In a Jan. 27 post, Dragonfly Research proclaimed Plasma to be dead, noting that the Ethereum (ETH) community is converging on Optimistic Rollup, despite initial enthusiasm. The news comes in stark contrast to earlier claims by Plasma Group arguing that the technology was moving into production phase. The history of Plasma The original paper detailing the Plasma proposal was published in August 2017. In essence, Plasma was conceived as a network of sidechains attached to the main Ethereum blockchain. They would have allowed offloading of the majority of the transactional load, improving scalability by orders of magnitude. In theory. A …

JPMorgan’s blockchain spin-off Kadena has fully launched its public blockchain, completing what it calls the “industry’s first hybrid blockchain platform.” Launched on Jan. 15, Kadena’s public blockchain includes full transactions and the ability to write smart contracts, the firm’s CEO co-founder and Will Martino said in a press release shared with Cointelegraph. The company claims the product is the first sharded Proof-of-Work Layer 1 network to make it to market. Kadena’s hybrid blockchain seamlessly integrates a public chain with a private network As the launch completes Kadena’s hybrid blockchain platform, the fully functional hybrid blockchain enables the connection of a …

Researchers from cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX have suggested that the privacy and scalability benefits of Bitcoin’s (BTC) implementation of the Lightning Network are less than expected. A report published by BitMEX on Jan. 11 illustrates the researchers’ efforts to determine the growth of the Lightning Network by trying to extrapolate information about private payment channels from readily available data. The team focused on non-cooperative channel closures and they suggest that — since the network started its activity — about 60,000 such transactions took place. A non-cooperative channel closure happens when a Lightning Network node initiates the closure of a payment channel …

British auditing giant EY has released a new iteration of its zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) blockchain, intending to cut transaction costs by 90%. A ZKP is a digital protocol that enables data to be distributed between the two participants without using a password or any associated information in the transaction. According to an announcement on Dec. 19, EY released its third-generation ZKP blockchain technology to the public domain on the Ethereum blockchain. The new ZKP blockchain aims to make private transactions on public blockchains more scalable by decreasing transaction costs by combining multiple private transfers in a single transaction. Specifically, the …

Cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX added support for native segregated witness (SegWit) addresses for Bitcoin (BTC) withdrawals, which lets users pay lower transaction fees. According to an announcement on Dec. 12, BitMEX now allows its users to withdraw Bitcoin to Bech32 addresses, the one that natively supports the segregated witness standard. Bitcoin address formats As the announcement explains, the Bitcoin network currently supports three address formats. The first one — Bitcoin’s original address format — is pay to public key hash (P2PKH), which starts with a 1. The second format is the pay to script hash (P2SH), which allows users to send …

China’s state-backed tech workgroup has released its fifteenth blockchain technology assessment, in which it promoted Ethereum to second place after its recent hard fork. The Center for Information and Industry Development (CCID) released the list on Dec. 6, ranking 35 assets in total. In the latest rankings, EOS kept its top spot, Ethereum moved from third to second, trading places with Tron (TRX). Bitcoin’s (BTC) network is ranked ninth, while Ripple did not even make the top ten, coming in at 18th. Top 20 blockchain networks per CCID’s 15th assessment. Source: CCID Ethereum’s rise Ethereum’s promotion can be attributed with …

Cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex and crypto store Bitrefill partnered to allow the trading platform’s clients to shop with Bitcoin (BTC) over the Lightning Network. According to a press release published on Dec. 4, Bitfinex users can instantly pay for a variety of services with Bitcoin that they hold on the exchange as of today. A Lightning B2B settlement system Per the press release, the companies attribute the development to the “world’s first dynamic B2B settlement process over the Lightning Network.” The announcement builds on recent news that Bitfinex enabled Bitcoin Lightning Network transactions and that those using it for deposits and …

Bitcoin (BTC) node synchronization would be impossible if it were not for the improvements that have been made to the software, according to the research arm of crypto exchange BitMex. BitMex Research measured the Initial Block Download (IBD) times of Bitcoin Core software releases from 2012 to 2019 needed to download the blockchain and verify it and shared their conclusions in a blog post published on Nov. 29. The research team claims that the older version of the Bitcoin Core software may be impossible to synchronize now and that the scalability improvements made to the software are essential to the …

Blockchain advisory and product development firm Akomba Labs conducted a test on the Ethereum network that shows it can make block propagation at least twice as fast. Coindesk reported on Nov. 27 that Akomba Labs — in collaboration with the scalability-focused blockchain startup BloXroute — ran a two-week test measuring the results of running BloXroute's Blockchain Distribution Network (BDN) on the Ethereum network. Test findings showed that the average block propagation performance significantly improved, dropping from 360 milliseconds without the BDN to 172 milliseconds with it. The test results further indicate that BDN could potentially present itself as a solution …

The Tor Project, the nonprofit organization behind the anonymous network Tor, announced that it now accepts Bitcoin (BTC) donations via the Lightning Network. The organization announced on Nov. 19 that it will accept Lightning Network donations as part of Bitcoin Tuesday, a fundraising initiative led by the crypto-for-charity organization The Giving Block. Tor recommended the BottlePay wallet for donations, which allows users to search for The Tor Project inside it and send crypto without copying and pasting addresses. The Lightning Network is a layer-2 payment protocol for the Bitcoin network that aims to expedite payments and address the network’s scalability …

IDEX, the decentralized exchange (DEX) responsible for over 40% of all DEX transactions, claims to have created an “infinite scaling solution” for the Ethereum network. 1,000 times faster In an email sent to Cointelegraph, IDEX claims that its system, dubbed Optimized Optimistic Rollups (O2Rs), reaches block finality in 10 minutes. The company also says that this is about 1,000 times faster than the Optimistic Rollups (ORs) developed by Ethereum scalability development organization Plasma Group — which achieves block finality in two weeks. Rollup solutions scale by moving computation off-chain and pushing result to the network later. Both O2Rs and ORs …

The EOS blockchain is congested by the EIDOS token airdrop, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase reports on Nov. 9. In a post on its blog, Coinbase claims that it had trouble in processing its clients’ transactions due to EOS network congestion caused by the EIDOS token airdrop. The exchange has since solved the issue by increasing the amount of staked CPU, securing a sufficient portion of the CPU time remaining on the network to process its transactions. Interestingly, the incident also caused the price of CPU time on the network to increase by over 100,000% over the course of 4 hours. The …