Ethereum users pay by the nose while miners profit. Coinbase offers loans with bitcoin support and almost a quarter of the Tor Network can be compromised by a crypto-loving scammer.
You read Blockchain Bites, the daily roundup of the most pivotal stories in blockchain and crypto news, and why they are important. You can subscribe here and all CoinDesk newsletters.
At stake
The memetic token project, which launched on Tuesday and crashed on Wednesday – wiping out nearly $ 60 million in value – announced itself to the world as an “experimental protocol that mixes some of the most exciting innovations in programmable money and governance,” in a Medium post.
Liquidity providers stepped into YAM tokens, developed by Yam Finance, in an attempt to make a quick profit before catching the hot potato.
Profits would be derived from YAM’s elastic delivery scheme, which was programmed to keep the token close to the value of US dollars by making or destroying tokens at set intervals, called a rebase.
It was this whole mechanism that contained a bug that destroyed the harvest, disabled by the project’s on-chain management function.
The first version of YAM launched as the “second purely decentralized DeFi project after Yearn Finance,” according to Cointelegraph’s Joseph Young. And this position has led to changing opinions about the value of the dead project.
Compound’s Jake Chervinsky tweeted, “This was an extraordinary board experiment.”
But Avalanche’s Emin Gun Sirer thinks that purely speculative projects – “YOLO coins” – are undermining DeFi’s attempts to ‘achieve things that are not possible in the traditional financial world. ‘
Top plank
Record fees
Miner transaction costs and profits rose on the Ethereum blockchain. Yesterday, the average fee per ether transaction reached $ 6.04, according to Blockchair, the highest level since 2015. Median transaction free sitting at historic highs of $ 3. The increase in fees and the jump in ether price has driven the daily profitability of Ethereum Miners to levels not seen in 27 months – increasing profit margins for most mining equipment above 90%. BitInfoCharts data shows that the daily profitability for Ethereum mining operators is at $ 5.8 per 100 megahash per second (MH / s) of computing – a level not seen since early May 2018.
Crypto-credit line
Coinbase will allow US retailers to lend fiat loans against up to 30% of their bitcoin holdings, without filling out an application or going through a credit check. The exchange sets conservative parameters on the product, according to CoinDesk’s Nathan DiCamillo, limiting credit loans to $ 20,000 per customer and offering an 8% interest rate for bitcoin-supported loans with terms that are one year or less. Coinbase claims that it will keep the bitcoin at the exchange without investing it again.
Tokens, take two
Token sales are back, reports Leigh Cuen of CoinDesk. Ava Labs, Polkadot and NEAR Protocol – all potential alternatives to Ethereum – are one of the most advanced Crypto projects to raise tens of millions of dollars in the last month. But this is not a play-by-play of 2017. Token founders now want to prevent continuous sales with controlled distribution carried out across exchanges such as CoinList, Gate.io and Binance. However, not all Layer 1s are interested in token sales. Bram Cohen’s Chia Network recently raised $ 5 million in an equity round led by Slow Ventures, ahead of an IPO.
Torn Network?
A single malicious entity controls 23% of all exit nodes used on the anonymous Internet provider Tor Network and uses its position to steal bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, according to pseudonymous cybersecurity analyst “nusenu.” The Tor Network is a popular way to anonymize web traffic by protecting the user’s IP address. The hacker uses a position as a large exit relay host to decrypt websites, giving them unrestricted access to traffic going through their servers. It is unclear how much cryptocurrency has been stolen and if the evil agent is engaged in other attacks.
Bitcoin for business
Nigerians are turning to bitcoin to avoid barriers imposed on trade with China. Business owners and laymen, constrained by banking restrictions and sanctions, use bitcoin for smooth trading, reports CoinDesk employee Alyssa Hertig. All this bitcoin trading is happening behind the scenes. “Experts and women in the field do not want to publish exactly that they use bitcoin for international trade. For one, the legality of cryptocurrency is fuzzy in the region, ‘she writes.
Quick bite
Market intel
Volumes up
Uniswap trading volume recorded its fourth consecutive record month high two weeks in August, and above $ 1.76 billion in volumes. The volume for record-setting comes amid an ongoing speculative frenzy over new and experimental decentralized financial applications, sweeping volumes across all decentralized platforms. In the past 24 hours, Uniswap reported $ 213 million in volume, accounting for more than 60% of all decentralized exchange volume, according to Dune Analytics.
Connect cap
Chainlink (LINK) is now the fifth largest crypto by market capitalization, surpassing bitcoin cash (BCH). At press time, LINK stands at $ 5.76 billion compared to BCH’s $ 5.30 billion in total market value with a 24-hour volume clock at $ 1.05 billion versus BCH’s $ 83.7 million. Market capitalization is a tenuous indicator, found by multiplying the total number of coins as tokens in circulation multiplied by its spot price, but has become the go-to metric for ranking crypto projects.
Op-ed
The myth debunked
Marcelo M. Prates, a lawyer at the Central Bank of Brazil, writes that digital central bankers (CBDCs) “are a conceptual type of money that has not yet been made, except for some limited prototypes. But myths about CBDCs have already been piled up. He debunks four of the most common misconceptions.
Podcast angles
How many?
Supplygate, the debate that erupted this weekend, was about more than Ethereum’s total supply of coins. It is one more front in the battle over narratives between the communities behind the two largest blockchains, according to NLW.