MinersMarket.ca - Even in a slow week ahead of the Chinese New Year, there's a lot of crypto news to cover. Here's this week's The Protocol, CoinDesk's weekly newsletter devoted to blockchain tech.
Honestly, we do try to keep things tight here in The Protocol newsletter. The problem is, there's just so many good stories in crypto. That's true even on a slower week as many of our readers and developers in Asia head toward the Chinese New Year on Feb. 10. (The "year of the dragon" is supposed to be bullish, by the way.)
In this week's issue we've got:
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EXCLUSIVE Q&A with Farcaster's Dan Romero on the decentralized social network's new "Frames" feature
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Solana falls shy of one-year uptime anniversary
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Theta Capital's "bold predictions" from Celestia's Nick White and Framework's Vance Spencer
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Ethereum's Dencun debut on Holesky testnet
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Top picks from the past week's Protocol Village living column of blockchain project updates, grants and other news
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More than $50M of blockchain project fundraisings
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EigenLayer's TVL, Ethereum's dogwifhat, Prometheum's pick, frozen XRP
This article is featured in the latest issue of The Protocol, our weekly newsletter exploring the tech behind crypto, one block at a time. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Wednesday. Also please check out our weekly The Protocol podcast.
Network News:
SOL CRUSHING. It was supposed to be a cause for celebration: On Feb. 25, the Solana blockchain would complete a full 365 days without an outage – seen as a remarkable milestone given its historic jankiness. So notable it was, in fact, that analysts at Coinbase Institutional called it out in a report last week: "Solana is fast approaching its first full year mark without any downtime, showcasing its significant ecosystem progress, especially when compared to an early history of crashes that halted the chain for days at a time." But the anniversary was not to be. On Tuesday, some 20 days shy of the mark, Solana went down for nearly five hours, in what one blockchain validator described as "performance degradation." According to the website status.solana.com, "Core contributors are working on a root cause report, which will be made available once complete." CoinDesk columnist Daniel Kuhn noted that even as Solana's top developers, led by co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko, promote the blockchain as a top contender in the race for relevance, they have continued to describe the project as being in "beta." After Tuesday's outage, such a descriptor might seem fitting. On the social-media platform X, fans of rival projects from Ethereum to Cardano and even Litecoin and VeChain were quick with the jabs. The prediction market Polymarket posted what appeared to be a betting forum on whether Solana would "go down again in February," with 89 cents on "no" and 11 cents on "yes."
BOLD PREDICTIONS: Theta Capital, which manages a fund-of-funds program for crypto-native venture capital, gave CoinDesk an exclusive advance peek at its "Satellite View" report compiling blockchain predictions from 20 top investors, founders and institutional chieftains. According to the report, the compilation keys off Theta Capital's annual Legends4Legends conference, which raises money for Alternatives4Children (A4C), a "charitable foundation established in 2011 in the Netherlands supporting small-scale educational projects with high impact potential." It runs 60 pages, and goes into a lot of depth on market and regulatory trends, but here are some of the boldest predictions for blockchain tech:
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Nick White, COO, Celestia Labs: "We'll see over 10,000 layer 2s deployed in 2024."
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Evan Fisher, founder and managing partner, Portal VC: "We predict new protocols built on top of Bitcoin will grow to $50 billion of cumulative market cap over the next one to two years."
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Vance Spencer, co-founder, Framework Ventures: "Maker will become the central bank of crypto and surpass $1 billion in earnings in the next two years."
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Jason Kam, founder, Folius Ventures: "The Asia developer landscape is looking even more bullish to me than previously thought, mainly brought forth by the BTC layer-2 narrative (driven mainly by miners), as well as another wave of mostly gaming developers hitting the market due to another round of adverse government policy on the entertainment industry."
ALSO:
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The final dress rehearsal for Ethereum’s upcoming Dencun upgrade – and the introduction of "data blobs" thanks to "proto-danksharding" – occurred Wednesday, as the blockchain's biggest changes in almost a year took place on the Holesky test network. (Link)
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The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) announced plans to conduct a provisional survey of electricity consumption data from cryptocurrency mining companies, drawing criticism from the community. (Link)
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Craig Wright denies forging evidence on Day 2 of U.K. "COPA" trial that could lay waste to his controversial claim that he is the father of cryptocurrency. (Link)