Aug. 31: Herodotus, a year-old, London-based startup developing infrastructure and tooling to help developers use storage proof technology on Ethereum, has released an “on-chain accumulator” based on a custom instance of Starkware’s shared prover. “Herodotus’s new accumulator technology will enable users to read data from any point in Ethereum’s history including the Genesis block,” according to a press release shared with CoinDesk. The technological development could be useful “for account recovery mechanisms where verifying on-chain data from the past and present could play a vital role in triggering a dead man’s switch, or for insurance protocols that rely on historical on-chain events for payouts or providing coverage,” the team wrote.
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Aug. 31: ChainLight, a blockchain security firm specializing in smart-contract audits and on-chain monitoring, has launched the second version of Relic Protocol, a data indexing protocol, on zkSync, a layer-2 network atop Ethereum. According to a press release, the update provides developers with “trustless access to historical Ethereum data. Various protocols can use this wealth of previously inaccessible data to enhance functionalities. For instance, a lending protocol could use historical data to determine collateral volatility to adjust risk parameters trustlessly.”
Aug. 31: Offchain Labs, the primary developer of the Ethereum optimistic rollup Arbitrum, on Thursday released Arbitrum Stylus, a new technical implementation that allows developers to build smart contracts using programming languages that are compatible with the WebAssembly industry standard format, also known as WASM. The offering, now available for use on a test network, means developers can program with popular coding languages like Rust, C and C++ alongside languages that are compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine, or EVM standard, which is far more common among today’s crypto developers.
Aug. 29: Casper Association, the Swiss-based organization that oversees the Casper blockchain, said its new “1.5” upgrade comes with unique “Speculative Execution Endpoint” feature, making the project “the only Layer-1 blockchain to enable the debugging of live, composable smart contracts on mainnet.”
Aug. 29: Alchemy, a platform for developing Web3 applications, has added support for Base, Coinbase’s layer-2 network on Ethereum.
Aug. 29: OpenZeppelin, a provider of blockchain security solutions, released the 2.0 version of its Defender platform, which provides automatic code analysis and can be used for ongoing monitoring of threats and automation of community governance proposals; developers and operators can use the tool to prevent and fix security issues pre- and post-deployment, according to the team.
Aug. 29: The team behind Interlay, a decentralized network designed to provide DeFi tooling for Bitcoin, announced plans for BOB, a new Bitcoin layer-2 network compatible with Ethereum’s EVM software environment, “featuring Rust smart contracts compatible with Bitcoin libraries such as Lightning and Ordinals.”
Aug. 29: Helix, a decentralized orderbook exchange built on the Injective network, announced the launch of Helix Institutional, which “enables the trading of DeFi derivatives products in a permissioned, KYC-enabled environment.” Currently Helix offers trading in perpetual futures contracts on bitcoin (BTC), ether (ETH), Cosmos’s ATOM and Injective’s INJ. Injective is a layer-1 blockchain built with Cosmos software and featuring “instant transaction finality” for financial applications.
Aug. 28: Token withdrawals out of the Shibarium bridge are now live and available to users, weeks after a much-hyped launch quickly fizzled out after being riddled with software bugs that led to millions of dollars in limbo on the network. Shibarium is an Ethereum layer-2 network, created via a fork of Polygon, that uses SHIB tokens as fees in what is part of a broader plan to position Shiba Inu as a serious blockchain project.
Aug. 27: Binance Labs wrote in a blog post that it has invested in Delphinus Lab, an infrastructure provider that is “leading the zkWASM space, where zero-knowledge (ZK) cryptography is deployed in WebAssembly (WASM) environments.” The funds will be used for development of Dephinus’s zkWASM-based application rollup platform, zkWASM Hub, according to the post. WASM is a programming environment used by several blockchains, including Cosmos and Polkadot, often positioned as an alternative to the Ethereum Virtual Machine or EVM, that’s used by the Ethereum blockchain (and associated layer-2 networks) as well as Binance Smart Chain and Avalanche.
Aug. 24: Radix Publishing, publisher of code for Radix, a layer 1 smart-contract platform, said the final update of its two-year-old Olympia Protocol would be released at the end of August, as part of the move toward Radix’s Babylon mainnet migration at the end of September.
Aug. 24: Pancake Swap, a decentralized exchange, has expanded to the Ethereum layer-2 blockchain Linea, from the big Ethereum developer Consensys. PancakeSwap was already available on Ethereum, BNB Chain, Aptos, Polygon zkEVM, zkSync Era and Arbitrum.
Aug. 23: Unstoppable Domains, a provider of digital identities that include crypto addresses, said it has launched a new “messenger feature powered by XTMP that allows owners of UD domains — or any Web3 wallet address — to chat with each other across the blockchain. You can use it for any kind of decentralized, end-to-end encrypted messaging. This could be as simple as making plans with a friend. You could even use it to negotiate an NFT trade or domain purchase. Many people in Web3 use their domain as an alias, meaning Messaging can support Web3 community building.”
