Web3 News for Devs: 15 - 23 July
Cross Chain All The Things whilst paying from a non-custodial crypto card? Yes Please!
Launches
Cross Chain All the Things! Chainlink's Interoperability Protocol, Connecting Blockchains to ‘Bank Chains,’ Goes Live
Data provider Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP), designed to help build cross-chain applications and services, is now live for early access users on the Avalanche, Ethereum, Optimism and Polygon blockchains.
🚀 CCIP has entered Mainnet Early Access on Avalanche, Ethereum, Optimism, and Polygon blockchains.
💱 The protocol's partnership with SWIFT, a closed network used by banks for international money transfers, is built upon CCIP as a key component.
🎥Leading DeFi protocols in derivatives and lending are adopting CCIP, including Synthetix, which is live on CCIP mainnet, as well as Aave, with BGD Labs now integrating CCIP on mainnet into the protocol.
Synthetix’ Synth Teleporter (provides users with a streamlined method for transferring Synth liquidity between chains) employs Chainlink CCIP to burn and mint tokens across chains safely and accurately, ensuring security and reliability.
📲”If a dApp already relies on Chainlink for Price Feeds, then relying on CCIP for cross-chain interactions is an obvious choice”, according to Chainlink
🪴Use cases (cross chain all the things)
Cross chain token transfers without a bridge
Cross chain collateral
Cross chain NFTs
Cross chain account abstraction etc
🏦Swift and over a dozen financial institutions and financial market infrastructure providers have already begun exploring CCIP for instructing token transfers across public and private chains through existing Swift messaging infrastructure.
The blockchain interoperability collaboration includes Australia and New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ), BNP Paribas, BNY Mellon, Citi, Clearstream, Euroclear, Lloyds Banking Group, SIX Digital Exchange (SDX), and The Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC).
🧑🏫Workshop on August 3 about Mastering Cross Chain Development with Chainlink CCIP
Solana Opens Doors to Ethereum Developers with Neon EVM Integration (Builders Program with Funding)
Solana introduces Neon EVM, an Ethereum Virtual Machine on its blockchain, allowing developers to build Ethereum DApps on Solana, benefiting from its efficiency and technical capabilities while reducing transaction costs significantly.
It’s still on devnet
🚀 The Neon Foundation is starting the Early Builders Program to fast-track the growth of the Neon Ecosystem, increase platform usability, and generate value for users in the Neon Network.
💰 Participants in the program will receive funding in NEON tokens as they achieve specific project milestones. The funding will be released in four stages based on successful deployment, marketing efforts, and user activity targets.
🔒 NEON tokens allocated to participants will be locked for a six-month vesting period.
🛠️ The Early Builders Program offers three tracks—Technical, Community, and Ecosystem—to provide support and resources to project teams, including chat support, office hours, community-building guidance, and ecosystem connections.
Solana Labs rolls out Solang compiler to enhance Ethereum compatibility
🚀 Solana Labs introduced Solang, a new compiler aimed at helping Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) developers transition to the Solana ecosystem.
📝 With Solang, developers familiar with Solidity, Ethereum's primary smart contract programming language, can now write applications on the Solana network.
🆕 The launch of Solang follows Neon EVM's release of a similar tool, showing ongoing efforts to enhance compatibility between Solana and existing Ethereum development approaches.
🔄 Solang offers compatibility with Ethereum Solidity version 0.8 and integration of Solana SPL tokens with Solidity, providing EVM frameworks on Solana access to the network's core features.
🦾 Traditionally, Solana development has focused on languages like Rust or C, but the team is now emphasizing greater accessibility through Solidity and EVM.
Linea Mainnet is Live
⛓️ Consensys has released Linea on Ethereum's mainnet, a type 2 zero-knowledge Ethereum virtual machine (zk-EVM).
🚀 Linea successfully completed its testnet phase on Goerli, with over 5.5 million wallet addresses executing over 46 million transactions.
🔄 Linea's zk-EVM is designed to replicate the user experience on mainnet while offering faster speeds and lower transaction costs (up to 15 times lower) than Ethereum layer-1.
📈 Leveraging Vortex, an industry-leading prover, Linea can generate efficient ZK proofs, enabling cheaper transactions and faster settlement finality with Ethereum.
💼 Linea is fully EVM compatible, ensuring no switching costs for Ethereum.
🛠️ At launch, Linea will integrate with existing Web3 products like MetaMask and Infura, providing a familiar infrastructure for developers.
Gnosis Pay: payment network on Gnosis chain L2 with linked Visa Debit card
💱 Gnosis Pay stands as the inaugural decentralized payment network that enables web3 developers to integrate various traditional payment methods, including Visa, facilitating onboarding of millions of new users to the web3 economy.
💳 Gnosis Card, the world's first Visa-certified, self-custodial consumer debit card, is directly linked to an onchain wallet, not a traditional bank account.
🔒 To securely manage massive transaction volumes, Gnosis Pay uses a custom L2 on the Gnosis Chain
Aave DAO Votes to Launch GHO Stablecoin on Ethereum Mainnet
🚀 Aave Companies is launching a decentralized stablecoin called GHO on the Ethereum mainnet.
💹 GHO will be native to the Aave Protocol and backed by an array of collateral assets held by users.
already 7.8 million GHO minted
Check out the Dune Analytics Board
Nethermind and EigenLayer team up to build on Ethereum restaking capabilities
Nethermind has teamed up with EigenLayer to combine their respective Ethereum infrastructure and restaking capabilities. However you might be wondering, what’s Nethermind and what’s EigenLayer?
