The Flippening: Key Metrics Where Ethereum Is Outperforming Bitcoin

In the latest episode of “Mapping out Ethereum 2.0,” CoinDesk’s Christine Kim and Consensys’ Ben Edgington announce the podcast is coming to a close, but finish strong, discussing Visa’s $165,000 CryptoPunk purchase, “orphaned blocks” on the Beacon Chain and the Ethereum gas limit debate.

This episode is sponsored by Unique One Network.

Visa announced on Monday that it acquired a member of one of the most valuable non-fungible token collections within crypto, called a “CryptoPunk”. CryptoPunks are 24x24 pixel art images depicting eccentric cartoon characters with mixed traits and accessories. 

Kim noted that Visa’s purchase of an NFT “wasn’t so much an investment decision as … really [an experiment] with NFTs wanting to learn more about how they work.”

Even so, market participants responded to the news by making investments in NFTs of their own. $100 million in trading volume took place in the 24 hours following Visa’s announcement, Edgington said. 

The duo also discussed a recent issue with the Ethereum 2.0 Beacon Chain that caused network participation rates to drop a few percentage points and some validators to miss out on rewards. 

The root cause of the issue originated with validator operations by staking as a service Lido. Due to a misconfiguration of their validator software client, Lido was producing orphan blocks that had ripple effects on validators across the network. Orphan blocks refer to blocks proposed by validators that are not included in the blockchain. 

Edgington noted that the issue has since been resolved and participation rates are back to 99% from their recent lows between 96-98%. 

Joining Kim and Edgington for their final episode, CoinDesk Research’s Teddy Oosterbaan discusses a recent debate in the Ethereum community about the governance process for raising Ethereum’s block gas limit. 

To learn more about the significance of gas limits on Ethereum and the controversial project seeking to improve governance around changing the gas limit, listen to the full episode of “Mapping Out Eth 2.0.” 

Links:

The Ethereum Gas Limit Project Twitter - https://twitter.com/ETH_EGL/status/1429530226908930048  

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Unique One Network is an interoperable Platform for DeFi enabled NFT Marketplaces, in a variety of sectors, built on Polkadot Parity Substrate. Unique One Network’s crosschain NFT hub facilitates transfers between a variety of blockchains and ecosystems, unleashing the power of NFTs with myriad innovative capabilities. Find out more at Unique One Network.

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In this week’s episode of “Mapping out Ethereum 2.0,” CoinDesk’s Christine Kim and Consensys’ Ben Edgington invite Alexander Blum, the managing director of digital asset investment fund, Two Prime, to discuss institutional interest in ether, regulatory trends in DeFi and key metrics to suggest ether is outperforming bitcoin. 

This episode is sponsored by Unique One Network.

Two Prime is a fund that only invests in two crypto assets, bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH). The firm also trades BTC and ETH options to further amplify the returns of their underlying holdings. Near the beginning of the year the fund was equally exposed to both ether and bitcoin, but outperformance and rebalancing have now given the fund an allocation to ether of about 70%. 

“I am not here ideologically. I am here trying to make money for people … and on both a fundamental and technical level, ETH looks more promising right now,” said Blum. “Ether is really open source. People are trying new stuff, they're experimenting, they're making mistakes, there are people who are excited about stuff. To me, bitcoin feels like a bunch of like monks protecting their holy sacred grail.” 

On the decentralized finance (DeFi) side, Blum noted there’s high technical risk associated with these applications due to the composability and lack of segmentation in the DeFi market. Similar to the U.S. subprime mortgage crisis in 2007, the leveraged and layered nature of DeFi products means it could be easier for an error in one application to introduce cascading risk to other applications. 

Kim and Edgington also discussed the first release of formal verification code specifications for the Ethereum 2.0 Beacon Chain. Formal verification goes beyond normal software testing and allows developers to see how their code could react to a variety of real world situations. 

Edgington noted, “Ethereum bugs are particularly serious. I mean, they have devastating effects. If the protocol forks because clients disagree with each other about the state, then there's a huge amount of value at stake.”

