ENS’s eth.link Could Be Lost Because There’s Nobody To Renew Its Web Address

ENS’s eth.link Could Be Lost Because There’s Nobody To Renew Its Web Address

by | Aug 26, 2022 | News

Eth.link will be put up for sale on Sept. 5, according to GoDaddy.

The eth.link page domain is about to expire, and the members of the ENS DAO community are forced to replace it. The Web3 sites use decentralized structures like the ENS (Ethereum Name Service), which are similar to the traditional DNS. 

The only person that has access to renew the domain is the former Ethereum developer, Virgil Griffith, who is currently serving a 63-month sentence. He pleaded guilty to helping North Koreans to use cryptocurrencies to circumvent the sanctions. After giving a talk about cryptocurrencies in Pyongyang in April 2019, Virgil Griffith was arrested in November 2019. 

Although the maximum sentence for the crime was 20 years, Griffith’s plea agreement with federal prosecutors reduced the sentence to a range between 63 and 78 months, which is approximately 5 to 6.5 years. Since Griffith is still serving his sentence, the eth.link expired on July 26, and there’s nobody else who can renew it. As of September 6, 2022, the eth.link domain will be available for registration, and anyone can take it. 

What is eth.link?

The eth.link is the EthDNS that serves the .eth community. 

ENS DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), governs the Ethereum Name Service protocol. This is a Web3 version for Domain Name Service providers. ENS is responsible for many.eth domains that have appeared in the Ethereum community. As a way to purchase their own domains, users have purchased .eth name. ENS names can be linked to your wallet address to make it easier to send and receive cryptocurrency (instead of typing out a complex Ethereum address).

The ENS gives DNS information to the distributed authority without conflating ownership and authoritative serving. Using ENS, domain owners have full control of their DNS records. Smart contracts allow ENS to irrevocably assign subdomains of domains to other entities.

So far, the ENSLink was used as the EthDNS, and anyone who used an ENS was able to use it to see the associated ENS records. 

However, instead of showing all the information about how to use the ethDNS, the eth.link will now show an empty page with an expiration banner on top. 

The Executive Director of ENS stated that Virgil Griffith was working with the Ethereum Foundation when ENS was launched, and he was an early contributor to the ENS protocol. However, it’s important to note that ENS is a permissionless protocol, and it can be used by anyone to build decentralized applications (DApps) on top of it. Virgil Griffith used the eth.link traditional domain to build an application that would resolve the ENS domains. The DAO got used to the DApps, and it was using it to fetch information about all ENS names. However, the ENS DAO is now operating another domain (eth.limo) which is now handling the same requests and resolving the ENS domains. 

What is ENS?

ENS or Ethereum Name Service is a distributed naming system that interacts with the Ethereum blockchain and map human-readable domains to blockchain addresses. 

ENS is used as a store for DNS information. It provides the distributed authority of DNS without conflating ownership and authoritative serving of information. By using ENS, the owner of a “.eth” domain has full control over their own DNS records. Effectively, an ENS is doing for the Ethereum blockchain what the DNS is doing for the WWW. 

In the last couple of years, the ENS has seen significant growth. While the first million domains were sold over the course of five years, it only took about four months to surpass the 2 million milestone. 

Dogechain Offers Smart Contract Capabilities to DOGE Owners

Dogechain Offers Smart Contract Capabilities to DOGE Owners

by | Aug 18, 2022 | News

The U.S. government decided to act upon the Ethereum blockchain, and it’s imposing a ban on Tornado Cash, the cryptocurrency tumbler. 

At the beginning of August 2022, the U.S. Treasury Department announced that it had banned Tornado Cash, the famous crypto-mixing service. In a move likely to have wide-reaching implications for crypto, all American “persons” are prohibited from interfacing with the open source protocol.

Circle, the issuing entity behind USDC stablecoin, immediately removed 38 addresses from their transaction history that were connected to Tornado. Anecdotal evidence suggests that bans are being enforced by other platforms and companies.

By instating this bad, the Office of Foreign Assets Control has created made it a crime to use Tornado Cash. It is now more difficult to maintain transactional secrecy for Ethereum, the most widely used blockchain. Platforms and individuals need to assess their exposure and take steps toward avoiding regulatory action. However, it’s still unclear whether or not the regulators will enforce such a ban and how blockchain protocols will comply. 

What is Tornado Cash?