💾Nethermind is an Ethereum client developer, they have a open-source . NET core implementation of a full ethereum node. They also build for Starknet and other public and private blockchains.
🔐EigenLayer is a restaking platform that leverages Ethereum's security. With EigenLayer, users can harness Ethereum's security and restake their already-staked ether or Ethereum liquid staking tokens (LSTs) — such as Lido’s stETH on other protocols. Restaking enables holders to double down on their staked assets for additional yield, albeit trading off additional risk.
🌐 EigenLayer recently went live on Ethereum with an initial $17 million LST deposit limit, and they have raised $64.5 million in total funding, including a $50 million Series A funding round backed by prominent investors.
🤝 The collaboration aims to explore and build possibilities with restaking on Ethereum and other chains.
📊Nethermind has released restaking dashboard for users and helping to establish specifications for node operators within EigenLayer.
⚠️ Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and others have expressed concerns about restaking, warning that it could potentially compromise the security of the mainnet.
💡Idea
Explore the potential impact of restaking capabilities on DeFi applications and how to optimize their integration.
DeFi
Uniswap is coming in HOT with this new update
🔄 UniswapX is a new permissionless, open-source (GPL) protocol designed for trading across Automated Market Makers (AMMs) and other liquidity sources.
💱 It outsources routing complexity to an open network of fillers who compete to execute swaps at the best prices.
🥧 Swappers can expect benefits such as better prices, gas-free swapping, MEV protection, and no cost for failed transactions in the competitive ecosystem of fillers.
🌍This ecosystem of fillers will bring
💸 Better prices
⛽ Gas-free swapping
🤝 MEV protection
🤩 No cost for failed transactions
👀 Gas-free cross-chain swaps (coming soon)
🖋️ Swappers sign offchain orders, and fillers submit them on-chain, paying the gas fees on behalf of the swappers for completing the transaction.
💰 UniswapX addresses the issue of Miner Extractable Value (MEV) by returning potential MEV to swappers through improved prices instead of it being captured by arbitrage transactions.
⚡ It’s an opt-in beta is LIVE!
Liquid staking claims top spot in DeFi: Binance report
🆕Therei s a new acronym in twon, LSTfi - Liquid Staking Finance
💧 Liquid staking is a DeFi subsector enabling users to earn yield without losing liquidity by staking their tokens.
💰 It has become the biggest DeFi sector in terms of TVL, dethroning DEXs, as per Binance's Half-Year Report 2023.
📈 Liquid staking holds 37.1% of the ETH staking market.
💼 The staking mechanism played a crucial role before the Ethereum Shanghai upgrade when users couldn't freely unstake their ETH, making liquid staking tokens (LSTs) essential.
📅 Despite the Ethereum Shanghai update allowing unstaking, liquid staking continued to grow post-update, becoming the most common way for users to stake ETH.
🔄 The emergence of "LSTfi" or "LSDfi" refers to projects combining liquid staking and DeFi, including yield-trading protocols and stablecoin minting using LSTs as collateral. LSTfi protocols' TVL grew by 67% in June 2023.
💡Idea: Build an automated liquid staking aggregator that optimizes users' staking rewards by automatically moving staked assets to different DeFi platforms with higher yields.
Not so good news
Ethereum-Based Decentralized Finance Protocol Loses $3,260,000 in ETH to Hackers
A decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol called Conic Finance (CNC) built on Ethereum has been hacked, resulting in a loss of about $3.2 million.
🛠️ The exploit has been fixed to prevent its recurrence, and withdrawals from the ETH Omnipool are deemed safe.
🚨 Conic warns users of potential scams and clarifies they have reached out to the exploiter directly.
🔍The root cause was a re-entrancy attack that was able to be performed because of a wrong assumption as to what address is returned by the Curve Meta Registry for ETH in Curve V2 pools. A fix to the affected contract is being deployed.
🦜Conic says they have reached out to the bad actor via the transaction and warns that anyone else contacting users to recover funds is attempting to scam them.
The exploit cannot be done again for the ETH Omnipool. Withdrawals are safe. No other Conic omnipools are affected by this issue. A more detailed post-mortem will be published soon.
📦This incident serves as a reminder for web3 developers to thoroughly audit and test their smart contracts to prevent potential vulnerabilities and unauthorized access.
📅 Events to Add to Your Calendar
3-Aug: Mastering Cross-Chain Development With Chainlink CCIP >
Chainlink On Demand Developer Bootcamps >
💡Builder Ideas based on the News
⛓️Develop DeFi apps targeting the African market and test on Marachain
📈Build an automated liquid staking aggregator that optimizes users' staking rewards by automatically moving staked assets to different DeFi platforms with higher yields.
1️⃣ One Liners
McDonald’s debuts McNuggets Land in The Sandbox >
Manta Network developer p0x labs raises $25 million, launches Layer 2 for ZK apps >
GHO can be minted through multiple collateral assets in a single transaction >
Oasis launches Ethereum-compatible privacy blockchain Sapphire >
Safe wallet adds 'ERC-4337' to boost account abstraction features >
OpenSea now allows users to trade their NFTs peer-to-peer through a new functionality called Deals >
Web3 Funding Plummets As AI Steals The Show >
Introducing L2s on mint.fun, allowing users to mint OurZora Network and OptimismFND NFTs >