Formal verification is the largest step forward in ensuring that serious bugs in Ethereum 2.0’s protocol layer code are caught before the merge to proof-of-stake. Kim saw taking these extra precautions as an important step to transitioning Eth 2.0 from an “experimental project” to a production-ready network. 

To hear the full conversation featuring Blum, Kim and Edgington, check out this week’s episode of “Mapping Out Ethereum 2.0.” 

Links:

A Derivatives Trader's Guide to Institutional Crypto and Defi, A Report by Two Prime - https://twoprime.io/a-derivatives-traders-guide-to-institutional-crypto-and-defi/ 

The Rise of Institutional Ethereum Investors, A Report by Two Prime - https://twoprime.io/the-rise-of-institutional-ethereum-investors/ 

Formally Verifying the Ethereum 2.0 Phase 0 Specifications, Blog Post by Consensys - https://consensys.net/blog/developers/formally-verifying-the-ethereum-2-0-phase-0-specifications/ 

Eth 2.0 Formal Verifications Specs - https://github.com/ConsenSys/eth2.0-dafny 

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Unique One Network is an interoperable Platform for DeFi enabled NFT Marketplaces, in a variety of sectors, built on Polkadot Parity Substrate. Unique One Network’s crosschain NFT hub facilitates transfers between a variety of blockchains and ecosystems, unleashing the power of NFTs with myriad innovative capabilities. Find out more at Unique One Network.

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In this week’s episode, CoinDesk’s Christine Kim and Consensys’ Ben Edgington are joined by cybersecurity and privacy litigator Sean C. Griffin to discuss the regulatory environment of non-fungible tokens (NFTs). 

This episode is sponsored by Unique One Network.

Edgington bought his first NFT from English contemporary artist Damien Hirst. Hirst is expected to raise up to $20 million by selling 10,000 tokens worth $2,000 each. Upon purchase, the NFTs can be redeemed for a physical painting but only for a limited time period of one year. At the end of the year, Hirst will burn the corresponding NFT or painting that the buyer decided not to keep. 

Owning a piece from Hirst’s NFT collection gives the buyer rights to a physical painting and comes with the assurance of limited token supply, which Griffin explains is not always the case with all NFTs. 

The underlying technology of blockchain is able to prove that each NFT token is one of a kind. However, linking NFTs to a physical piece of art requires off-chain trust and verification. Griffin said he often sees NFT buyers “believe they are getting the associated artwork, too,” which is typically not true. According to Griffin, fraudsters have been selling NFTs of valuable artwork and leading people to believe they are buying the rights to the underlying artwork. 

Griffin also highlighted the importance of private key security and avoiding malicious phishing attacks. As the cryptocurrency markets grow in value, so do the privacy and security risks associated with investing in digital assets. 

Griffin hopes increased regulation over NFTs in the U.S. will enforce standards that benefit all market participants. His concern is that regulators will come in from a “zillion” directions and create unnecessary regulations that do more harm than good. 

Kim asked Griffin, “When it comes to holding [individuals] accountable and liable, do you think the main people responsible for abiding to these guidelines are the developers of the marketplaces and developers of the protocol? [Are these] the people that justice authorities go after?”  

Griffin believes the marketplaces facilitating the trading of NFTs are the most at risk of penalties. However, in such a new and changing space it is difficult to judge how regulators will go about governing the industry. 

To hear the full conversation featuring Griffin, Kim and Edgington, check out this week’s episode of “Mapping Out Ethereum 2.0.” 

Links:

Damien Hirst NFTs -- https://www.heni.com/

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Unique One Network is an interoperable Platform for DeFi enabled NFT Marketplaces, in a variety of sectors, built on Polkadot Parity Substrate. Unique One Network’s crosschain NFT hub facilitates transfers between a variety of blockchains and ecosystems, unleashing the power of NFTs with myriad innovative capabilities. Find out more at Unique One Network.

