For a country of 25 million people, Australia punches well above its weight both economically and in the world of blockchain. Australians have long been enthusiastic adopters of new technology, from cellphones to smart homes, so it’s little surprise they’ve embraced crypto too. Chainalysis ranks Australia 20th out of 154 countries surveyed this year for its "The 2020 Geography of Cryptocurrency Report," citing favorable regulation that legitimizes the technology as driving "steady growth in adoption." Australian crypto educator Alex Saunders, founder of Nuggets News, said the Australian crypto community encompasses everyone from hardcore Bitcoin (BTC) maximalists to well-known Ethereans and …
Charles Hoskinson's IOHK recently published two Ethereum Classic Improvement Proposals, or ECIPs, meant to help the struggling chain recover after a slew of recent 51% attacks. The first introduced a checkpoint system to prevent the possibility of such attacks, and the second proposed a decentralized treasury — a seemingly divisive idea within the ETC community. Following the recent attacks, a heated debate ensued concerning the project's future. Hoskinson, one of Ethereum's co-founders and a supporter of the ETC fork, believes that the way forward revolves around the institution of the decentralized treasury. The proposal suggests that the current method of …
Rounding up the last decade, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin revisited his predictions made over the years, showcasing a knack for being right about abstract ideas than on-production software development issues. Buterin started the Twitter thread by addressing his article dated Jul. 23, 2013 in which he highlighted Bitcoin's (BTC) key benefits — internationality and censorship resistance. Buterin foresaw Bitcoin’s potential in protecting the citizens’ buying power in countries such as Iran, Argentina, China and Africa. However, Buterin also noticed a rise in stablecoin adoption as he saw Argentinian businesses operating in Tether (USDT). He backed up his decade-old ideas around …
While Ethereum devs promised no downtime during The Merge, one of the most anticipated Ethereum upgrades, members of the crypto community decided to take proactive measures to ensure the safety of investor funds. In this effort, crypto exchange FTX announced to halt all Ether (ETH) trades on various blockchains until the September upgrade concludes. The Merge upgrade will permanently transition the Ethereum blockchain from proof-of-work (PoW) to a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism — aimed at reducing energy consumption and introducing sharding capabilities. According to Ethereum developers, the Merge is designed to transition to PoS with zero downtime owing to the …
Ripple users may be able to interact with Ethereum-compatible decentralized applications (DApps) in the future following the launch of a test phase of Ripple’s new XRP Ledger sidechain. The launch of the sidechain was shared in a Tweet by blockchain development firm Peersyst Technologies on Oct. 17, noting that the new sidechain is compatible with Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). This means that Ripple users could eventually have access to decentralized applications like Uniswap (should it port over) and Web3 wallets such as Metamask and XUMM Wallet. The new sidechain also comes with a cross-chain bridge built to transfer XRP and …