A Canadian business has become the world’s first publicly listed company to be entirely focused on the Lightning Network. LQwD FinTech Corp. trades under the symbols TSXV:LQWD, OTCQB: LQWDF. In November 2020, it was announced that Interlapse planned to acquire 100% of the issued and outstanding shares in LQwD, a Bitcoin company that aims to provide enterprise-grade infrastructure, tools and liquidity to support the growth of the Lightning Network ecosystem. The Lightning Network is a layer-two solution that is built on top of the Bitcoin blockchain — delivering scalable, off-chain, instantaneous and cheap payments. According to LQwD, this technology “is …

Developers in the DeFi space are currently confronted with a terrible choice: Build something quickly and risk losing people’s money, or write bug-free Solidity code that takes time — meaning they miss market opportunities. With Solidity developers now spending up to 90% of their time securing code and only 10% being creative, a blockchain project says the DeFi world deserves better, and is promising to deliver a way to create DApps quickly and securely. The Radix Engine uses a new programming language called Scrypto — and the team behind this initiative say their smart contracts run on the same logic …

A privacy-enabled blockchain platform says its goal is to build a responsible data economy and usher in a new era for this technology. Oasis Protocol says it brings privacy and scalability to DeFi — ensuring that this new approach to finance can expand beyond early adopters to reach the mass market. Controlling privacy Support for confidential smart contracts is a key differentiator of the Oasis Network. The contracts play an important role in preserving privacy by allowing a trustless decentralized blockchain without having to make that smart contract’s data public. This leaves the network able to solve emerging problems in …

Dominic Williams, founder of Dfinity and its Internet Computer, has slammed the scaling solutions put forward by Polkadot and Ethereum for offering a disjointed user experience. The self-described “blockchain maximalist” criticized Ethereum’s burgeoning ecosystem of second-layer scaling solutions, describing Ethereum as starting to resemble a ridiculously elaborate “Rube Goldberg machine” of “layer-two cloud applications.” Williams asserted layer twos cause points of friction for Ethereum users and exposes them to counterparty security vulnerabilities, emphasizing that more than half of Ethereum’s nodes are hosted by Amazon Web Services: “A lot of these proof-of-stake networks today that people invest in are really just …

Polygon ecosystem is getting a major funding boost thanks to a new joint venture fund with blockchain venture capitalist AU21 Capital, setting the stage for wider adoption of the Ethereum-compatible infrastructure platform. The $21 million Polygon Ecosystem Fund announced Wednesday is designed to provide direct funding support for promising projects building on top of Polygon. The fund will offer business development and marketing support, as well as human capital incentives. Receiving support from AU21 is a source of strength from Polygon, given the venture capital firm’s track record in supporting highly successful projects, including The Graph, Casper Labs and Elrond, …

Popular crypto derivatives exchange BitMEX has announced a $150,000 grant for Calvin Kim — a Korean-based Bitcoin scaling researcher. The grant provides a second instance of support in which BitMEX has backed Kim’s research, with the exchange donating $30,000 to Kim in August 2020. For his current research, Kim plans to implement Utreexo into Bitcoin deployments, using the Go and Rust programming languages respectively, while also working on “improving the initial block download time in Bitcoin.” Utreexo is a Bitcoin scaling solution and hash accumulator that Kim has been working on since mid-2019, with the protocol's design having first been …

The Uniswap community has voted in favor of launching the leading decentralized exchange’s v3 iteration on layer-two scaling solution, Arbitrum. Uniswap’s creator, Hayden Adams, announced the vote on May 27, revealing the proposal’s governance vote received 41.35 million votes in favor and zero opposing votes from UNI token holders. He noted that work is already underway to plan the deployment and design its interface. 2/ Assuming the snapshot passes we intend to support the community by deploying the v3 smart contracts to Arbitrum! We have already begun work on interface support and planning the deployment. — Hayden Adams (@haydenzadams) May …

Polygon has announced the launch of its SDK stack that will allow developers to easily deploy their own Ethereum-connected blockchains. SDKs, or software development kits, are single installation packages containing tools necessary for seamless app creation. According to an announcement on Wednesday, the Polygon SDK contains several plug-and-play modules with custom-made solutions for parameters like consensus and synchronization. Apart from consensus and synchronization, the Polygon SDK also contains other modules like TxPool, JSON RPC and gRPC. As part of the announcement, Polygon revealed that its SDK was designed to mirror a “Polkadot on Ethereum” approach, which could see the emergence …

Billionaire investor Mark Cuban has thrown his weight behind Polygon, according to a new disclosure on one of his websites, offering further evidence that wealthy investors are tapping into the digital asset market despite the recent turmoil. The addition of Polygon to the Mark Cuban Companies website appears to have been made recently and reaffirms the billionaire’s backing of the project. Cuban, who was once a polarizing figure in the cryptocurrency market, has become a more vocal supporter of the nascent asset class over the past year. Recently, when Elon Musk decided to stop accepting Bitcoin (BTC) due to environmental …

The cryptocurrency sector has undergone a seismic shift in recent years as retail investors and publicly listed companies make their way into the space. Globally, estimates suggest that the number of crypto users surged by about 190% between 2018 and 2020. Record-breaking inflows into the market have also taken the number of active addresses on the Bitcoin network, as well as trading volumes, to all-time highs this year. On the face of it, all of this should be cause for celebration — and it is. But here’s the problem: While Bitcoin’s network is enjoying a surge in demand, it could …

When this “truly decentralized” blockchain launched on May 7, 2020, it had not sold a single token. A year later, Free TON still hasn’t — and won’t — TON Labs CTO Mitja Goroshevsky said on a May 3 Cointelegraph AMA. That’s unique for a proof-of-stake blockchain, which generally relies on validators who stake a fair amount of a project’s tokens to ensure good behavior. But then, very little is normal about the Free TON project, which arose from the ashes of Telegram messaging service’s Telegram Open Network blockchain. In that incarnation, Telegram presold $1.7 billion worth of tokens to investors. …

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has posted a lengthy paper on the limits to blockchain scalability, criticizing claims made by Tesla CEO Elon Musk. The article, published on Buterin’s personal blog on Sunday, emphasizes the trade-off between decentralization and scalability in architecting blockchain networks. The article comes in response to Elon Musk’s May 15 tweet asserting that Dogecoin will emerge as the leading chain if it moves to increase its block size by 900%: “Ideally, Doge speeds up block time 10X, increases block size 10X & drops fee 100X. Then it wins hands down.” Buterin challenged Musk’s proposition, emphasizing the challenge …