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In this week’s episode, CoinDesk’s Christine Kim and Consensys’ Ben Edgington discuss Uniswap Lab’s contentious decision to censor assets on its website and the release of a new Ethereum 2.0 software client called Lodestar. 

This episode is sponsored by Unique One Network.

Uniswap is the largest decentralized exchange (DEX) on the Ethereum blockchain by both market capitalization and trading volume, facilitating nearly $340 billion in trades annually. The DEX has become a cornerstone of the decentralized finance (DeFi) industry by enabling any token issuer to list their assets on the exchange. 

A recent decision by Uniswap Labs, the development firm behind Uniswap, resulted in the delisting of several tokens from the Uniswap.org website. CoinDesk Research intern Teddy Oosterbaan stated that it was important to note the tokens are “delisted from their front end, which is basically just the Uniswap Labs website for interacting with protocol.” There are additional access points to listing and trading tokens on Uniswap through DEX aggregators such as 1inch. 

The decision by Uniswap Labs was controversial for three main reasons. First, censorship goes against the ethos of decentralization. In addition, there was no vote on the decision with UNI governance token holders, and finally, the decision may be one of several forthcoming actions taken by Uniswap Labs in its bid to partner with mainstream consumer finance applications.  

While discussing Uniswap’s connection with venture capital and a potential look toward consumer finance, Edgington compared Uniswap with one of its largest competitors, SushiSwap. He said, “It’s definitely a hint of corporatization of Uniswap … and this seems to set a more respectable trajectory for them, whereas Sushi is perhaps a bit more like the Wild West.” 

The future of decentralized finance could very well have tiers of decentralization, with certain applications built for the individual DeFi user and others built for institutions and mainstream inventors, sometimes called centralized DeFi (CeDeFi). 

Edgington and Kim also discussed the official release of a new Ethereum 2.0 software client dubbed Lodestar. The addition brings the total Eth 2.0 client number up to five and offers users looking to run validators on the Ethereum Beacon Chain more “lightweight” options for their computers. 

Speaking to the importance of lowering the barrier to becoming a validator on Eth 2.0, Kim said, “I do think it is very important to maintain a sense of ability to keep on that course of trying to make this technology do what it's supposed to do, which is cut out reliance on centralized providers and centralized businesses.”

Tune into the full episode of “Mapping Out Ethereum 2.0” to hear Kim, Oosterbaan and Edgington discuss the latest news about Ethereum and Ethereum 2.0.

Links: 

DEX aggregator that bypasses Uniswap Lab’s front-end - https://app.1inch.io/#/1/swap/ETH/DAI

Public Ethereum blockchain explorer - https://etherscan.io/

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Unique One Network is an interoperable Platform for DeFi enabled NFT Marketplaces, in a variety of sectors, built on Polkadot Parity Substrate. Unique One Network’s crosschain NFT hub facilitates transfers between a variety of blockchains and ecosystems, unleashing the power of NFTs with myriad innovative capabilities. Find out more at Unique One Network.

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See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In this week’s episode, CoinDesk’s Christine Kim and Consensys’ Ben Edgington are joined by Flashbots researcher Alex Obadia to discuss the noble yet futile fight to vanquish Miner/Maximal Extrable Value (MEV) on Ethereum. 

This episode is sponsored by Unique One Network and Mimo.

MEV is the additional rewards earned by miners as a direct result of their ability to reorder, censor or insert transactions into a block. Since November 2020, Flashbots has created research and built software to assess the impacts of MEV on the network, its users and decentralized applications (dapps). 

The research shows, according to Obadia, that MEV cannot be stopped fully. 

“At Flashbots we definitely believe that MEV should be mitigated, but we also believe that it can't be fully mitigated down to zero,” said Obadia. 

There will always be financial incentives for miners to rearrange transactions within a block due to the auditability and permissionless nature of decentralized blockchains like Ethereum. 

In efforts to mitigate the negative impact of MEV on users, Flashbots created a separate channel for transaction and block ordering earlier this year known as Flashbots Auction. 

