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MetaMask’s ConsenSys Reveals New “Custom Networks” Layer 2 Solution

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At this point, everyone with their ear to the ground knows of Ethereum’s massive problem when it comes to transaction fees on the Layer 1 network, not to mention the overall congestion in the network traffic. As one would imagine, it’s been a race for the crypto community to pile on the new “Layer 2” solutions in order to try and bypass these rampant fees. ConsenSys stands as the latest figure to recognize and respond to this, coming with a new Custom Networks API for the MetaMask wallet.

Layer 2 Networks Brought To MetaMask

With this new service, developers are capable of recommending an array of chains to their respective users, Layer 2 chains included.

The firm started off its announcement by highlighting the rampant success of Ethereum, which is ironically causing all the problems when it comes to network transactions. ConsenSys highlighted that Ethereum’s fundamentals are stronger than ever, showing that $12 billion in transaction volumes occurred every day, spread out by 1.3 million transactions. Now, however, the firm emphasized the need for off-chain Layer 2 processing.

The Latest Innovations

Metamask can now incorporate any chain as a custom network, the only mandate being that it has the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) enabled. This all can be done through the MetaMask API, where networks can then be added to the menus of the users, all through a simple confirmation process. After that, it’s a matter of ease for any user to switch between these networks, using the usual network switching menus

ConsenSys highlighted that sidechains, as well as Layer 2 networks, can be added, so a user can incorporate everything from xDAI to Arbitrum to their menus.

Nothing’s Pure Good

However, not everything’s all fine and dandy. The firm was quick to issue out a general warning against untrusted networks, advising users to read the documentation regarding setting them up. It’s a sad fact that MetaMask is both one of the most popular user wallets out there and one of the biggest hubs of bad actors and scammers, as well. It’s almost impossible to have the one without the other.

One of the few (immediate) benefits that this recent market crash had enacted, was that the Ethereum network’s gas prices started to settle down. Now, however, with the market in full-scale recovery, it’s clear that these prices are only going to go up. Until ETH 2.0 launches, the only viable option now available is to make use of sidechains.

MetaMask’s ConsenSys Reveals New “Custom Networks” Layer 2 Solution

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Enterprise meets DeFi: Organizations work toward adopting blockchain tech

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Decentralized finance is quickly maturing. While the total value locked in DeFi is over $45 billion, financial institutions and large corporations are starting to implement DeFi concepts to automate business processes. This is known as “enterprise DeFi.”

For instance, invoices and other financial products can be tokenized to ensure that transactions are valid and should be processed for payment across multiple parties. Coke One North America is one of the first large corporations to demonstrate this.

CONA is leveraging the Baseline Protocol — a project that coordinates confidential workflows between enterprises using messaging, zero-knowledge cryptography and blockchain — to tokenize invoices. CONA aims to “baseline” its entire supply chain by giving internal bottlers and external suppliers access to a private, distributed integration network.

Through use cases like CONA, such solutions are quickly gaining traction. There are also a number of vendors entering this infrastructure market including Provide, an enterprise middleware provider, and Big Four firm Ernst & Young. Most recently, ConsenSys — one of the leading blockchain software companies — announced plans to use Baseline Protocol as a solution for its enterprise clients, further demonstrating the importance of enterprise DeFi adoption.

How ConsenSys plans to drive enterprise DeFi

Specifically, ConsenSys Codefi — ConsenSys’ fintech suite that connects financial use cases to blockchain counterparts — will soon offer a baseline-compliant solution for its enterprise clients.

Didier Le Floch, institutional products and engineering lead at ConsenSys Codefi, told Cointelegraph that while the Baseline Protocol was developed by EY, ConsenSys and Microsoft, Codefi has been taking steps to ensure that its products will eventually be fully compatible with it:

“We want to enable the use of digital assets and the financing of those assets for payment use cases. These use cases will generate maximum business value, combining automation of business processes and payments using things like stablecoins, for example.”

In order to achieve this, Floch explained that the Codefi tech stack will be combined with the Baseline Protocol to deliver an effortless user experience for cases such as financing supply chains. Floch remarked that this is a first step in the right direction, as Codefi strongly believes that the enterprise sector will soon converge with the DeFi market: “There will be ebbs and flows, and it will be a journey with various steps, but we’ve already seen the promise of this convergence in the DeFi market.”

