Ethereum’s fifth anniversary from the mainnet launch is upon us, marking an important milestone in the long history of the first smart contract platform to reach significant adoption. Following the initial coin offering mania, today’s main narrative behind Ethereum is decentralized finance, an ecosystem that seeks to recreate the financial system from scratch on the blockchain. Ever since Ethereum’s founding, the application layer has been at the center of its value proposition. In a 2014 interview, Ethereum’s co-founder Vitalik Buterin illustrated that Ethereum is not just about the Ether currency, noting a variety of alternative tokens that could find usage: …

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has warned of the dangers of ‘smart contract risk’ in DeFi protocols in an interview to mark Ethereum's fifth birthday. Buterin also warned users not to ‘risk their life savings’ in DefI in his appearance on Laura Shin’s Unchained Podcast. Smart contract risk When asked about his main criticism and concerns about DeFi, Buterin responded; “I think one big one is just that a lot of people are underestimating smart contract risk.” Buterin said that the interest rates are exponentially higher than traditional bank accounts meaning DeFi products are far riskier and have a much higher …

DAML, a major smart contact language designed for building business-level blockchain applications, has been integrated with R3’s blockchain. Developed by United States’ blockchain startup Digital Asset, DAML, or Digital Asset Modeling Language, is now available on R3 commercial blockchain platform, Corda Enterprise. A cross-platform alternative to Corda’s native programming language In order to bring the cross-platform language to the Corda platform, Digital Asset partnered with international tech firm IntellectEU, the firm announced on July 27. Focused on emerging technologies like blockchain, IntellectEU provided commercial integration, enabling a new smart contract language on Corda. To date, Corda developers have only been …

Binance Smart Chain — a dual-chain architecture from major crypto exchange Binance — is now integrating Chainlink (LINK) data oracles. Binance Smart Chain adds smart contracts to the exchange's original chain, Binance Chain, and is currently in testnet. Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov told Cointelegraph that in his opinion, this integration will save time and effort for developers who are building decentralized apps on the blockchain: “With the Chainlink integration, Binance Smart Chain developers no longer need to dedicate months of engineering time to set up their own oracle infrastructure. Now, they can simply use Chainlink as an abstraction layer to …

As Ethereum contracts can hit the maximum contract size limit of 24KB when there are too many functions and too much code, a new standard has been developed to help combat it. Programmer Nick Mudge revealed in his blog post on July 10 that although Vitalik Buterin’s insistence on using “proxy contracts” could be the potential solution to the limitations, a standardized proxy contract called Diamond Standard he created could be the icing on the cake. Proxy contracts are contracts that can stay small by borrowing functions from other contracts. Mudge noted standard contracts such as ERC1400 Security Token Standards …

Helbiz Inc is facing a class-action lawsuit from investors for its plan to destroy the smart contract underpinning its ERC-20 token, HelbizCoin (HBZ). The electric scooter company initially claimed to have raised almost $40 million dollars for a cryptocurrency billed to disrupt the ride-sharing economy in 2017. In a July 6 memorandum filed by the plaintiffs in support of their request for a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction against the firm, the investors claim to represent approximately 20,000 individuals who now face the permanent destruction of their private property. The plaintiffs assert that HBZ is orchestrating the destruction of …

Smart contracts have limited efficiency in certain industries if not implemented in conjunction with IoT sensors according to experts in blockchain and business from NYU. Stern School of Business Associate Professors Hanna Halaburda and Yannis Bakos presented their research at the Unitize conference July 10 on the interaction between smart contracts and Internet of Things (IoT) sensors in improving business efficiencies. Smart contracts make business more democratic The study looked at how “smart contracts will make the business landscape more democratic” — that is, beneficial for all parties involved — however it found shortcomings in the current implementation of the …

Digital asset protocol Ampleforth announced the official launch of a new “Liquidity Incentive Program' on June 23'. This program, named Geyser, targets Uniswap 2.0 and aims to enable users to stake their Ample liquidity tokens (AMPL) to earn staking rewards. According to the announcement, users will earn Ample tokens based on the amount of liquidity provided and the duration the user’s tokens are available. The company claims that the entire process is on-chain and non-custodial. Targeting Uniswap 2.0 and DeFi’s current status Brandon Iles, co-founder of Ampleforth, told Cointelegraph that the Uniswap platform has had time to prove itself in …

Ether (ETH) options are having a fantastic year, with open interest on Deribit — the largest market for these options — having surged 315% to $158 million over the past two months, breaking the $150-million barrier for the first time ever. Even though Ether first came about only to serve the users of the Ethereum platform as a wallet to use with the apps developed on the platform, it has in the recent past emerged as the clear competitor to Bitcoin (BTC), being the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization. Emergence of ETH options ETH options mostly emerged in March 2019 …

Telos, currently ranked the second-most active blockchain worldwide, is set to enable developers to create and run Ethereum-compatible smart contracts without transaction fees. Telos is a smart contract platform that supports the creation of decentralized applications and decentralized autonomous organizations running on EOSIO, the software underlying the EOS blockchain. As of June 18, the network has launched an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) on its testnet, in what is apparently the first implementation of EVM on an EOSIO blockchain. A challenger to Ethereum? Developers are being invited to use Solidity — the primary programming language for Ethereum — to run smart …

The newest release of the Bancor decentralized exchange appears to be vulnerable to a very serious bug that can result in a significant loss of user funds. According to the tweet posted by Bancor on June 18, the vulnerability affects the latest version of the BancorNetwork smart contract, which was launched on June 16. Users who traded on Bancor and gave a withdrawal approval to its smart contract are urged to revoke it through a specialized website, approved.zone. The team revealed that after discovering the vulnerability, they “attacked the contract as a white-hack” to migrate funds at risk to a …

The potential benefits and applications of smart contracts go well beyond what their name suggests, the co-founder and CEO of blockchain software firm Blockstack has argued. In an interview with Cointelegraph on June 12, Dr. Muneeb Ali, who holds a Ph.D in computer science from Princeton University, said: “Just like cloud computing had implications for a broad range of industries, and not just finance, the same is true for smart contracts. They should not even be called smart contracts because it’s a rather limiting name. These are verifiable programs that couldn’t exist in the cloud computing era.” Dr. Ali’s comments …