Roughly 85% of Ethereum mining computational power, also called hash power, now uses Flashbots Auction to extract MEV rewards. Obadia described Flashbots Auction as a “communication channel between Ethereum users and miners, where they can express their preference over transaction ordering in a more granular way than simply by upping their gas price.” 

While it is difficult to measure the precise impact of the channel on reducing high fees on Ethereum, Edgington asserts that the introduction of Flashbots Auction has been working positively. 

“We can see that gas prices are much better than they were two, three months ago. It seems like Flashbots is working in that sense,” said Edgington. 

Looking ahead, Obadia and his team are figuring out ways to decentralize Flashbots Auction and create mechanisms within it to distribute MEV rewards in a “democratic” way. 

To learn more about Obadia’s work, listen to the full episode of Mapping Out Eth 2.0. 

Links:

Ethereum Community Conference Panel Recordings - https://ethcc.interspace.chat/

Flash Boys 2.0 Paper - https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.05234  

Flashbots Data Dashboard - https://dashboard.flashbots.net/network

Vitalik Buterin’s Proposal on Fee Market Designs to Mitigate MEV - https://ethresear.ch/t/proposer-block-builder-separation-friendly-fee-market-designs/9725

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Unique One Network is an interoperable Platform for DeFi enabled NFT Marketplaces, in a variety of sectors, built on Polkadot Parity Substrate. Unique One Network’s cross chain NFT hub facilitates transfers between a variety of blockchains and ecosystems, unleashing the power of NFTs with myriad innovative capabilities. Find out more at Unique One Network.

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Mimo is home of the world’s #1 euro-algorithmically pegged token minted at an interest rate of just 2%. Lock in your crypto assets, access their liquidity, and stabilize your portfolio by hedging against inflating coins. Open a Vault and experience the power of Mimo today at mimo.capital.

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In this week’s episode, CoinDesk’s Christine Kim and Consensys’ Ben Edgington discuss mounting concerns over the potential for block reorganizations on Ethereum. They also discuss the lack of supply growth in the world’s largest stablecoin, tether (USDT), and the annual Ethereum conference in Paris, France, EthCC. 

This episode is sponsored by Unique One Network and Mimo.

Time bandit attacks are a Miner/Maximal Extrable Value (MEV) strategy involving the reorganization of past blocks. If the reward is great enough, Ethereum miners may be incentivized to propose competing blocks containing altered transactions at the expense of users and other network stakeholders. 

Edgington highlighted the negative effects these attacks would have on the network, saying, “You think your transaction is confirmed and then suddenly it goes away, and it may or may not be included in the next block. So it breaks user experience to a certain extent, and is not really good for the stability of the blockchain.” 

Luckily, these types of network attacks are difficult to pull off. Kim said miners would need to “split the network” using vast amounts of computational power, also called hash power, in order to have their version of transaction history rewrite the main Ethereum chain. 

Miners would need approximately 40% of total network hash power in order to reliably utilize a time bandit attack. This is an exceptionally difficult task, especially in a zero-sum game where miners are competing with each other for block rewards. However, in light of the fact all Ethereum miners will need to retire as the network upgrades to a proof-of-stake consensus protocol, certain miners may not be so resistant to collusion for short-term profit. 

Early attempts to create an open-source application that facilitates time bandit attacks on Ethereum  were met with backlash last week on social media. The negative community response to “open exploration” exposing the root of this issue on the network in Edgington’s eyes sets a bad precedent for transparent discussion about the ways Ethereum needs improvement. 

This kind of reaction “discourages people from coming forward with creative ideas or speaking up about things and turns gray hats into black hats, which is not what we want,” Edgington said. 

To listen to the full conversation between Kim and Edgington, check out this week’s episode of “Mapping Out Eth 2.0.”

Links: 

The Ethereum Community Conference - https://ethcc.io/

Tether Hasn't Printed New USDT in Weeks - https://www.coindesk.com/tether-hasnt-printed-new-usdt-in-weeks-3-possible-explanations 

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Unique One Network is an interoperable Platform for DeFi enabled NFT Marketplaces, in a variety of sectors, built on Polkadot Parity Substrate. Unique One Network’s cross chain NFT hub facilitates transfers between a variety of blockchains and ecosystems, unleashing the power of NFTs with myriad innovative capabilities. Find out more at Unique One Network.