To his point, MakerDAO — the protocol behind the stablecoin Dai — announced support in June 2020 to use non-crypto-native assets, such as invoices and music streaming royalties, as collateral for its Dai stablecoin. Maker also voted to support a protocol from blockchain startup Centrifuge to bring real-world assets on its platform. Known as “Centrifuge Chain,” this is built on Parity’s blockchain development framework, Substrate.

Asset originators can use the Centrifuge Chain to mint nonfungible tokens of real-world assets, converting them to ERC-721 tokens. These assets can then be added to Tinlake, which is Centrifuge’s Ethereum-based DeFi protocol for decentralized asset financing.

A Centrifuge spokesperson told Cointelegraph that the company is currently working with MakerDAO to bring New Silver, an online real-estate lender, on to the Maker platform as an asset originator. As such, NewSilver would be the first asset originator using Tinlake to get to the MakerDAO executive vote, ultimately allowing asset originators to generate Dai as a credit facility.

DeFi protocol Aave also introduced a diversified money market to support real-world assets back in October 2020. According to the Aave blog post, this money market would make it easy for the Aave community to onboard real-world assets into the protocol, allowing investors to lend against assets, such as invoices, real estate and inventory finance. “Right now, it’s at a small scale, but there are DeFi lending protocols already taking steps to incorporate real-world assets into their protocols,” said Floch.

Breaking down barriers hampering adoption

Many enterprise DeFi concepts are still in early development, as a number of barriers exist. For instance, there are concerns regarding publicly available sources to determine the price of collateralized assets. Furthermore, many DeFi protocols venturing into the enterprise space only allow solutions for borrowing in crypto, which may be unappealing to mainstream organizations. Moreover, paying transaction fees in cryptocurrency may also be problematic for enterprises that typically deal in fiat payments.

Floch explained that Codefi’s use of Baseline Protocol is intended to address these concerns. For example, he noted that there will be an “Infura ITX” integration that will enable corporations to pay gas fees in dollars rather than Ether (ETH) when using the Baseline Protocol. Since the platform leverages the Ethereum network as its mainnet of choice, or as a common frame of reference for complex workflows, this integration will ensure a better user experience overall.

In addition, Floch mentioned that ConsenSys’ open-source zero-knowledge proof library, known as “gnark,” will be leveraged to ensure enterprise data remains private, yet verifiable.

While notable, Codefi’s implementation of the Baseline Protocol isn’t the only solution intended to solve the challenges related to enterprise DeFi adoption.

For example, EY has been heavily involved in the blockchain space, specifically in terms of enterprise DeFi development. Paul Brody, global blockchain lead at EY, told Cointelegraph that the firm has been working on DeFi enabling solutions since 2016, with the goal of making the inputs and outputs of enterprise business processes tokenized and then transactable:

“This means purchase orders, invoices, receivables, inventory — everything in traditional business-to-business processes should be ready to integrate into a DeFi ecosystem.”

Of course, Brody is aware of the challenges regarding this vision, noting that the first element to be tackled is achieving an acceptable level of privacy for enterprise users. Once this is accomplished, Brody explained that necessary standards need to be established where bodies, such as the Enterprise Ethereum Association, can be key partners in the pursuit of these goals.

Brody further mentioned that as an industry auditor, EY will not be offering financial services involving DeFi. Rather, the firm is devoted to ensuring that enterprise clients will be able to plug their business operations into existing DeFi solutions. For example, Brody explained that EY’s Network Procurement solution is designed to manage purchase orders and fulfillment, which would allow enterprises to exchange tokens for purchase orders, contracts, invoices and inventory transfers. “As soon as we see standards we can leverage, we hope that our enterprise users will be able to take advantage of these markets,” said Brody.

Institutions show interest in DeFi?

In addition to a growing number of enterprise DeFi solutions in development, there is now interest in DeFi from large organizations and financial institutions. This was recently demonstrated by the leading digital currency asset manager, Grayscale. On Feb. 26, 2021, the firm announced consideration to offer investors access to DeFi assets, including Aave, Compound’s COMP, MakerDAO’s MKR, Reserve Rights (RSR), SushiSwap’s SUSHI, Synthetix Network Token (SNX), Uniswap’s UNI and Yearn.finance’s YFI.

Although this is separate from enterprises using DeFi protocols to find real-world assets, Floch noted that this demonstrates more institutional players are ready to invest in prominent DeFi protocols:

“For institutional customers of Grayscale to start investing in those tokens is definitely a sign that they’re getting more comfortable with Defi, while understanding the value of those protocols (asset management, collateralized lending and trading automated in smart contracts).”

