SF Newsletter March Issue
phones, UX improvements, conferences, jobs & much more - welcome to our March NL!
Welcome to our March issue,
the downfall of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and its aftermath served as yet another reminder of why crypto and DeFi are necessary. Blockchain technology enables the creation of transparent and permissionless systems, e.g. a financial one. While the destination is unknown and the journey is long, this crisis (and future ones) will push the average person towards mass adoption of this revolutionary technology - some updates mentioned down below may also pave the way a bit more.
While regulatory developments in the US (đ Janet, Gary & Jerome) might make you feel a bit grim about the (immediate) future of crypto, it pays to look beyond the US borders.
Take Europe for example, with the final vote on MiCA being imminent, a lot more regulatory clarity will be present in the European markets. Germany might even pave the way for âcrypto sharesâ, allowing companies to choose how they want to issue their shares - centrally or via a blockchain (source).
This Politico opinion piece also makes a good case for why US lawmakers should take a different approach and lists a few great examples of countries taking a more nuanced, innovation-friendly path towards regulation - we highly recommend reading through the whole thing.
For now, letâs jump into some updates - so buckle up!
Julius, our âKleingeldheldâ
Julius from our team sat together with the folks from âKleingeldheldenâ, a spin-off of Focus Money to push and diffuse financial education - big up for that mission. In roughly fourty minutes, Julius and Alisha cover a lot of ground ranging from a general introduction & definition of cryptocurrencies, blockchains, and smart contracts all the way to FTX and potential regulatory consequences, better yet, suggestions regarding how policy makers should approach the topic of Web3. As always, Julius uses a bunch of simple metaphors to break down complex topics, which makes this video a great resource for beginners. Please note that the video is in German.
Berlin Build Station Aftermath
The Build Station by Superteam and the Solana Foundation was packed with amazing people, great events, as well as loads of interesting talks, and workshops. All of this culminated in the Demo Day, a day to showcase what the amazing teams based in Germany have build for the Grizzlython.
While the overall winners of Grizzlython still have to be announced, we wanted to congratulate the winners of the Berlin Demo Day. A special shoutout goes to Bunkr for winning our sponsored infrastructure track. Bunkr is adding an additional layer of security to your assets by introducing the TOTP 2FA standard to your wallets - a popular standard from web2. Bunkr strives to become a free, permissionless, trustless, and open-source common good for Solana. Great mission and even greater builders - weâre stoked to be able to support the team a bit for lift off.
During our time at the Station, Wolfgang and Julius from our team sat together with two German YouTubers - Niklas Steenfatt and The Morpheus - who are set out to educate their audience on finance and IT (cheers to that!). Together with other guests, a lot of ground was covered and resulted in two very insightful episodes that you can check out below (note that both are in German):
Looking to co-create the future together?
Are ya? Well, wonderful, because we are looking to grow our tech team!
More precisely, we are looking for a Senior Systems Engineer to join our ranks and help with taking care of our precious nodes in order to provide our portfolio networks with the best in class infrastructure. You can learn more about the open position here and directly apply via this link. Feel free to share this in your network or with anyone who might be interested, weâd highly appreciate that.
Also note that we are always open to initiative applications - you can find more info regarding this on our careers page.
Ethereum
Fork it. Itâs happening, folks - the Shapella upgrade (aka. the Shanghai hardfork) is coming to mainnet on April 12th after it was successfully tested on the Goerli testnet over the past weeks. Shapella officially finalizes Ethereumsâ transition to Proof-of-Stake, which was kicked off in September last year with âThe Mergeâ. Besides enabling staked ETH to be withdrawn, Shapella will also introduce lower gas fees for developers, making it more affordable to build on the network. You can learn more about this here.
There are two popular, yet contrary trains of thought regarding what Shapella means for the market: one side believes it will result in a lot of sell pressure while the other side believes that being able to withdraw will lead to encouraging more staking as entry barriers are lowered Whatâs your take? Which side to you subscribe to? Fyi, ~15% of the ETH supply is currently staked with ~1/3 of this going through Lido. One could witness a significant increase in ETH being staked around the beginning of March - just sayinâ.
Ready when you are. Lido is all set for Shapella with Lido V2 having been tested successfully on Goerli so that it can kick-off soon after Shapella goes live. We gave it a good run as well and were able to exit one of our validators on testnet (a prerequisite for withdrawals).
Abstract it. ERC-4337 also saw the light of day (well, mainnet that is) on the second of March and introduced the concept of account abstraction. This is big for UX improvements of e.g. wallets and could potentially result in broader adoption. The new standard, originally proposed by the man, Vitalik, himself, combines features of the two existing account types and eases the usage and creation of smart contract wallets. These in turn can be used e.g. to batch transactions or for social recovery of your funds. You can learn more about all of this here.
Solana
The SAGA continues. Well, itâs about to get started: Solanasâ web3-ready smartphone, SAGA is launching on April 14th. This comes roughly 50 years after the first ever mobile phone call was conducted - back then hardly anybody would have predicted the fundamental impact mobile phones and later smart phones would have on our daily lives. Is this a similar event? Is this cryptosâ âiPhone momentâ? Whatâs your take?
SAGA enables itsâ owners to take true, non-custodial ownership of their digital assets and identities anywhere they go. Since SAGA has a built in âseed vaultâ (~ a hardware wallet built into your phone), a developer stack (SMS), as well as a permissionless dApp store all within a high-end smart phone, it constitutes a one-stop web3 solution and could prove to be fundamental to mass adoption.
