Monthly review of the crypto market

The fall of the crypto market is the most important topic among all the media today. And who or what was not accused of this. And China, a new strain of the Omicron virus, and even the Christmas season, which encourages people to cover their expenses through sales, as the world prepares for the consequences of the supply chain crisis. But, these are already December events, and we will tell you about the most important events of the past month.

Taproot Update

The long-awaited Bitcoin update, known as Taproot, was finally activated on November 14th, paving the way for improved user privacy protection and more efficient transactions and automation. The update consists of three building blocks: Schnorr signatures, Taproot and Tapscript. Schnorr signatures (BIP340) provide a more secure, easy and flexible way of cryptographic signature, and are designed to ensure that single and multiple signatures, and even smart contract transactions look the same on the blockchain. This will improve user privacy, reduce data load, and fundamentally support scalability.

Meanwhile, Taproot (BIP341) is introducing a new way to send Bitcoins called Pay-to-Taproot (P2TR), which combines both a pay-to-public-key hash and a pay-to-script, which will provide users with better privacy and greater flexibility. To take advantage of the aforementioned two upgrade building blocks, Tapscript (BIP342) was created to improve the Bitcoin programming language. Developers can thank Tapscript for making future updates easier to implement.

This is especially good news for countries like El Salvador, where Bitcoin is used as legal tender, as the update aims to reduce network space and computing power to ensure mass adoption. If other countries like Zimbabwe want to follow suit, it will be good news for them too.

Avalanche is gaining momentum

While many cryptocurrencies were in the red, Avalanche according to Coinmarketrate.com recorded a new historical maximum on November 21. Avalanche is one of the first-level blockchains that competes with Ethereum, and acts as a platform for decentralized applications and custom blockchain networks. A feature of Avalanche is its throughput (higher than that of Ethereum) – up to 6,500 transactions per second, without compromising scalability and decentralization.

The performance of the native AVAX token is due to various changes that the Avalanche network has undergone since September.

On November 1, the creation of the Blizzard Fund was announced, which will provide an additional $ 200 million to encourage developers who create applications based on the Avalanche network. The foundation’s activities will focus on four key areas: DeFi, enterprise applications, NFT and cultural applications. The funds will be used for equity investments, token purchases, partnerships, technology and business development.

On November 16, a strategic alliance was announced with Deloitte to more effectively eliminate risks by creating more powerful disaster relief platforms using the Avalanche blockchain. This new assistance platform is designed to help state and local governments easily prove their eligibility for federal disaster relief funds.

AVAX’s strong price performance may also be due to the Avalanche Rush program announced in August to attract users to the network. Avalanche Rush is a liquidity mining and airdrop program in which the Avalanche Foundation offers AVAX tokens worth up to $180 million. Its goal is to deploy DeFi applications on the Avalanche platform. The program rewards its users for lending or borrowing through DeFi with interest on the invested tokens.

Solana Conference in Portugal

The three-day Solana Conference was held in Lisbon, Portugal, from November 7 to 10. Solana has one of the most vibrant and dynamic ecosystems in the world. About 2,000 participants gathered to discuss the future of finance, digital ownership, management, commerce, social networks and online communities. Several important events took place during the conference:

• Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian, who initially raised $50 million, launched a $100 million fund with Solana Ventures and SevenSevenSix to help develop social media in Web 3.
• Brendan Eich, the creator of Javascript and co-founder of Brave Browser, said that Brave will integrate Solana, and make it the standard for supporting dApps.
• The founder of the Render Network, Jules Urbach, announced that his company will also begin integrating Solana and Metaplex. Render uses blockchain to render animation and graphics for companies such as HBO, Netflix and Disney. With Solana integration, they can use the same rendering power on a phone or tablet to provide a photorealistic Metaverse to their audience.
• Neon Labs has announced that, thanks to a $40 million funding round, it will introduce compatibility with Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) on the Solana platform.

Nansen, a crypto wallet analytics company, is also launching Solana Dashboards, making Solana the first Nansen platform without EVM.

ENS becomes DAO

Ethereum Name Service (ENS) is a distributed, open and extensible system based on the Ethereum blockchain. ENS is comparable to DNS, the Internet domain name service, and converts long wallet addresses into readable names such as alice.eth.

Based on the basic principles of decentralization, ENS announced that it considers the space mature enough to transfer control over it to the community. Therefore, starting in November, ENS will accept applications for participation as delegates in a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO). This delegation model will allow the community to elect its leaders to support the growth and longevity of ENS. The creation of the DAO also led to the appearance of the ENS management token.

The distribution of tokens was organized in such a way that the community received it positively, and the largest beneficiaries of airdrop were the early registrants of the .eth domain. After the initial delight of receiving a five-figure sum for free, the community was reminded that they were not getting free money, but responsibility.

Decentralized Identifiers (DID)

The concept of self-managed identification systems on the blockchain using decentralized identifiers (DID) is not new, but ENS offers a very personal and traceable way for Ethereum users to develop their identification on the blockchain – beyond the use of IP addresses and email addresses. They can even set their own NFT as an avatar.

In the coming months, as DID evolves, we can expect access to credit, public storage, messaging, and decentralized credentials to become permanent. Alchemix Finance, a self-supporting credit protocol, hinted at the functionality of delegating credit to those whom the user considers worthy.

In the future, access to decentralized financial applications in the form of applications for mass transport, healthcare and auto insurance will be carried out using DID to authorize login with zero-knowledge proofs for cryptographic data verification. Personal information such as driver’s license, credit card details and medical records will be used to register, conduct transactions and access services without transferring personal data to companies such as Google, Apple.

The commotion in the Smart Chain

Users of Binance Smart Chain (BSC), a DeFi blockchain competing with Ethereum, have experienced outages mainly due to the reduction of the block time to 3 seconds, compared to the average block time of 13 seconds on Ethereum. On November 17, BSC user activity reached a historic high of 14.7 million transactions. Users accuse Binance of deceiving its community for the sake of greater profit. The angry BSC community expressed its dissatisfaction on Github, and one of the users called the blockchain a lost cause.

The developers complained about:

• Lack of code reviews.
• Lack of response to error messages, especially to messages about unsynchronized nodes.
• Zero beta testing, leaving the blockchain in chaos.

Perhaps this was one of the main reasons for the fall in the price of Binance’s own cryptocurrency – Binance Coin (BNB). Frustration can force developers to build their applications on Ethereum or other ecosystems, such as Avalanche or Solana, and, in fact, abandon BNB.

A week later, one of the BSC developers responded to the topic mentioned above on Github, apologizing for the lack of transparency and communication in each release. They said that these errors are mainly related to the ongoing update. According to the developers, the synchronization speed has improved in many nodes, and other improvements related to the architecture are on the way to be proposed as new BEPS soon.