Enterprise meets DeFi: Organizations work toward adopting blockchain tech

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2021 Sees DEXs Push Past $120 Billion In Trade Volumes

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The Ethereum network, as it stands now, is rife with high transaction fee problems. However, that hasn’t stopped the decentralized exchanges, or DEXs, within the network are still reaching spectacularly large trade volumes. In 2021 so far, over $120 billion in DEX transactions have been processed.

2021 Proving To Be Very Good For DEXs

What’s amazing about this, is that 2021’s first two months have managed to generate enough trading volume to beat all the previous years combined. As is the norm, the two biggest fish within the Ethereum space is Uniswap and Sushiswap, Uniswap’s cloned counterpart. These two DEXs constitute about 65% of the entire trade volumes for February, with Uniswap boasting over double the volumes of its competitor. Uniswap alone boasts almost 50% of the entire market share within the DEX space.

BSC Turning Significant Volumes

That metric doesn’t say it all, however. Once you start looking at the weekly number of active traders within every platform, it’s clear that Uniswap boasts three-quarters of the DEX users for Ethereum. Uniswap recorded close to 142,000 users within the past seven days of trading on its platform.

Uniswap

By comparison, SushiSwap only holds 8,911 users.  Interestingly enough, while Sushiswap is second place in terms of volume, it’s third in users. It’s beaten out by 1inch, which boasts a seven-day user tally of 18,450.

Another big competitor in terms of blockchains for the DeFi space is none other than the Binance Smart Chain (BSC). Pancake Swap, the big boy for BSC, managed to report a daily volume of above $1.1 billion. Binance being Binance, it’s not quite clear whether or not those are actual or inflated volumes.

The Year Of The DEX

The DEX space within the DeFi sector has, more or less, risen to new all-time highs. DEXs across boast an aggravated Total Value Locked (TVL) of more than $40 billion. Many a user have moved from Ethereum to BSC, pushed out by the rampant congestion and transaction fees. Once Ethereum manages to fix this, either through L2 or full rollout of ETH 2, it’s to be expected that there will be a large influx of people from other networks at large.

Now, however, these high transaction fees, and the sheer volume of users still taking part, stands as a testament to how dedicated the crypto space is for DEXs. The great Gamestop fiasco’s subsequent backlash, where exchanges started to refuse retail clients the ability to buy certain stocks, certainly didn’t hurt the attractiveness of DEXs either.

2021 Sees DEXs Push Past $120 Billion In Trade Volumes

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Stripe Sees Former BoE Governor Mark Carney Join Board Of Directors

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Stripe, a US-based payments company dedicated to the development of new commerce solutions for the Internet, has recently added a brand new member to its Board of Directors: Mark Carney. Carney joins up with Stripe after having served in the Bank of England (BoE) as one of its crypto pioneers.

Carney’s Still A Big Fish

The official introduction of Carney as a Board Member occurred on Sunday, standing alongside names like Diane Green, Christa Davies, Sir Micheal Moritz, Jonathan Chadwick, as well as the two co-founders of Stripe: John and Patrick Collison.

In the mandatory public statement, Stripe cited Carney’s extensive experience regarding global governance and financial systems, which will be especially useful with the payment firm’s rollout of new climate efforts.

The Mandatory Kind Words

In a public statement, Carney declared that commerce by its very nature has changed within these past ten years. He praised Stripe, as one always does in this situation, stating that the firm has been at the forefront of this change. He said the firm helped enable this digital economy, explaining that it provides both small and large businesses across the globe with both resilient and innovative global payment solutions.

In his mandatory kind words, he declared his eagerness to work alongside Stripe and support it throughout the coming years. He stated that the firm will develop and construct a global infrastructure that will allow the Internet at large to become an engine for inclusive and robust economic growth.

Crypto Hedge Funds Defraud Investors of $100 Million

Stripe itself was founded back in 2011, marketing itself as an all-encompassing payments processing platform dedicated to various forms of online business such as e-commerce. Stripe even dabbled in Bitcoin payments for a time, rolling out BTC payment options back in 2015. However, Stripe had also pulled out of Bitcoin in 2018 due to the platform’s issues with the network in terms of slow processing time and high transfer fees.

Stripe even had its finger in Diem, back when it was first announced and was still known as the Libra Project. Massive pressure from various global governments had completely crippled Libra, before the entire project built itself back up. Time will tell how Libra, or rather Diem, will fare in the future.