The Peoples Network. Helium is migrating to Solanasâ Mainnet Beta on April 18th after this move was extensively discussed and finally voted on by the Helium community. Helium is a wireless network that connects devices to the internet using a technology called LongFi. It uses a decentralized architecture powered by small, low-power devices called "Hotspots" to cover large areas with minimal infrastructure. Devices connect to the network by sending signals to the nearest Hotspot, which relays the signal to other nearby Hotspots until it reaches a backbone Hotspot connected to the internet. The network incentivizes people to run Hotspots by using a cryptocurrency called HNT, which can be used to pay for network fees or exchanged for other currencies. The Helium network is a reliable and accessible technology that has the potential to connect devices no matter where they are in the world.
Puff. Puff. Build. It was just announced that the next Breakpoint conference will take place from October 30th - November 3rd in Amsterdam. You can (and probably should) sign up for updates and early access here. Weâd love to meet up in person and hope to see many familiar as well as new faces there.
Shameless self-shill. Weâre thrilled to announce that we are running the Jito-enabled client for Solana. This is not only good news for our delegators as they get to enjoy juicy MEV rewards (aka. higher yield), it is also very good news for the Solana network. While the low fees of the Solana network are a blessing for end-users, they do lead - at times - to an increase in spam. Jito mitigates this by providing more efficient MEV extraction and thus lowering the âneedâ for spam. You can learn more in this blog post. Currently, ~20% of the networksâ stake is powered by Jito, big shout out to the team for achieving this!
Tendermint: Cosmos, Stride & Celestia
Happy anniversary. March 29th marked the two-year anniversary of the Inter-Blockchain-Communication (IBC) protocol. This Twitter thread gives a glimpse into the future and whatâs next: IBC is coming to Ethereum, Bitcoin, Polkadot, Near, and, Avalanche. Check out this blog post for a recap of the past two years of IBC.
Quite nobel. Native USDC is coming to Cosmos. Noble partnered with Circle, the company behind USDC, to bring a native, fully collateralized, fiat-backed stablecoin to the Cosmos ecosystem. Native means that no bridges or any other third-party solutions are needed, ultimately increasing security, reliability as well as user and developer experience. Noble is a Cosmos, IBC-enabled âappchainâ with the sole purpose of issuing assets and bringing them on-chain, starting out with USDC. You can learn more about Noblesâ mission as well as the teams behind it here.
Cosmoverse. The Cosmos community has the chance to meet up in real life during this yearâs Cosmoverse taking place from October 2nd - 4th in Istanbul. The conference is followed by a hackathon during which builders can build for the âinternet of blockchainsâ - more infos are expected to be released soon.
On your marks. Get set. Go. Celestiasâ Blockspace Race testnet kicked off in the middle of March to test data availability sampling via bridge nodes, full storage nodes, and light nodes. You can check out the different types of nodes and their status on Tiascan, a dashboard that we build in collaboration with the Celestia team.
Injected. Stride recently integrated support for Injective, a DeFi focused appchain in the Cosmos universe. This integration means that INJ holders can now liquid stake their tokens, ultimately foregoing liquidity restrains as well as unlocking new revenue streams for their assets.
Substrate: Polkadot, Kusama & Hydra
Lights out. Polkadot released a high-priority client update apart from the regular release schedule on March, 9th to address a critical bug in wasmtime, a third party runtime for WebAssembly.
The release itself worked fine in most instances but there was a particular issue when node operators replaced the node binary without restarting the service. By doing so the main process was still running the old node version but spawned the new one for subprocesses related to parachain validation causing a mismatch in PVF artifacts. These validators on the relaychain were then unable to process and validate blocks from the parachains when they had the specific role to do so.
The subset of validators responsible for that task are pretty limited and a single non-functional validator was responsible for almost stalling most of the parachains. We've seen block times of more than a minute and parachain collators had a hard time restarting and fixing their nodes.
This all happened on the 10t of March with Kusama and on the 11th/12th of April with Polkadot. It was resolved as soon as the disputing validators properly updated their nodes. Our DotSama-Degen Simon posted some incident coverage back then.
The more the merrier. Referendum #112, which aims to increase Polkadotsâ active validator set from 297 to 500, is likely to fail. While we a re in full support of increasing the set, we share the sentiment that this increase is a bit too big at once as it would mean that the set increases by 2/3s from one day to another.
Big News. German publishing giant, Axel Springer teamed up with Kilt, an identity-focused parachain, to prototype web3 logins and identity management for the publisherâs product suite. Both parties strive for a long-term partnership that bears additional use cases.
Hejsa, København. A little birdie has twittered to us that this yearâs Polkadot Decoded Conference will take place on June 28th & 29th in Copenhagen. More info about the conference is expected to go public soon.
Ramp it
upon. The stars are well aligned for referendum #131, which aims to improve the on-ramp experience for parachains on Kusama (and later on Polkadot). With 98.9% voting âAyeâ, the referendum is likely to pass.
Network quick takes
Count Dracula. Aptos, Fandango and NBC Universal (better known for their subsidiaries such as Universal Pictures) join forces for a free-to-play game that accompanies the Renfield movie (hitting theatres soon).
Next up, 1k. At the end of March, The Graph network hit another milestone - there are now more than 800 subgraphs on itsâ decentralized network. This number is likely to increase rapidly as the recent ETHGlobal Hackathon has demonstrated: The Graph foundation awarded a total of $5000 in bounties for teams building innovative subgraphs - check out the winners here.
Shhhh, thatâs private. Congratulations on a successful launch, Elusiv. On March 7th, their compliant privacy solution went live on Solanasâ Mainnet Beta - kudos, frens! The next milestone on the horizon is the launch of their SDK - for more updates, check out this Twitter thread.
From around the block
On the Edge. Screenshots leaked that show the UI of a wallet that is supposed to be directly integrated into Microsoftsâ browser, Edge.
Slowly, then suddenly? Hereâs a great Twitter Thread from our friend Max over at Ultimate that highlights a few facts and figures regarding the adoption of blockchain technology.