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Mimo is home of the world’s #1 euro-algorithmically pegged token minted at an interest rate of just 2%. Lock in your crypto assets, access their liquidity, and stabilize your portfolio by hedging against inflating coins. Open a Vault and experience the power of Mimo today at mimo.capital.

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See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In this week’s episode, CoinDesk’s Christine Kim and Consensys’ Ben Edgington interview Elina Sinelnikova, the Co-founder and CEO of Metis and CryptoChicks, about her Layer 2 scaling project and her role in bringing women into crypto. 

This episode is sponsored by Unique One Network and Mimo.

Metis, named after the Greek goddess of prudence and wisdom, is a Layer 2 solution to help boost the speed and lower the cost of transactions on Ethereum. 

Sinelnikova called the Greek goddess the icon of her project and explained her goals to “move forward with the same spirit as Metis as well as hiring more women,” who make up half of the project’s team. 

Sinelnikova also heads up CryptoChicks, co-founded with the mother of Vitalik Buterin, Natalia Ameline. CryptoChicks is a non-profit organization with the goal of educating women of all ages about blockchain and cryptocurrency. Without outside funding, the team is made up of predominantly volunteers, but has secured sponsorships from the likes of Microsoft, IBM and the Royal Bank of Canada. 

Blockchain engineering jobs have typically been dominated by males and Kim noted that there are “implicit biases that females are less technically minded,” which makes foundations like CryptoChicks even more important. In Sinelnikova’s hiring experience, all of her female employees have been over-qualified for their jobs. 

“We noticed that when the guys apply, they apply without experience and knowledge. When women apply, they’re 200% ready for that job,” said Sinelnikova. 

The female led Metis team is gearing up for a main network release of their product later this month. While boasting a higher transaction throughput than Ethereum, the Metis network will not sacrifice decentralization or security for its speed, according to Sinelnikova. 

Among the many technical solutions for blockchain scalability being developed on Ethereum’s Layer 2 such as state channels, side chains, zk-rollups, plasma and others, Metis uses a technology known as optimistic roll-ups to process and validate transactions in batches. 

To learn more about optimistic roll-ups, female empowerment in crypto, and Circle’s recent $4.5 billion dollar SPAC deal, listen in to this week’s episode of Mapping Out Ethereum 2.0 with Christine Kim and Ben Edgington.

Links:

Crypto Chicks (https://cryptochicks.ca/)

Dai Collateralization Data (https://daistats.com/)

Metis (https://metisdao.medium.com/)

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Unique One Network is an interoperable Platform for DeFi enabled NFT Marketplaces, in a variety of sectors, built on Polkadot Parity Substrate. Unique One Network’s cross chain NFT hub facilitates transfers between a variety of blockchains and ecosystems, unleashing the power of NFTs with myriad innovative capabilities. Find out more at Unique One Network.

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Mimo is home of the world’s #1 euro-algorithmically pegged token minted at an interest rate of just 2%. Lock in your crypto assets, access their liquidity, and stabilize your portfolio by hedging against inflating coins. Open a Vault and experience the power of Mimo today at mimo.capital.

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In this week’s episode, Christine Kim and Ben Edgington chat with CoinDesk Senior Markets Reporter Omkar Godbole about the evolution of ether trading markets. The duo also discussed the earnings of CoinDesk’s Ethereum 2.0 validator in recent months and the ways validator reward dynamics are expected to change after the network’s first system-wide upgrade, Altair.  

This episode is sponsored by Unique One Network and Mimo.

“Compared to 2017, the [ether] market has matured and we have more sophisticated players,” said Godbole. “I’m not surprised by just how fast the ether markets have grown because it’s actually the bitcoin market that first picked up the pace and now we are seeing activity flowing into ether and the [ether] options market.”