Stripe Still Positive About Crypto

It should be noted that John Collison, one of the co-founders of Stripe, has been giving positive sentiments regarding crypto for some time now. The man is hopeful for crypto’s future in general, even if Stripe was forced to pull out thanks to the ever-expanding problem of transaction fees within the top crypto networks out there.

Carney himself had already expressed positive sentiments toward none other than Central Bank Digital Currencies, or CBDCs. Indeed, he expressed a vision of the future back in 2019 at the Jackson Hole Symposium, one where the great US Dollar was replaced by some sort of CBDC as the global reserve currency.

It should be noted that it’s been almost a year since he stepped down from his position of Governor of the Bank of England. Carney was there to help tackle the BoE’s problems regarding Brexit and COVID-19’s initial impact on the global economy.

Stripe Sees Former BoE Governor Mark Carney Join Board Of Directors

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BNB price surges as Binance Smart Chain grows in popularity with DeFi

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Binance Coin (BNB) has been on an absolute tear in the month of February. It traded at $48.93 on Feb. 1 and grew to trade at $304 at the time of publication, amounting to a 521% month-to-date gain and 707% year-to-date gain.

This price rally has led BNB to become the third-largest cryptocurrency, with a $46.5 billion market capitalization. BNB achieved its all-time high of $342.88 on Feb. 19. This price rally and leap in market capitalization could be attributed to Binance Smart Chain gaining popularity within decentralized finance markets and other macroeconomic factors driving the growth of flagship assets like Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) to new all-time highs this week.

While Ether price was rallying to it’s all time highs on Feb. 19, Binance announced on Twitter that they have “ temporarily suspended” withdrawals of Ether and all Ethereum based tokens due to a “congestion issue.” This led to the users not able to trade these tokens for around an hour and left the community speculating what actually happened. This pause led BNB to rise by another $60 in that time while Ether staggered around the same range.

Binance Smart Chain is the main driver?

Apart from macroeconomic factors such as the price of BTC and ETH reaching all-time highs this week, spilling over to drive up the price of BNB, Binance Smart Chain also has been gaining significant traction among the crypto community. BSC was launched in September 2020 and acts as a parallel blockchain to Binance Chain while enabling smart contract functionality and the staking mechanism of BNB, which powers Binance Chain as its native token.

Cointelegraph discussed this further with a spokesperson from Binance, who elaborated on the unique benefits that BSC offers users, saying:

“BSC offers a high-performance and low-fee blockchain network that’s compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine. Developers can worry less about transaction fees and focus more on innovating, while using all of the existing developer tooling they are familiar with in the Ethereum ecosystem.”

The entire Binance ecosystem is powered by BSC. Being a global cryptocurrency exchange with extremely high user traffic, it’s highly essential for scalability and low transaction fees to go hand in hand with the BSC ecosystem. BSC is now being used extensively by various DeFi protocols, with the latest to leave Ethereum for the blockchain being multiservice platform Value DeFi and yield aggregator Harvest Finance, which cited cross-chain yield farming as the prime reason for the shift.

The influence of BSC has extended to various DeFi protocols. Venus, an algorithmic money market and synthetic stablecoin protocol designed specifically for BSC, saw the price of its Venus Token (XVS) surge over 750% after it was launched on Binance Smart Chain, from a low of $10.04 on Feb. 2 to an all-time high of $95.90 on Feb. 20. 

Another prominent DeFi protocol on BSC is PancakeSwap, which went on to become the first billion-dollar project on the blockchain. It quickly doubled that to pass $2 billion in market capitalization, owing to the growth of its food-themed token, CAKE. Data from Cointelegraph Markets indicates that the price of the CAKE has surged 973% from a low of $1.89 on Feb. 3 to its all-time high of $20.33 on Feb. 19.

Speaking with Cointelegraph, Ilia Maksimenka, CEO of PlasmaPay — a DeFi investment platform — indicated that PancakeSwap could be one of the main reasons for BNB’s price rally:

“PancakeSwap traded over $400 million in daily volume and briefly became the world’s second-largest DEX. Its [BSC’s] unique propositions of a lottery service and a non-fungible token art platform have furthered PancakeSwap’s use cases.”

BSC gaining amid high Ethereum fees

Another reason for the popularity of BSC is the lower transaction fees when compared with Ethereum, which in its state of high demand sidelines retail investors in the DeFi markets, tailoring it more for whales. While Eth2 proposes to sort the transaction fees issue through its scalability solutions, currently there is a lot of congestion on the network due to the increasing popularity of DeFi protocols, leading to high gas fees for all transactions on the Ethereum network.

