This Week in Blockfolio Signal — May 24th
Every week we comb through hundreds of Blockfolio Signals to bring you the most significant team updates with brief analyses to help you understand the latest developments in blockchain.
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In this week’s issue:
Tezos (XTZ) Successfully Exercises On-Chain Governance with ‘Athens A’ Protocol Upgrade
“Today the promotional vote period for the Athens A protocol upgrade reached quorum eight days before the deadline.
With Athens A, the Tezos community successfully exercised on-chain governance to amend the Tezos protocol- an important moment in the history of Tezos.
The new Athens A protocol is set to activate on May 29th.”
— Alison Mangiero, President, Tocqueville Group
Summary
- The Tezos community successfully exercised on-chain governance to amend the Tezos protocol.
- The two Athens proposals will see incremental changes introduced to the Tezos blockchain, without the need for a disruptive hard-fork.
- Athens Proposal A increases the gas limit to allow for larger transaction throughput. It also reduces the minimum roll size from 10,000 XTZ to 8,000 XTZ.
- During the initial proposal phase, Athens “A” received the greatest number of votes and was promoted to the next period, the exploration phase.
- Subsequently, the voting recently passed the exploration phase and is now in its final round of voting, the promotion phase. Activation of the new Athens A protocol is slated for May 29th (EST).
Significance
This is a major milestone for Tezos and the greater cryptocurrency community. While most crypto governance has been off-chain thus far, it goes against the grain of decentralization. On-chain governance offers a better way forward, but most on-chain governance attempts have hit hurdles and realized major setbacks.
This will be the first example of a truly democratic implementation of an amendment on a live blockchain protocol. This innovative governance permits the roll out of system-wide upgrades (hard forks) in an entirely automated and self-governing fashion. It is a significant step forward in the decentralization of the cryptocurrency ecosystem.
Future proposals that are already being discussed include the integration of zero-knowledge cryptography such as zk-SNARKs, which would bring greater privacy to the Tezos blockchain.
XTZ price at the time of Blockfolio Signal: $1.69. View XTZ on Blockfolio.
Cardano (ADA) Announces ‘Shelley’ Testnet Coming in June
“IOHK has announced that the first Shelley Testnet is coming in June, starting with a small, closed pool of trusted stake pool operators and an MVP, rolling out more functionality and more operators over the next 3–4 months. Please watch the Cardano Effect podcast with David Esser, Cardano Senior Product Manager for more details.” YouTube Link
— Keisha DePaz, Global Digital Marketing Manager, EMURGO
Summary
- Cardano’s testnet, the beginning of Shelley, will be launched in early June. This will be the minimum MVP of the Cardano platform and is highly anticipated after months of delays.
- A small group of stake pool operators will test the platform with a series of rolling releases that will evolve over 3 to 4 months.
- The Cardano team hopes to launch Shelley mainnet by the end of the year with the goal to provide a powerful platform for enterprise-class decentralized applications.
Significance
There have been high levels of anticipation for the Cardano launch and high levels of disappointment and frustration when the team delayed the Shelley testnet launch by several months. But the team is finally confident that they will be able to launch the testnet within the coming weeks.
While it is only a testnet launch, it is nonetheless a significant milestone for the Cardano team and will display the power and complexity of their platform to the public for the first time.
While the delays have been frustrating, the team is highly focused on getting the project right and not rushing the release. They want to make sure they are solving real problems for real people, which should increase the use-cases for Cardano and demand for their token going forward.
ADA price at the time of Blockfolio Signal: $0.08. View ADA on Blockfolio.
OmiseGo (OMG) Launches v0.2 ‘Samrong’
“We are happy to announce the newest release version of our network, Samrong — the second iteration of the OMG Network” Read More
— Kasima Tharnpipitchai, Director of Engineering
Summary
- OmiseGo announces the newest release version of the Network, `Samrong` — the second iteration of the OMG Network after Ari.
- There are drastic improvements on Samrong that make the network more reliable, monitored, and less prone to downtime when faced with high network load.
- New features include transaction signatures using the EIP 712 standard, allowing users to sign transactions through wallets like Metamask. Also added is a meta-data field, allowing businesses and decentralized applications to store any arbitrary data into their transactions.
- There will also be significant modifications to the Plasma smart contract itself. It will be MoreVP specification compliant. Since this is a written smart contract that cannot be modified, Samrong will be a separate network from Ari.
Significance
OmiseGo is one of the leading cryptocurrency payment processors and exchanges in the world. They were early in their minimal integration of Plasma — which was developed by Joseph Poon and Vitalik Buterin, both advisors to OmiseGo. The Plasma protocol was designed to scale smart contracts on a drastic scale for usage to include fraud detection, minimal trust, and offer a single ledger.
Plasma smart contracts on Ethereum will be autonomous, enabled by Nakamoto consensus, and scalable to a significant amount of state updates per second (potentially billions). This has the potential to change the whole landscape of blockchains and smart contracts for the better.