Tornado Cash is an open-source project that allows crypto users to hide their transactions histories from the public. It is claimed by the U.S. government that Tornado Cash was used to launder more than $103.8 million through hacks of Nomad Token Bridge and Horizon Harmony Bridge earlier in the summer and was also used by Lazarus Group, a North Korean hacker group. 

The U.S. Treasury sanctioned Tornado Cash for its use by Lazarus Group, a North Korean hacker group. Also, it cited the laundering of more than $103.8 million through hacks of Nomad Token Bridge and Horizon Harmony Bridge earlier in the summer.

Since its 2019 launch, Tornado Cash was used to launder more than $7 billion worth of cryptocurrency.

Soon after the U.S. Treasury announcement, the Discord server for that group vanished, and unknown persons also took down the forum on Tornado Cash’s community website. A member of Tornado Cash’s developer group was also taken into custody in the Netherlands by law enforcement.

Who uses Tornado Cash?

Instead of pursuing identifiable bad actors or targeting hackers, the government has placed a ban on the protocol. Elliptic, an analytics firm, claimed it had found $1.5 billion worth of illicit funds through ransomware fraud, hacks, and hacks.

Chainalysis, the blockchain analysis company, released a report that claimed that the use of crypto-mixers hit an all-time high monthly level in April 2022. This was after $51.8 million had been laundered through different platforms.

Tornado is also an important component of the Ethereum money stack. While this wasn’t the only method to anonymize transactions on blockchain, or the only coin tumbler used, it was the most widely used tool. The vast majority of applications supporting ETH will have exposure to the mixing service. Even Ethereum co-founder, Vitalik Buterin, has admitted to having used Tornado Cash before donating money to Ukraine in the spring of 2022.

But a government can’t really ban a blockchain protocol

But as with any smart contract deployed on a blockchain, it can’t be shut down by any authority. Although the use of the Tornado Cash smart contract has been deemed a criminal action, the ruling can’t actually stop anyone from using it or even re-deploying its open-source code on a different blockchain. 

Surely, there have been some reactions to the ban. Some Tornado Cash users have been sending small amounts of crypto to celebrities’ crypto owners. The issue is that anyone who knows your public wallet address (which is not hard to find) can send you transactions, even a transaction from Tornado Cash, and there’s no way to refuse a transaction. In this case, there can be innocent people that might have wallets that can be tied to the banned protocol – but are they really to be blamed?

While some platforms such as Circle and MakerDAO are trying to follow the rules, it is clear that blockchain financial apps can’t exist by following the archaic regulations of governments. 

Crypto and AI Set for Major Energy Consumption Surge by 2026

Crypto and AI Set for Major Energy Consumption Surge by 2026

by | Jan 28, 2024 |

As the International Energy Agency (IEA) forecasts, AI’s energy consumption is poised for an explosive increase, overshadowing even the substantial growth in crypto’s energy use. Despite AI’s burgeoning demand, the spotlight remains on cryptocurrency for its significant energy footprint.

Tornado Cash Becomes the First Smart Contract Banned by the U.S. Government

Tornado Cash Becomes the First Smart Contract Banned by the U.S. Government

by | Aug 12, 2022 | News

The U.S. government decided to act upon the Ethereum blockchain, and it’s imposing a ban on Tornado Cash, the cryptocurrency tumbler. 

At the beginning of August 2022, the U.S. Treasury Department announced that it had banned Tornado Cash, the famous crypto-mixing service. In a move likely to have wide-reaching implications for crypto, all American “persons” are prohibited from interfacing with the open source protocol.

Circle, the issuing entity behind USDC stablecoin, immediately removed 38 addresses from their transaction history that were connected to Tornado. Anecdotal evidence suggests that bans are being enforced by other platforms and companies.

By instating this bad, the Office of Foreign Assets Control has created made it a crime to use Tornado Cash. It is now more difficult to maintain transactional secrecy for Ethereum, the most widely used blockchain. Platforms and individuals need to assess their exposure and take steps toward avoiding regulatory action. However, it’s still unclear whether or not the regulators will enforce such a ban and how blockchain protocols will comply.

What is Tornado Cash?

Tornado Cash is an open-source project that allows crypto users to hide their transactions histories from the public. It is claimed by the U.S. government that Tornado Cash was used to launder more than $103.8 million through hacks of Nomad Token Bridge and Horizon Harmony Bridge earlier in the summer and was also used by Lazarus Group, a North Korean hacker group.