William Quigley, cryptocurrency fund manager at Magnetic Capital — a crypto-focused investment firm — told Cointelegraph that BNB’s rise comes down to the congestion on the Ethereum blockchain, adding: “Ethereum has an Uber-like surge pricing mechanism. When demand on the chain is high, the price to quickly process a transaction goes up.”

On Feb. 18, BSC recorded 2.5 million transactions on its network, compared with 1.3 million transactions on Ethereum. The Binance spokesperson explained to Cointelegraph why this might be the case:

“BSC daily transaction volume is up by 300% from YTD and bolsters an ecosystem of 100+ DeFi projects. Furthermore, the platform has succeeded in maintaining GAS costs as low as $0.04. Compared to Ethereum’s $5.53, BSC is 135 times less expensive!”

While Eth2’s phased launch promises speed in its proposed roadmap, history suggests that these launches often miss the deadline, with no clarity of when the actual updates will be done. Since Ethereum will take time to implement its scaling solutions, which should eventually reduce the gas fees on the network, until that point, blockchains like BSC stand to benefit the most from its delays.

The network speed of Ethereum compared with BSC could also be one of the reasons that DeFi protocols are migrating to BSC, as it is comparatively faster. BSC allows 300 transactions per second, while Ethereum, despite its higher transaction fees, can only process 15 transactions per second.

Blockchain disruption

Lower transaction fees and network speed might not be the only reasons that some DeFi protocols are migrating to BSC. The fact that BSC is 100% compatible with DeFi’s flagship blockchain, Ethereum — which allows protocols to deploy their application on top of BSC with no additional changes — is a design victory for Binance. The Binance spokesperson further spoke on some of the other reasons:

“Feedback we have heard is the DeFi protocols are increasingly chain agnostic. The rapid growth of BSC shows the users prefer lower transaction fees. BSC also provides a variety of assets, many of which are not available on DeFi protocols on Ethereum.”

Although various other blockchains like Cardano and Polkadot are trying to break Ethereum’s hegemony in the DeFi and NFT markets, none have quite achieved success at the rapid rate Binance Smart Chain is now witnessing. Disruptive blockchain innovation is bound to push the industry forward by challenging the status quo and pushing blockchain developers to focus on building universal, well-connected blockchains.

Related: DEXs becoming unusable? How to navigate record gas fees ahead of Eth2

Billy Adams, head of ecosystem development at XinFin — an open-source hybrid blockchain platform — told Cointelegraph that he believes blockchains like BSC are beneficial for the entire ecosystem:

“The market is demonstrating an appetite for emerging DeFi solutions, which can provide investor protection, sufficient liquidity for MSMEs and support interoperability between both other blockchains and legacy systems.”

BNB price surges as Binance Smart Chain grows in popularity with DeFi

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Uniswap reaches $100B in cumulative volume amid DeFi explosion

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Uniswap’s decentralized exchange reached a major milestone on Monday, as cumulative trade volumes surpassed $100 billion in the wake of the DeFi boom. 

Hayden Adams, Uniswap’s CEO, tweeted Monday that his platform became the first decentralized exchange to process over $100 billion in transactions. Using data from Dune Analytics, Adams shows cumulative volumes of $101.5 billion as of Feb. 15. The chart highlights Uniswap’s dramatic growth since mid-2020 when the first DeFi bull market began.

Uniswap processed over $1.2 billion worth of transactions in the last 24 hours, according to Coingecko, placing it among the largest exchanges for cryptocurrency trading.

Decentralized exchanges, also referred to as DEXs, have seen their volumes grow considerably over the past eight months. They now threaten centralized-exchange dominance due to the rapid uptake of DeFi governance tokens.

The upsurge in trading activity has come at a cost, though. As Ethereum-based DEXs and on-chain transactions continue to grow, so too are the transaction fees. Cointelegraph recently reported that transactions on Uniswap can cost over $100 during peak overload periods.

Uniswap has emerged as a critical piece of the DeFi sector thanks to its first-mover advantage and ability to accommodate new token projects. In late 2020, the exchange airdropped 400 UNI tokens to users that had previously contributed to its liquidity. At the time of the airdrop, the 400 UNI were worth around $3,500. The tokens are now worth a combined $8,400.

More than $57.6 billion has been locked into DeFi protocols, according to the latest industry data.

Uniswap reaches $100B in cumulative volume amid DeFi explosion

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