.

About Gateway

bridge is a leading white-label blockchain provider that offers no-code protocol deployment. Users can launch custom blockchains in just ten minutes. They are an implementation provider for Polygon CDK and have already helped projects like Wirex, Gnosis Pay, and PalmNFT bring new utility to the crypto landscape.

About Polygon Labs

Polygon Laboratories Polygon Labs is a software development company building and developing a network of aggregated blockchains via the AggLayer, secured by Ethereum. As a public infrastructure, the AggLayer will aggregate the user bases and liquidity of any connected chain, and leverage Ethereum as the settlement layer. Polygon Labs has also contributed to the core development of several widely adopted scaling protocols and tools for launching blockchains, including Polygon PoS, Polygon zkEVM, and Polygon Miden, which is currently under development, as well as the Polygon CDK.

Contact

Lana Kovalski
haustnetwork@gmail.com

Fuente

DeFi

Ethena downplays danger of letting traders use USDe to back risky bets – DL News

Published

9 months ago

1 August, 2024

Financial Block Staff

Ethena downplays danger of letting traders use USDe to back risky bets – DL News

Ethena and ByBit will allow derivatives traders to use USDe as collateral.
There is a risk in letting traders use an asset partially backed by derivatives to place more bets.

Ethena has downplayed the dangers of a new feature, which will allow traders to put up its synthetic dollar USDe as collateral when trading derivatives, which are risky bets on the prices of crypto assets.

While allowing users to underwrite their trades with yield-bearing USDe is an attractive prospect, Ethena said there is potential risk in letting traders use an asset partially backed by derivatives to place even more derivatives bets.

“We have taken this risk into account and that is why Ethena operates across more than five different sites,” said Conor Ryder, head of research at Ethena Labs. DL News.

The move comes as competition in the stablecoin sector intensifies.

In recent weeks, PayPal grown up the amount of its stablecoin PYUSD in circulation 96%, while the MakerDAO cooperative plans a rebrandingaiming to increase the supply of its DAI stablecoin to 100 billion.

US dollar growth stagnates

It comes as Ethena has lost momentum after its blockbuster launch in December.

In early July, USDe reached a record level of 3.6 billion in circulation.

That figure has now fallen by 11% to around 3.2 billion.

Join the community to receive our latest stories and updates

New uses for USDe could boost demand for Ethena’s products.

This is where the new plan, announcement Tuesday with ByBit, one of its partner exchanges, is coming.

Ethena users create USDe by depositing Bitcoin or Ether into the protocol.

Ethena then covers these deposits with short positions – bearish bets – on the corresponding asset.

This creates a stable support for USDe, unaffected by price fluctuations in Bitcoin or Ether.

Mitigate risks

While using USDe as collateral for derivatives trading is proving popular, it is unclear what the effects will be if the cryptocurrency market experiences major fluctuations.

Using derivatives as collateral to place more bets has already had disastrous effects.

In June 2022, Lido’s liquid staking token stETH broke its peg to Ether following the fallout from the Terra collapse.

Many traders who used looping leverage to increase their stETH staking yields were liquidated, creating a cascade that caused the price of Ether to drop by more than 43%.

Ethena Labs founder Guy Young said: DL News His office and his partners have taken many precautions.

Ethena spreads bearish bets supporting the USDe across the five exchanges it partners with.

According to Ethena, 48% of short positions supporting USDe are on Binance, 23% on ByBit, 20% on OKX, 5% on Deribit, and 1% on Bitget. website.

In doing so, Ethena aims to minimize the impact of an unforeseen event on a stock market.

The same theory applies to the distribution of risks across different supporting assets.

Fifty percent of USDe is backed by Bitcoin, 30% by Ether, 11% by Ether liquid staking tokens, and 8% by Tether’s USDT stablecoin.

Previous reviews

Ethena has already been criticised regarding the risks associated with USDe.