The U.S. Treasury sanctioned Tornado Cash for its use by Lazarus Group, a North Korean hacker group. Also, it cited the laundering of more than $103.8 million through hacks of Nomad Token Bridge and Horizon Harmony Bridge earlier in the summer.

Since its 2019 launch, Tornado Cash was used to launder more than $7 billion worth of cryptocurrency.

Soon after the U.S. Treasury announcement, the Discord server for that group vanished, and unknown persons also took down the forum on Tornado Cash’s community website. A member of Tornado Cash’s developer group was also taken into custody in the Netherlands by law enforcement.



Who uses Tornado Cash?

Instead of pursuing identifiable bad actors or targeting hackers, the government has placed a ban on the protocol. Elliptic, an analytics firm, claimed it had found $1.5 billion worth of illicit funds through ransomware fraud, hacks, and hacks.

Chainalysis, the blockchain analysis company, released a report that claimed that the use of crypto-mixers hit an all-time high monthly level in April 2022. This was after $51.8 million had been laundered through different platforms.

Tornado is also an important component of the Ethereum money stack. While this wasn’t the only method to anonymize transactions on blockchain, or the only coin tumbler used, it was the most widely used tool. The vast majority of applications supporting ETH will have exposure to the mixing service. Even Ethereum co-founder, Vitalik Buterin, has admitted to having used Tornado Cash before donating money to Ukraine in the spring of 2022.

But a government can’t really ban a blockchain protocol

But as with any smart contract deployed on a blockchain, it can’t be shut down by any authority. Although the use of the Tornado Cash smart contract has been deemed a criminal action, the ruling can’t actually stop anyone from using it or even re-deploying its open-source code on a different blockchain.

Surely, there have been some reactions to the ban. Some Tornado Cash users have been sending small amounts of crypto to celebrities’ crypto owners. The issue is that anyone who knows your public wallet address (which is not hard to find) can send you transactions, even a transaction from Tornado Cash, and there’s no way to refuse a transaction. In this case, there can be innocent people that might have wallets that can be tied to the banned protocol – but are they really to be blamed?

While some platforms such as Circle and MakerDAO are trying to follow the rules, it is clear that blockchain financial apps can’t exist by following the archaic regulations of governments. 

What Will Happen to Miners After the Ethereum Merge Is Complete

What Will Happen to Miners After the Ethereum Merge Is Complete

by | Aug 4, 2022 | Ethereum, News

Ethereum miners will need to switch course as soon as September, when the network will no longer require miners to validate transactions and create new blocks. They might consider mining other cryptocurrencies or even give up completely. 

After The Merge, the Ethereum miners will no longer be part of the network participants, and they will have to shift their use of the network. The roles of Ethereum miners will now be obsolete, and they are forced to find alternative income streams. 

The sudden change took, in fact, years of research and development, but after The Merge, Ethereum will finally be described as a safer, energy-efficient, and scalable blockchain network. 

After the Ethereum network moved to a Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism (PoS), it is now that Ethereum miners face a sudden change. Their role effectively ends, and they are forced to look for alternative income streams.

This historical moment for the Ethereum community, known as the “The Merge,” is expected to take place on September 15th, 2022, but might take place even sooner. 

What’s the Ethereum Merge?

The Ethereum Merge is the switch from a Proof-of-Work (PoW) to a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism. In plain English, a PoS blockchain doesn’t require miners (aka energy-intensive computers) to validate transactions and create new blocks but replies on stakers and validators.  

This will have many benefits, including the elimination of energy-intensive mining. To secure the network, the network will instead use staking.

Over the years, as more applications have been deployed on Ethereum, users have been hit with high transaction fees, low scalability, and even network congestion. But all of these are expected to change in the near future. 

When complete, the Merge will eliminate Ethereum’s high gas fees, improve scalability and security, and provide greater sustainability.

What will happen to Ethereum miners?

Since its creation, Ethereum has relied on GPU (graphics processing unit) rigs to perform the process of Ethereum mining. They are more flexible than the ones used for bitcoin mining, and can be reconfigured to mine other coins more easily. GPUs are used by gamers but can also be used to mine other cryptos such as Ergo, Ravencoin, and Ethereum Classic.

But as Ethereum is being upgraded, all these miners will have to either start mining other coins or give up crypto mining entirely. It’s worth noting that a profitable mining rig costs more than $1,000, and the operation’s success relies on the cost of electricity, which has also gone up dramatically since the beginning of 2022. 

