Smart contract automation network Gelato has become the latest to receive big backing from crypto venture capital giants. Gelato has raised $11 million in a Series A funding round led by Dragonfly Capital and with participation from ParaFi Capital, Nascent, IDEO CoLab Ventures and Aave founder Stani Kulechov. The funds were raised through a closed-door token sale and will go toward onboarding more blockchains to the network and increasing its staff from the current team of 15. Gelato automates Ethereum smart contract operations by using what it calls “arbitrary logic” and bots. Its most prominent use case is addressing liquidity …

Compound Finance announced the passing of Proposal 064 on Thursday, titled the "Fix COMP Accrual Bug." The proposal states that this update will attempt to “patch the bug introduced in Proposal 62 and pessimistically allow COMP reward withdrawals until the bad COMP accruals can be fixed.” The proposal, which was written primarily by the same community members who proposed the original upgrade, received unanimous COMP votes of 1,037,107 for and 0 against from 27 key addresses including CEO Robert Leshner, Andreessen Horowitz’s A16z, Gauntlet and Pantera Capital. The proposal is now expected to execute on Saturday. Users who interacted with …

EOS (EOS) began a descending trend 53 days ago and despite the recent 27% weekly gain, the altcoin is not showing any signs of a reversal. As a result, investors are questioning whether the former top-5 cryptocurrency has what it takes to turn around after Daniel Larimer, CTO of the development company behind EOS, resigned in late 2020. The emergence of competing proof-of-stake smart contract platforms like Solana (SOL), Polkadot (DOT) and Avalanche (AVAX) possibly weighed on this 2017-era project. One potentially bullish catalyst could be the fact that Block.one, the company responsible for the EOS token launch, owns over …

Major decentralized finance (DeFi) money market Compound’s woes are worsening, with nearly $150 million worth of COMP now at risk due to a buggy upgrade to the protocol that went live last week. On Thursday, Cointelegraph reported that a bug had resulted in between $70 million and $85 million worth of COMP tokens being mistakenly offered to users as rewards after an update intended to fix bugs and “split COMP rewards distribution” went awry. Despite the reward distribution error being identified quickly, Compound’s week-long delay in enacting new governance measures meant that the error will not be fixed until Thursda. …

Decentralized oracle service Umbrella Network officially launched on Ethereum on Friday, setting the stage for cross-chain transactions between the dominant smart contract platform and Binance Smart Chain, or BSC. The cross-chain bridge connecting Ethereum and BSC was developed in-house at Umbrella Network, underscoring the need to transfer tokens and other crypto assets between the two networks. The cross-chain bridge also enables users to stake and farm crypto tokens on either blockchain. Umbrella said it’s planning future cross-chain integration with Polygon, Solana, Cardano and Avalanche, though no timetable was given. Although the blockchain industry has given birth to several oracle services, …

An on-chain study released by Kraken Intelligence highlights strong accumulation behavior among Ethereum miners even as they faced the prospects of generating lower revenue following a major network upgrade on Aug. 5. Ethereum miners accumulated an additional 2 million Ether (ETH), worth $6.1 billion, after the so-called London hard fork’s activation. The latest bout of accumulation caused miners’ net Ether holdings to hit an all-time high of 22.3 million ETH (worth nearly $70 billion), which is almost 19% of the total Ether supply. “ETH accumulation was stagnant for most of the summer before picking up speed in July in spite …

A new stablecoin is arriving on the Cardano blockchain to provide a tool for decentralized finance (DeFi) operations and avoid transaction fees. Cardano’s payment gateway provider, Coti, will be the official issuer of Djed, a new DeFi-focused stablecoin for the Cardano network, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson and Coti CEO Shahaf Bar-Geffen announced Sunday at the Cardano Summit. The new stablecoin will be based on an algorithmic design using smart contracts to ensure price stability and providing an instrument for DeFi transactions. The stablecoin is designed for paying transaction fees on the Cardano network in order to avoid “volatile and exorbitant …

Arca Labs, the innovation arm of digital asset investment firm Arca, has partnered with blockchain tech firm Securitize to launch regulated, tokenized financial products. According to a Thursday announcement, Securitize has signed on to provide a smart contract and issuance platform for the firm, starting with Arca’s tokenized fund dubbed the “Arca U.S. Treasury Fund,” which was launched in July 2020. Arca touts the Arca U.S. Treasury Fund as the first treasury fund registered under the Investment Company Act of 1940 to issue shares as digital assets via the blockchain. The fund meets the same regulatory requirements as a mutual …

Dfinity Foundation’s Internet Computer blockchain is bringing smart-contract capabilities to the Bitcoin (BTC) network, potentially opening the door to new use cases for the premier cryptocurrency. Internet Computer will utilize its so-called chain key cryptography to integrate with Bitcoin, paving the way for smart contracts with native BTC addresses that are hosted directly on Internet Computer, Dfinity Foundation announced Tuesday. “Internet Computer smart contracts will gain access to bitcoin liquidity, and Bitcoin will gain powerful new smart contract functionality, without the need for insecure and cumbersome trusted bridging services,” explained Dominic Williams, the founder and chief scientist of Dfinity Foundation. …

Before new technologies become widely adopted, the market must first learn to incorporate them into their everyday lives. While the technology continues to make leaps and bounds in the world of cryptocurrency, some obstacles still stand in the way before businesses and individuals may start incorporating them in frequent practice. Smart contracts and their underlying technology have become widely popularized for their ability to execute secure business transactions. Complicated smart contracts are designed to execute logic based on triggering events that will result in an automatic payment upon completion. With the ability to create more complex smart contracts, uses will …

One of the familiar themes seen in previous crypto market cycles is the shifting market caps, popularity and ranking of the top 10 projects that see significant gains during bull phases, only to fade into obscurity during the bear markets. For many of these projects, they follow a recognizable boom-to-bust cycle and never return to their previous glory. During the 2017–2018 bull market and initial coin offering (ICO) boom, which was driven by Ethereum network-based projects, all manner of small smart contract-oriented projects rallied thousands of percentage to unexpected highs. During this time, projects like Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Litecoin (LTC), …

Welcome to the latest edition of Cointelegraph’s decentralized finance, or DeFi, newsletter. Despite Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson's claim that the DeFi space is now “up for grabs,“ it was rival Vitalik Buterin who stole the headlines this week with a feature in Time Magazine. What you’re about to read is the smaller version of this newsletter designed for brevity. For the full version of DeFi’s developments over the last week — released a whole lot quicker than Cardano’s smart contracts — drop your email below. Buterin’s Time to Shine Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin was listed in Time Magazine’s 100 most …