Ethereum

Binance – the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange – will perform maintenance on its Ethereum wallet in about five days. Users will be unable to use their self-hosted wallets to interact with their Binance accounts during that time. According to a company announcement on Wednesday, the maintenance will take place on June 27th at 06:00 UTC for approximately 2 hours. The exchange will temporarily disable Ethereum network deposits and withdrawals at  beginning, five minutes before this maintenance starts. That includes not…

The Sepolia testnet is live in readiness for a trial merge that will supply Ethereum developers with vital technical insights. Sepolia's upcoming integration with Ethereum's Beacon chain will deploy Proof of Stake in achieving consensus instead of Proof of Work. The purpose of this testnet is to supply a picture of what could happen when Ethereum 2.0's Merge finally goes live. Why Ethereum is Moving from PoW to PoS The energy-intensive Proof of Work (PoW) model Ethereum blockchain uses has…

In a Twitter post, layer-2 blockchain protocol Optimism shared that the hacker who exploited a transfer error has refunded most of the stolen OP tokens as promised. This comes two days after the attack and less than a day since the attacker awarded 1 million coins to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin. Hacker Withholds 2 Million OP Tokens The hacker returned only 17M tokens, worth roughly $15 million; this falls 3M short of the stolen 20 million. According to information on…

Ethereum Layer-2 system, Optimism announced on May 31st that its governance token airdrop was going live. A few hours after the airdrop launch, the network suffered from low performance as traffic surged.  The governance token, OP, is the beginning of a shift to a bicameral governance system of funding for the network, called the Optimism Collective. In April, Coinbase carried an OP token page, which roused speculations that a token airdrop was in the offing. A week later, Optimism confirmed…

The financial services giant Fidelity is putting more money in cryptocurrency-related services, despite the recent market downturn. President Tom Jessop has confirmed that the firm will start developing services for cryptocurrencies besides Bitcoin, such as Ethereum trading. Unphased by the Bear Market As reported by the Wall Street Journal, Fidelity Digital Asset Services plans to hire 110 engineers with blockchain expertise. It will also bring 100 customer service specialists to the team. The new hires will have to help launch…

On Wednesday, the Beacon Chain – the core of the Ethereum 2.0 ecosystem – experienced a blockchain reorganization 7 blocks deep. That means that 7 blocks worth of its most recent transactions were effectively reversed on Wednesday. The Meaning of Blockchain Reorgs A blockchain reorganization occurs when nodes cannot agree on the canonical order of blocks. This can be caused by a number of factors, which differ between proof of work and proof of stake systems. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin…

Longtime electronic game giant, GameStop, has announced the release of its beta NFT wallet. The unveiled wallet is the first step to GameStop's goal of a native Ethereum-based NFT marketplace. GameStop Wades in Web3 Waters On Monday, 23rd May, GameStop took to its official Twitter account to publicize the development. The new wallet, downloadable on GameStop’s website, would allow users to send and receive digital assets without leaving their web browsers.  https://twitter.com/GameStop/status/1528693604364976129?s=20&t=xkghM9-X6-nnLMg4U5cgQQ According to the announcement, GameStop’s wallet boasts Ethereum…

The Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) released a report on Tuesday covering the current state of crypto adoption. It highlights Ethereum as the leading blockchain network for developer support but contains very little mention of Bitcoin’s growth. The Potential of Web 3 The VC firm broke boiled down its report into five key takeaways about the current state of crypto. It began by suggesting that the industry is in the middle of its fourth ‘price innovation’ cycle.…

Ethereum rollup Optimism could launch a new token in the coming weeks. The L2 network wi also introduced interesting reforms to its governance structure.  Optimism is a low-cost, high-speed Ethereum Layer 2 (L2) scaling solution created in 2019. Considering Ethereum’s longstanding problem of scalability, Optimism like other L2 chains hopes to alleviate these problems. The network has risen in popularity and use in the past 2 years. Its new governance token, OP,  will underly the layer-2 protocol and promote Optimism’s adoption in…