Some have compared USDe to TerraUSD, an undercollateralized stablecoin that collapsed in 2022.

“It’s not a good design for long-term stability,” said Austin Campbell, an assistant professor at Columbia Business School. said as the USDe launch approaches.

Young replied to critics, saying the industry needs to be more diligent and careful when “marketing products to users who might not understand them as well as we do.”

Ethena has since added a disclaimer on its website stating that USDe is not the same as a fiat stablecoin like USDC or USDT.

“This means that the risks involved are inherently different,” the project says on its website.

Tim Craig is DL News DeFi correspondent based in Edinburgh. Feel free to share your tips with us at tim@dlnews.com.

Fuente

DeFi

Cryptocurrency and defi firms lost $266 million to hackers in July

Published

9 months ago

1 August, 2024

Financial Block Staff

Crypto companies, defi lost $266m to hackers in July

In July 2024, the cryptocurrency industry suffered a series of devastating attacks, resulting in losses amounting to approximately $266 million.

Blockchain Research Firm Peck Shield revealed in an X post On August 1, attacks on decentralized protocols in July reached $266 million, a 51% increase from $176 million reported in June.

The most significant breach last month involved WazirX, one of India’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, which lost $230 million in what appears to be a highly sophisticated attack by North Korean hackers. The attack was a major blow to the stock market, leading to a break in withdrawals. Subsequently, WazirX launched a program in order to recover the funds.

Another notable incident involved Compound Finance, a decentralized lending protocol, which suffered a governance attack by a group known as the “Golden Boys,” who passed a proposal who allocated 499,000 COMP tokens – valued at $24 million – to a vault under their control.

The cross-chain liquidity aggregation protocol LI.FI also fell victim On July 16, a hack resulted in losses of $9.73 million. Additionally, Bittensor, a decentralized machine learning network, was one of the first protocols to suffer an exploit last month, lo m ing $8 million on July 3 due to an attack targeting its staking mechanism.

Meanwhile, Rho Markets, a lending protocol, suffered a $7.6 million breach. However, in an interesting twist, the exploiters research to return the stolen funds, claiming the incident was not a hack.

July 31, reports The Terra blockchain protocol was also hacked, resulting in a loss of $6.8 million across multiple cryptocurrencies. As crypto.news reported, the attack exploited a reentrancy vulnerability that had been identified a few months ago.

Dough Finance, a liquidity protocol, lost $1.8 million in Ethereum (ETH) and USD Coin (USDC) to a flash loan attack on July 12. Similarly, Minterest, a lending and borrowing protocol, saw a loss of $1.4 million due to exchange rate manipulation in one of its markets.

Decentralized staking platform MonoSwap also reported a loss of $1.3 million following an attack that allowed the perpetrators to withdraw the liquidity staked on the protocol. Finally, Delta Prime, another decentralized finance platform, suffered a $1 million breach, although $900,000 of the stolen funds was later recovered.

Fuente

DeFi

The Rise of Bitcoin DeFi: Then and Now

Published

9 months ago

1 August, 2024

Financial Block Staff

The convergence of Bitcoin’s robust security and Layer 2 scaling solutions has catalyzed the emergence of a vibrant DeFi ecosystem.

By expanding Bitcoin’s utility beyond simple peer-to-peer payments, these advancements have opened up a new frontier of financial possibilities, allowing users to participate in decentralized lending, trading, and other complex smart contract operations on Bitcoin.

Read on to learn about the rise of Bitcoin-based decentralized finance and how the space has expanded to accommodate a new generation of native assets and features.

Note: If you want to learn candlesticks and chart trading from scratch, this is the best book available on Amazon! Get the book now!

What is DeFi?

Decentralized finance (DeFi) represents a paradigm shift in financial services, offering internet-based financial products such as trading, lending, and borrowing through the use of decentralized public blockchains.

