Ethereum underwent an upgrade on Thursday, bringing with it a number of alterations to the network's blockchain. CEO and founder of MyEtherWallet, Kosala Hemchandra, pointed toward two changes of particular importance. “The London upgrade adds around 5 changes to the current Ethereum network; however, I believe that only 2 of them are crucial to day-to-day users,” Hemchandra said in comments sent to Cointelegraph. Noting “time bomb delay” as the first of the two, he added: “Since the inception of Ethereum there was a hard coded value basically responsible to make sure Ethereum will move to PoS or ETH 2.0 on …

The London hard fork arrived almost on schedule at 12:33 pm UTC on Thursday at block height 12,965,000, ushering in the Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 1559. With the upgrade triggered, Ethereum will now undergo a significant overhaul of the network’s transaction fee market and other parameters such as gas refunds among others. Under EIP-1559, each transaction on Ethereum will involve burning the base fee, which automatically decreases the Ether (ETH) circulating supply. Several exchanges, including Binance, announced a temporary pause to deposit and withdrawals on the Ethereum network due to the London hard fork. Some proponents of the upgrade say …

Ethereum’s London upgrade is set to activate on Thursday, according to the countdown available on Ethereum.org. “The London upgrade is scheduled to go live on Ethereum in August 2021, on block 12,965,000,” Ethereum.org reads. “It will introduce EIP-1559, which reforms the transaction fee market, along with changes to how gas refunds are handled and the Ice Age schedule.” Ethereum Improvement Proposal 1559, or EIP-1559, will directly affect how the network handles transaction fees. Going forward, each transaction will burn a base fee, thereby decreasing the asset's circulating supply and giving users the option of including a tip to help incentivize …

Biconomy, a multichain infrastructure network for decentralized applications, has concluded a $9 million private funding round that was co-led by venture firms DACM and Mechanism Capital. Ahmed Al-Balaghi, CEO of Biconomy, said his protocol has been designed to address some of the biggest challenges with Web 3.0 transactions such as gas fees, Ether-only payments and fragmented layer-two solutions. He explained: “If we are able to solve even a fraction of those challenges, we believe we will be able to onboard the next billion users into the DeFi and broader Web 3.0 ecosystem.” Related: A multichain future will accelerate innovators and …

Layer-two scaling platform Celer Network has officially launched the mainnet version of cBridge, a multi-chain network that gives users the ability to more easily swap assets across multiple blockchains. With cBridge, users can instantly transfer tokens across Ethereum, Polygon, Binance Smart Chain and Arbitrum networks without experiencing any liquidity bottlenecks, Celer announced Thursday. The company claims that cBRidge solves many of the existing challenges preventing the full integration of layer-two scaling solutions, including an overly complex user experience and the significant resources required to move assets across multiple chains. Related: A multichain future will accelerate innovators and entrepreneurs Mo Dong, …

Synthetix (SNX) prices reached a one-month high on Monday as traders looked for alternative upside bets against a mixed cryptocurrency market. Bids for SNX/USD achieved an intraday high of $13.76 during the Asia-Pacific trading session, following an approximately 25% price rally that started Sunday. A flurry of technical and fundamental factors contributed to the sudden market demand for Synthetix tokens, including founder Kain Warwick's update on the project's much-awaited layer 2 solutions. A new synthetic exchange underway Layer 2 refers to the techniques for scaling blockchains by taking computation and transaction load from the parent layer and put them onto …

The concerns voiced about the consensus mechanisms of Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) have played a part in the sideways price action both assets have seen over the past two months, opening the door for other competing projects to gain attention. One project that managed to overcome the sideways action in the market and rally to a new record high on July 10 is Constellation (DAG), a protocol that utilizes a directed acyclic graph architecture to achieve a consensus that is theoretically capable of infinite scaling. Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView shows that the price of DAG rallied …

Emin Gün Sirer, creator of the Avalanche blockchain protocol, has said the current decline in crypto prices has not dampened his enthusiasm about the future of the market in general. Speaking to Cointelegraph China, Sirer drew from his “unique vantage point” to offer some of the behind-the-scenes goings-on concerning the growing level of interest in crypto exposure among entities from outside the industry. According to Sirer, everyone from politicians to central banks and even hedge funds have been inquiring about crypto over the last year. Indeed, the influx of hedge funds and institutional money, in general, seemed to catalyze a …

Ernest & Young's (EY's) attempts to promote secure and private transactions over public blockchains at cheaper costs has culminated in the release of Nightfall 3. The company announced the news via a release on July 1, stating that Nightfall 3 combines zero-knowledge proofs with optimistic rollups — zk-Optimistic Rollups — to improve transaction efficiency on Ethereum. Indeed, zk-Rollups are one of the layer-two scaling solutions being developed to achieve scalability for networks like Ethereum, using a process of batched transfers “rolled” into one transaction. EY’s first contribution to ZK proofs was in April 2019, previously reported by Cointelegraph at the …

Ethereum (ETH) scalability infrastructure developer Polygon has announced the rollout of a general-purpose, scalable data availability solution called Avail. According to a release issued on Monday, Polygon revealed that Avail will function as a data available tool for execution layers like sidechains, standalone networks, and layer-two protocols. One of the major hurdles for effective blockchain scaling is the data availability problem. Malicious actors can broadcast blocks to the network with incomplete data and other participants will be none the wiser. To tackle this problem, the Polygon team stated that Avail utilizes erasure coding and polynomial commitment to combat data encoding …

A new project calling itself the first of the fourth generation blockchains says it has solved the “blockchain trilemma” with a new approach to decentralization and an identity-based approach to security. The MetaMUI Blockchain is a “self-sovereign, identity-based meta blockchain” Seokgu (Phantom) Yun, founder and CEO of Sovereign Wallet Network (SWN) told a live ask-me-anything session held on Cointelegraph's YouTube channel. “MetaMUI Network is the permissioned public blockchain SovereignWallet Network is building with central banks, commercial banks, financial institutions, and other blockchain companies around the world.” The blockchain trilemma, posited by Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin, is that full decentralization, scalability, …

More than 1,100 registrations, nine hours of content, 450 slides and thousands of viewers — this two-day blockchain event may have been held virtually because of COVID-19, but it was jam-packed with content nonetheless. Lisk.js is a developer-focused event that was full of announcements. Not only was a cutting-edge interoperability solution presented to the audience, but tantalizing details were given about an ambitious new hackathon and a grants program. The conference began with a rousing speech from Lisk’s CEO and co-founder Max Kordek, who reflected on how far the project has come over the past two years. As you’d expect, …