Increasingly sophisticated and deep-pocketed investors are turning to the ether derivatives markets as a way to diversify their crypto asset portfolios beyond just bitcoin, according to Godbole. In the process, certain market players are making millions. 

On Tuesday, June 22, 5,000 ether options contracts representing 5,000 ether were bought out at an estimated $5.44 million through a single trade on cryptocurrency exchange Deribit. As Godbole explained, the trade was executed by a market maker who bets on both sides of the market and profits from the spread between bid and ask prices for an option. 

Essentially, “they get commission for providing liquidity,” said Godbole. 

This particular market maker, according to Deribit CCO Luuk Strijers who spoke with Godbole about the events of June 22, made over $3 million from the trade. 

Outside of analyzing individual trades, Godbole also looks at aggregate data on trade activity in crypto derivatives markets in order to glean insights and hints about investor sentiment and broader market trends. 

The put-call skew is one metric measuring the price of put options relative to calls that can signal how worried investors are feeling about further potential sell-offs in bearish market conditions. 

“There is still considerable fear in both the ether and bitcoin options markets where put options are driving more demand or higher prices than calls,” said Godbole.  

Kim and Edgington also discussed a drought in block rewards for CoinDesk’s Eth 2.0 validator, Zelda. It has been over two months since Zelda has proposed a block on the network, which Edgington chalks up to being simply “super unlucky.”

To listen to the full conversation between Godbole, Kim and Edgington, check out this week’s episode of Mapping Out Eth 2.0. 

Links: 

• Ethereum Cat Herders (https://ethereumcatherders.com/index.html)
• How One Ether Options Trader May Have Lost $3M in a trade gone bad (https://www.coindesk.com/how-one-ether-options-trader-lost-3m-in-a-trade-gone-bad)

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Unique One Network is an interoperable Platform for DeFi enabled NFT Marketplaces, in a variety of sectors, built on Polkadot Parity Substrate. Unique One Network’s cross chain NFT hub facilitates transfers between a variety of blockchains and ecosystems, unleashing the power of NFTs with myriad innovative capabilities. Find out more at Unique One Network.

-

Mimo is home of the world’s #1 euro-algorithmically pegged token minted at an interest rate of just 2%. Lock in your crypto assets, access their liquidity, and stabilize your portfolio by hedging against inflating coins. Open a Vault and experience the power of Mimo today at mimo.capital.

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See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In this week’s episode, CoinDesk’s Christine Kim and Consensys’ Ben Edgington discuss the activation of EIP 1559 on Ethereum’s test network Ropsten and two potential protocol-level changes impacting Ethereum 2.0 validators. 

This episode is sponsored by Unique One Network and Mimo.

The London upgrade containing Ethereum’s fee market change, otherwise known as Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 1559, was activated Friday, June 25, on the Ropsten test network.

Kim noted early statistics about the activation of London on Ropsten, saying, “It looks like about over 80,000 testnet ETH was taken out of circulation, that is burned, as a result of EIP 1559. And the base fee, which is this new mandatory minimum fee payment required to send a transaction … was trending at about 100 gwei.”

If these figures were also seen on Ethereum after activation of London, it would mean average fee payments at minimum double from roughly 50 gwei to 100 gwei and about 30% of new coin issuance gets counterbalanced on the network through fee burning. 

Edgington warned these figures shouldn’t be taken too seriously as the high gas prices on Ropsten are partially a result of deliberate spamming in efforts to battle test the upgrade for main network deployment. 

“Also, Ropsten ETH is free, right? It’s costless. It’s testnet ETH. Sending a million transactions costs nothing except a bit of time so it differs from mainnet in that respect as well,” said Edgington.  

Looking further down the road to upgrades on the Ethereum 2.0 Beacon Chain, Edgington and Kim discussed the recurring idea to potentially lower the amount of ETH required to become a network validator. While this would make it less costly for users to validate and earn rewards on Eth 2.0, it would also require an “immense” engineering effort on the part of protocol developers, according to Edgington. 