In the past, Ethereum mining was very popular due to its profitability. However, miners will have to switch course and employ their GPUs on other blockchains. While a shift to mining other cryptocurrencies could result in a decrease in profits in the short term, it still represents income for owners of these expensive mining rigs. 

One of the biggest beneficiaries of the switch could be Ethereum Classic (ETC), as some expect many of the Ethereum miners to turn to Ethereum Classic. It’s worth noting that the ETC hashrate has started to rise since July. Some investors might even view Ethereum Classic as a hedge against potential disruptions in Ethereum’s blockchain during the transition from PoW-to-PoS. 

Can Ethereum miners switch to Bitcoin mining? Not really, because the two networks use different mining algorithms. Bitcoin requires ASIC-compatible hardware, which has a higher performance, but it’s also more energy intensive. ETH, on the other hand,  uses a mining algorithm called “Ethash,” which was designed to be ASIC-resistant.

After Ethereum moves to PoS, the most likely outcome is that miners will distribute their rigs among different networks that support GPU mining.

Vitalik Buterin at EthCC Paris 2022: The Upcoming ‘Merge’ and ‘Surge’ 

Vitalik Buterin at EthCC Paris 2022: The Upcoming ‘Merge’ and ‘Surge’ 

by | Jul 22, 2022 | Ethereum, News

Ethereum’s co-founder presented the future of Ethereum at the EthCC Paris 2022 conference. 

In July 2022, took place the 5th Paris Community Conference, during which Vitalk Buterin presented the long-term road map for Ethereum. 

At the developer-focused conference, Buterin spoke about the “Merge,” in which Ethereum will undergo a complete transition from proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-stake (PoS). 

What’s next to come for Ethereum?

Buterin spoke about the Merge’s short-term and long-term outcomes. He stated that the network’s roadmap also includes the “Surge”, which will increase the scalability of rollups through sharding.

According to Buterin’s statements, Ethereum would be much more scalable after the completion of the road map. When everything is complete, Ethereum will be capable of processing 100,000 transactions per minute.

Ethereum’s overall network development will be at 55% completion once the Merge is completed. That means that there is still much work ahead for developers.

Buterin stated that the network’s deep changes would include an update to its monetary policies and token issuance, as well as its security model, transaction inclusion, and its security model.

It is hard to pursue these decentralized goals due to the network’s complexity and rapid changes. He said that everyone had been anticipating these network upgrades for a while.

When Vitalik asked the crowd, “Who wants to cancel proof-of-stake?” – he did not raise a hand.

He joked, “Even though you want to, it’s not going to be canceled.”

Ether has been trading at around $1,500 and up 34% in the last month.

Buterin spoke at last year’s EthCC and stated that Ethereum needed to go beyond decentralized finance (DeFi).

The conference was busiest on Thursday (July 21st), according to many conference attendees. Many said that Buterin’s talk would make Thursday the most memorable day.

What is the “Merge” for Ethereum?

It’s a known fact that the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains use the proof-of-work (PoW) consensus algorithm to secure their networks. This allows miners to compete to secure it by solving complicated computational puzzles. However, it has been criticized for its high energy consumption.

But there’s an alternative to that, and it’s called proof-of-stake (PoS). This is a version of the protocol that has been adopted by chains such as Solana or Tezos, and it replaces miners with validators. In the case of Ethereum, the PoS Eth will have validators stake 32 ETH on the Ethereum network, and each one can be randomly selected to add blocks to the chain.

In both of these mechanisms, PoW and PoS, adding blocks to a chain usually grant rewards to the block issuer.

The Ethereum roadmap has been hinting on this upgrade from PoW since 2015, but engineering complexities have caused this shift (Ethereum 2.0) to drag out for several years.

Although the Merge will not reduce Ethereum’s high fees or improve the transaction speeds, it will have an immediate impact on Ethereum’s energy consumption.

As of July 2022, Ethereum’s Sepolia testnet switched to PoS. Goerli will be the third and final public testnet to go through the Merge process. It will take place on Aug. 11. The next Ethereum Foundation All-Core Developers conference will determine the parameters that will trigger the test. These testnet mergers were used as a kind of dress rehearsal for the real thing, and each moved developers one step closer to Ethereum’s mainnet PoS update.

When is the Ethereum merge going to happen?

