Five to six-figure-size airdrops have become the new norm in the crypto sector and a growing number of analysts believe there are more to come. In September dYdX distributed a massive airdrop to early users and last week the Ethereum Name Service gave out roughly $17,000 to $30,000 in ENS tokens to platform users. Anticipation of additional "helicopter money" has also led to a flurry of airdrop hunters seeking out the next big score. The mad dash to engage with protocols and qualify for possible token drops led to an uptick in activity on Polygon, a popular layer-2 platform, and …

Decentralized exchange, or DEX, and self-custody wallet platform, Portal, has announced a strategic partnership agreement with layer-2 blockchain network, Polygon to advance Bitcoin functionality in the decentralized finance, or DeFi, market. Portal currently offers fully decentralized on-chain spot and options trading, as well as peer-to-peer lending and borrowing. This partnership is expected to expand these user capabilities through the enablement of zero-knowledge swap functionalities for wBTC/BTC as well as POS/WBTC to BTC, in addition to Polygon operating a liquidity-supporting node on Portal DEX. Portal's principle objective is to cultivate a self-governing, anonymous and uncensored ecosystem for Bitcoin on DeFi. The …

Metaverse gaming tokens Ethverse (ETHV), The Sandbox (SAND), GameSwap (GSWAP), Yield Guild Games (YGG), Axie Infinity (AXS) are the few cryptocurrencies seeing gains on Nov. 17 with Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH) and most of the market in the red. Best-performing crypto sector The emerging division of the blockchain universe saw its market cap swell by more than 9% in the previous 24 hours and almost 8% in the last seven days to reach $17.42 billion. Its gains came on the back of volatile upside moves in Ethverse, The Sandbox, GameSwap, Yield Guild Games, Axie Infinity, and other markets. Meanwhile, about …

Polygon, a layer 2 scaling solution for Ethereum compatible blockchains, stated in a press release provided to Cointelegraph that it has launched its zk-STARK powered Miden Virtual Machine for the development of decentralized applications, also known as DApps. 1/7 We are proud to reveal the newest member of the Polygon family - Polygon Miden, an upcoming STARK-based, EVM-compatible Rollup! The project is led by @bobbinth, former Facebook's lead ZK researcher who led the development of Winterfell. A on why this is exciting... pic.twitter.com/5RqAJgnZlP — Polygon | $MATIC - We're hiring! (@0xPolygon) November 16, 2021 zk-STARK stands for zero-knowledge Scalable Transparent …

Polysynth, a Polygon-based synthetic asset platform, has secured investments from a number of DeFi venture capital firms and angel investors. The team announced a $1.5 million funding round as part of its seed round on Nov. 15, revealing participation from Jump Capital, DeFi Alliance, Hashed, and a number of individuals such as Alan Howard, co-founder of Brevan Howard Asset Management, and Polygon’s co-founders Sandeep Nailwal and Jaynti Kanani. Polysynth stated that it would be using the funding to expand its team of engineers, designers, and marketers, in addition to carrying out security audits for the protocol. The platform is currently …

Cross-chain protocols are continuing to face challenges, with Synapse Bridge narrowly averting a multi-million exploit. On Nov. 7, Synapse Bridge announced on Discord they had prevented a hacker from draining approximately $8 million USD from the Avalanche Neutral Dollar (nUSD) Metapool. The hacker attempted to exploit a vulnerability using the bridge to transfer assets from Polygon (MATIC) to Avalanche (AVAX). Synapse is a cross-chain bridge designed to facilitate swaps and transfers between a range of layer-one and layer-two protocols using an automated market maker (AMM). Synapse Bridge stated: “Over the past 16 hours, we encountered and discovered a contract bug …

Blockchain platform Telos raised $8 million in funding led by ConsenSys and Polygon investor John Lilic. The funding was secured right before the launch of Telos’ Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) platform, ending the company’s ongoing streak of bootstrapped initiatives. Telos aims to redirect the recently secured capital on the platform’s development and marketing in addition to improving the liquidity of the ecosystem “without needing to resort to TLOS token sales in the event of a prolonged bear market over the next year.” According to Telos chief architect Douglas Horn: “While this [bootstrapping] preserved our identity as an egalitarian, self-governing community, …

In crypto trading we often see entire sectors move in tandem. DeFi coins may all curve upwards together, while metaverse tokens soared on news that Facebook’s getting a Facelift. But this week’s group of top crypto performers have very little in common... except one trading indicator that lit up in pulsating green neon letters before their prices trended upward. We’re looking today at: Polygon (MATIC) — a layer-2 scaling solution for Ethereum Aave (imaginatively, AAVE) — a decentralized finance (DeFi) asset Voyager (VGX) — a crypto trading platform Koinos (KOIN) — a feeless foundational blockchain built for scalability Linear (LINA) …

Enegra Group, a commodities trading firm based in Malaysia with a net asset value of $28 billion, has migrated its equity-tied EGX security tokens from to the Polygon (MATIC) blockchain from Ethereum (ETH). In 2019, Energra tokenized 100% of its equity, enabling shareholders to digitally exercise their dividend, voting, and governance rights. Both the initial tokenization and token migration were facilitated by Tokeny, an asset tokenization and compliance infrastructure provider. Matthew Averay, managing director and CEO at Enegra, said: We tokenized our equity to improve liquidity. And, now that the technology is available for faster, cheaper, and compliant transactions on …

Play-to-earn has become a popular concept in the gaming industry, with the emergence of blockchain technology taking traditional gaming to the next level. However, with so many players entering the market, these platforms are set for significant competition in the long run if they cannot bring anything above and beyond the model itself. Aloha DeFi aims to take the play-to-earn model to the next level by merging it with the concept of learn-to-earn to give participants numerous earning opportunities. Aloha began its journey as a WiFi-sharing platform focused on providing passive income opportunities to users. In practice, the platform allowed …

The weekend failed to ignite bullish momentum from crypto investors and both Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) turned down on Oct. 31. The bulls will now try to achieve the third successive weekly close and the first-ever monthly close above the psychological $60,000 level. $63,000 is another level of interest for traders because the stock-to-flow creator PlanB, projected this level as the “worst-case scenario” for October. In the recent past, PlanB’s worst-case theory was proven to be correct in August and September. Apart from the near-term interest, investors should remember that Bitcoin was launched on Jan. 3, 2009, at a …

White hat hacker Gerhard Wagner has earned $2 million after reporting a solution to a potentially costly “double-spend” bug on the Polygon network. In an Oct. 21 blog post from Immunefi, a security service that helps facilitate bug reports in decentralized finance projects, Polygon network’s Plasma Bridge was at risk of having $850 million removed by a knowledgeable hacker. According to the project, the vulnerability would have allowed attackers to exit their burn transaction from the bridge up to 223 times, quickly turning an amount like $4,500 into $1 million profi. Immunefi reported the double-spend exploit worked by first depositing …