This new development is the biggest technical update executed by OmiseGo this year. The Samrong upgrade will enable OMG to meet the standards that allow for easy developments of applications and client libraries on its platform, while greatly improving its resiliency.
The OmiseGo decentralized network facilitates self-sovereign financial services across geographies, which increases financial freedom and the potential for upward mobility across the globe.
OMG price at the time of Blockfolio Signal: $2.01. View OMG on Blockfolio.
Maker’s (MKR) Dai Stablecoin (DAI) Added to Coinbase
“Dai is now on Coinbase! Maker’s decentralized stablecoin is now available on one of the biggest exchanges in the world.” Read More
— Coulter Mulligan, Head of Marketing
Summary
- Coinbase now supports Maker’s decentralized stablecoin Dai (DAI). Coinbase customers can buy, sell, convert, send, receive, or store DAI.
- DAI became available to Coinbase Pro in December, but it is now available to entry-level users on coinbase.com and their mobile apps.
- DAI will be available for customers in most jurisdictions, but will not initially be available for residents of the state of New York.
- DAI is a decentralized stablecoin running on Ethereum that was designed with a goal of maintaining a target value of US$1.00. Unlike most centralized stablecoins, DAI isn’t backed by US dollars in a bank account. Instead, it’s backed by collateral on the Maker (MKR) platform.
- The relevant whitepapers explain that MKR and DAI tokens form a paired set of assets in which MKR provides governance, and DAI is a decentralized, collateral-backed stablecoin.
Significance
This news is significant as Coinbase is one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges, which should increase the awareness, adoption, and usage of Dai. The increased volume may also help Dai better maintain its peg to the U.S. dollar and increase voter participation in the governance through Maker.
Stablecoins are especially powerful for the unbanked and those living in countries with unstable monetary systems. The stability of these tokens can help people maintain their purchasing power and fruits of their labor in places where their native fiat currency is exposed to rampant inflation.
Crypto-backed stablecoins like Dai offer the benefits of being much more decentralized than fiat-backed stablecoins since everything is conducted on the blockchain. They can be even more trustless, secure, and transparent than fiat-backed versions. There is no single entity controlling or potentially mismanaging funds, as we’ve seen in the case of Bitfinex/Tether. Additionally, they are often backed by multiple cryptocurrencies in order to diversify and distribute risk.
Stablecoins can also provide crypto holders with a safe haven in the event of a market crash. They can move their funds from volatile cryptocurrencies into stablecoins in a matter of minutes without having to move their capital back into fiat or the legacy banking system. The addition of Dai to Coinbase will bring these benefits to a much wider audience and help to increase adoption and usage of cryptocurrencies in general.
Dai price at the time of Blockfolio Signal: $1.00. View DAI on Blockfolio.
MKR price at the time of Blockfolio Signal: $656. View MKR on Blockfolio.
Bluzelle (BLZ) Data Delivery Network Launches
“We’re pleased to announce that Bluzelle is now production-ready to be used as a data cache — we call this the Bluzelle Data Delivery Network (DDN). Currently Bluzelle is giving greater than 30x the performance of the leading data cache solution in the world. Read More
— Yingyao Xie, Marketing Lead
Summary
- The Bluzelle Data Delivery Network (DDN) is now production ready to be used as a data cache. By combining blockchain and edge computing technologies, Bluzelle is revolutionizing the way data is managed.
- Currently, Bluzelle is giving greater than 30x the performance of the leading data cache solution in the world.
- Write updates sync to all nodes around the world in under a second, with global availability through 25+ data centers.
- It works with any existing database type including SQL and NoSQL.
- Bluzelle DDN has Language support for Javascript, C++, and Python.
Significance
Traditionally a data cache requires setting up servers one at a time in one or more regions. Bluzelle changes this by creating a network of decentralized servers around the world for customers that is pre-deployed and auto-managed. Similar to how a content delivery network (CDN) like Cloudflare pushes web content to the edge, Bluzelle pushes data to the edge closest to the end customer.
Bluzelle is well suited for video game and media streaming businesses. This opens the potential to increase adoption of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology with the gaming ecosystem.
BLZ price at the time of Blockfolio Signal: $0.06. View BLZ on Blockfolio.
Quote of the Week:
“Imagine if daily printing of US dollars was suddenly cut in half forever. Bankers would be FOMOing even though USD isn’t a scarce asset. Now imagine what they’re going to do when the daily Bitcoin supply is cut in half for one of the scarcest assets in the world.”
— Pomp
Thanks for joining us and we look forward to bringing you our top Blockfolio Signals again next week.
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Jason Hamlin
Ecosystem Insights & Development @ Blockfolio
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Blockfolio Signal is a first-of-its-kind communications platform built exclusively for token teams to connect and engage with their communities. Over 400 token team CEOs and team leaders actively use the platform to provide relevant project updates directly to Blockfolio’s five million plus users. Learn more at www.blockfolio.com/signal.
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