Tim Beiko, from the Ethereum Foundation, predicted that the Merge could take place around September 19th 2022.

The Merge will see Ethereum move from an energy-intensive proof of work (POW), a consensus mechanism that was brought forward by Bitcoin, to a more efficient proof-of-stake system (PoS). Some PoS proponents believe that switching to other mechanisms will bring security and scaling benefits, in addition to cutting down the network’s energy consumption by 99.95%.

Beiko, an Ethereum protocol engineer, gave his September estimate during a PoS implementers call. Beiko provided a timeline and a date for the Merge, as well as a possible date.

Although he did not offer a hard date for the Merge, but Beiko repeatedly pointed out – on Discord and Twitter – that it is very likely that things will change.

The DeFi and NFT Markets Are in a Downtrend, but Users Feel Hopeful

The DeFi and NFT Markets Are in a Downtrend, but Users Feel Hopeful

by | Jul 15, 2022 | News

According to a report, the on-chain for DeFi apps has slowed down, but the industry has managed to retain most of its daily active users.

CoinGecko published a report for Q2 2022 that reveals the market trends and analysis for decentralized finance (DeFi). The most unexpected statistic is that the DeFi market experienced a 74.6% decline in Q2, but the user activity has remained relatively robust. 

Cryptocurrency market chances in Q2 2022 (statistics) 

  • Top 30 cryptos market capitalization decreased by 55.9%, losing over half its value and falling below $1 trillion.
  • The top 15 stablecoins lost almost a fifth of their market cap, -18.3% or -$33.9B
  • The top 30 crypto market cap correlation with the S&P500 was 0.92 (that’s a high correlation).
  • Bitcoin’s hash rate decreased by 1.7%
  • +17.82% of total ETH Staked in Q2 2022. (Almost 13 million ETH was staked, representing roughly 11% of the total ETH supply).
  • There was a 34.5% decrease in average daily DeFi Users compared to 1st April 2022
  • The NFT trading volume decreased by 26% from Q1 to Q2 2022

DeFi market in Q2 2022

The CoinGecko report states that the total DeFi market cap dropped from $142 million (in Q1) to $36 million (in Q2). This was primarily due to the collapse of Terra’s stablecoin UST in May 2022.

Another worrying statistic is the increase in DeFi exploits, which has contributed significantly to this fall. Some of the most notable hacking events involved Inverse Finance and Rari, and the lost funds accumulated up to $1.2 million and $11,000,000, respectively. These attacks affected the token prices’ tremendously, and investors have also lost confidence in these protocols. 

But it’s not all doom and gloom in the DeFi space. Although on-chain activity has slowed, the DeFi industry still retains most of its active users daily.

The DeFi daily active users decreased by only 34.5%, from 50,000 to 35,000 in Q2. There were also numerous instances that led to an increase in DeFi activity.

After Terra’s collapse, there was a spike in users’ on-chain activity. Of course, that could be explained by users who used Curve Finance or Uniswap to sell Terra (LUNA and USTC).

The second spike was seen in June when Celsius, a crypto lending platform, imposed withdrawal restrictions due to financial difficulties. Celsius filed for bankruptcy on July 12. 

The users’ behavior is normal in both f these cases, as they were trying to escape the dramatic consequences of these protocols. 

What’s happening to NFTs?

Also, the report found that the trading volume for nonfungible tokens (NFTs) decreased by 26.2.% reaching $7.6 billion since the same time last year. 

In June 2022, the NFT trading volumes reached $830 million. This coincided with the collapse of the floor prices of NFTs.

For the first time ever, we also witness a change in the NFT marketplaces’ arena. 

OpenSea maintained its grip on the top spot, despite being in decline. In May and June, however, Magic Eden, X2Y2, seemed to have caught up and took turns to surpass OpenSea’s daily and weekly volumes. 

Despite having a more advantageous fee structure, LooksRare & X2Y2 are still behind OpenSea. However, they are slowly gaining ground.

NFT trends in Q2 2022

It looks like the Play-to-Earn (P2E) games are gaining more popularity, and we can see it in the NFT trends. 

Some of the most traded in-game NFT assets are Stepn’s shoes (move to earn game), GoblinTown, and Art Blocks. 

It’s also important to note that Solana has been reducing Ethereum’s NFT share. It will be interesting to see if this momentum can last long-term.

Some of the rising NFT projects on Solana include OkayBears, Trippin’ Ape Tribe, and DeGods.