By implementing blockchains, smart contracts, and digital assets, DeFi protocols provide financial services through a decentralized ecosystem, where participants do not have to deal with intermediaries when transacting.

What is Bitcoin DeFi?

The inherent limitations of the Bitcoin mainchain in supporting the intricacies of decentralized finance have created the need to develop smart contract-based Layer 2 solutions.

Additionally, the advent of the Ordinals protocol in 2023, which facilitated the emergence of fungible token standards such as BRC-20 and Runes, catalyzed the growth of DeFi on the Bitcoin blockchain.

This expansion in protocol diversity has broadened the applications of the world’s leading cryptocurrency network beyond the core base-layer use cases around value preservation and transactional capabilities.

Therefore, Bitcoin DeFi has become a nascent sector within the digital asset market, after previously being a missing essential part of the Bitcoin ecosystem.

Bitcoin DeFi in its early days

Integrating decentralized finance (DeFi) concepts into the Bitcoin ecosystem has been a journey of innovation and perseverance. Early attempts to bridge the gap between Bitcoin’s fundamental simplicity and DeFi’s complexities have spawned pioneering projects that, while laying essential foundations, have also encountered significant obstacles.

Colored coins

Colored coins represented an early foray into tokenizing real-world assets on the Bitcoin blockchain. By leveraging the existing network to track ownership of assets ranging from stocks to real estate, this approach highlighted Bitcoin’s potential as a platform beyond digital currency. However, scalability and practical implementation challenges have limited its widespread adoption.

Counterpart

Building on the colored coins, Counterparty has become a platform for creating and trading digital assets, including non-fungible tokens (NFTs), on Bitcoin.

The introduction of popular projects like Rare Pepe NFTs has demonstrated the growing appeal of digital collectibles. However, constraints around user experience and network efficiency have hampered its full potential.

These early experiments, while not fully realizing their ambitions, served as valuable stepping stones, informing Bitcoin DeFi’s subsequent developments. Their challenges highlighted the need for more sophisticated infrastructure and protocols to harness the full potential of decentralized finance on the Bitcoin network.

Bitcoin DeFi Today

Today, building DeFi applications on Bitcoin is primarily done in the realm of Layer 2 (L2) networks. This architectural choice is motivated by the limitations of Bitcoin’s base layer in supporting complex programmable smart contracts.

Bitcoin’s original design prioritized security and decentralization over programmability, making it difficult to develop sophisticated DeFi protocols directly on its blockchain. However, the recent emergence of protocols like Ordinals, BRC-20, and Runes, while not DeFi in their own right, has sparked possibilities for future DeFi-like applications on the main chain.

In contrast, L2 solutions offer a scalable and programmable environment built on Bitcoin, enabling the creation of various DeFi products.

By expanding Bitcoin’s capabilities without compromising its core principles, L2s have become the preferred platform for developers looking to build DeFi applications that encompass trading, lending, staking, and more.

Leading L2 networks such as Lightning Network, Rootstock, Stacks, and Build on Bitcoin provide the infrastructure for these efforts. Some of these L2s have even introduced their own native tokens to the network, further expanding Bitcoin’s DeFi ecosystem.

Essentially, while Bitcoin’s core layer presents challenges for DeFi development, its security and decentralization have provided a foundational layer for the innovative L2 landscape to thrive.

Bitcoin Layer 2 offers a promising path to building a robust and thriving Bitcoin-based DeFi ecosystem that offers trading, staking, lending, and borrowing. All you need is a DeFi Wallet like Xverse to access the new world of decentralized financial services secured by Bitcoin.

Conclusion

The integration of DeFi principles into the Bitcoin ecosystem, primarily facilitated by Layer 2 solutions, marks a significant evolution in the digital asset landscape.

Building on the foundational work of pioneers like Colored Coins and Counterparty, the industry has evolved into more sophisticated platforms like Rootstock, Stacks, and Build on Bitcoin to create a thriving Bitcoin-powered DeFi ecosystem.