“You can’t just change it to 16 ETH because what about all the people who have already got 32 ETH staked. They now have two validator entities. What a nightmare,” he said. 

Kim also noted that changing the required amount of ETH for validators would not be a long-term solution for encouraging a greater number of validators given the price volatility of the crypto asset, as well as the protocol-level decisions that still need to be made about the overall size of the Eth 2.0 network. 

Edgington and Kim also touched on the recent dispute between cryptocurrency custody provider Fireblocks and Eth 2.0 staking pool StakeHound. For the full overview on the dispute and what Eth 2.0 developers are considering to help users in similar situations, listen to this week’s episode of “Mapping Out Eth 2.0.” 

Links mentioned in this podcast: 

• Camila Russo’s The Infinite Machine (https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-infinite-machine-camila-russo?variant=32123333836834)   
• Matthew Leising’s Out of the Ether (https://www.amazon.com/Out-Ether-Amazing-Ethereum-Destroyed/dp/1119602939) 
• Data about EIP 1559 on Ropsten (http://watchtheburn.com) 
• Legal Dispute Between Fireblocks and Stakehound (https://www.coindesk.com/fireblocks-being-sued-for-allegedly-losing-over-70m-of-ethereum-report)

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Unique One Network is an interoperable Platform for DeFi enabled NFT Marketplaces, in a variety of sectors, built on Polkadot Parity Substrate. Unique One Network’s crosschain NFT hub facilitates transfers between a variety of blockchains and ecosystems, unleashing the power of NFTs with myriad innovative capabilities. Find out more at Unique One Network.

-

Mimo is home of the world’s #1 euro-algorithmically pegged token minted at an interest rate of just 2%. Lock in your crypto assets, access their liquidity, and stabilize your portfolio by hedging against inflating coins. Open a Vault and experience the power of Mimo today at mimo.capital.

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See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In this week’s episode, CoinDesk’s Christine Kim and Consensys’ Ben Edgington chat with the CEO and founder of Allnodes, Konstantin Boyko-Romanovsky. Allnodes is a blockchain node hosting, monitoring and staking service supporting over 25 cryptocurrency networks.  

This episode is sponsored by PumaPay.io.

Among the networks for which Allnodes provides hosting services, Boyko-Romanovsky said, the set up for validator nodes on Ethereum 2.0 was by far “the most stressful.” 

“Ethereum 2.0 is like playing Diablo in nightmare mode. I didn’t sleep well for two months when Ethereum [2.0] was launched because there is a risk of slashing,” said Boyko-Romanovsky.

The risk of slashing, or getting penalized, on Eth 2.0 is greater for staking-as-a-service platforms like Allnodes than for individual users. According to Edgington, this is by design in order to encourage network decentralization.  

“The Ethereum [2.0] protocol was not designed with staking services in mind. It was very much designed for individual stakers,” he said. “It is deliberately not supposed to be easy for [staking] services.” 

Even so, Edgington noted that among staking services Allnodes consistently operates the best-performing Eth 2.0 validator nodes in terms of rewards earned. 

While Boyko-Romanovsky attributed most of that success to “luck,” he also noted that using a single Eth 2.0 software client, Teku, and investing time into understanding Teku enabled him and his team to make “improvements” to their validator set-up based on their knowledge.

The trio also discussed the downfall of decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Iron Finance and Mark Cuban’s call for action from U.S regulators in light of the fiasco. To listen to the full discussion, check out this week’s episode of “Mapping Out Eth 2.0.” 

Links mentioned in this podcast:

• CoinDesk article about Iron Finance token price crash (https://www.coindesk.com/iron-finance-says-it-suffered-cryptos-first-large-scale-bank-run-in-token-crash-postmortem)
• Iron Finance blog post (https://ironfinance.medium.com/iron-finance-post-mortem-17-june-2021-6a4e9ccf23f5)
• Mark Cuban’s statement in Bloomberg (https://twitter.com/TheStalwart/status/1405536487630798859/photo/1) 

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