Not only is DOGE a very good boy, its coin is about to be very smart, too — as in, smart contract-ready. Flare is a startup launching its canary network in the coming days, and it’s going to bring smart contract functionality to DOGE. It will also bring it to XRP, Stellar (XLM) and Litecoin…

At long last, Cardano has smart contracts. Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK), one of three companies backing Cardano, announced the release on Sep. 12 as part of the so-called Alonzo upgrade. The deployment means the end of a long wait — Cardano launched its mainnet four years ago but hasn’t been able to run decentralized…

Arbitrum, a Layer 2 which pushes Ethereum transactions onto a sidechain to enhance performance, is on fire.  In the last five days, Arbitrum’s total value locked has multiplied 17 times, shooting to $2.2B on Sept. 14 from $126M on Sept. 9, according to data provider L2BEAT. Arbitrum has more than 70% of the total L2…

Arbitrum experienced what its team is describing as an “outage” this morning, according to a Tweet posted by its main account at 10:43 AM New York time. The downtime happened to coincide with a similar loss of performance on the Solana blockchain.  Arbitrum is an optimistic roll-up chain built to support the Ethereum blockchain, developed…

It has historically paid to be early in DeFi — literally. Traders (including yours truly) are betting that will also be the case on Arbitrum and Optimism.   DeFi has long fostered a culture of rewarding early adopters, with a great example being last year’s massive Uniswap airdrop in which the decentralized exchange airdropped 400 UNI…

Another day, another NFT project, but with the strong network and idiosyncratic art behind this one, it might be in it for the long haul. The new kid on the block is CrypToadz. At 4,873 ETH, over $15M, in weekly trading volume, the project has quickly vaulted to the tenth slot on OpenSea despite launching…

Margin trading protocol dYdX launched its native token with one of the largest distributions in decentralized finance. dYdX dropped 7.5% of its initial billion-strong token supply on Sept 8. At the current price of $11.12, those 75M tokens are worth more than $800M. At one point the airdropped tokens’ value eclipsed $1B.  That’s up there…

I started chasing Art Blocks NFTs on Aug. 25 during Radix’ Eccentrics 2: Orbits drop.  That may sound like gobbledygook to some, but others, including Art Blocks founder Erick Calderon, AKA Snowfro, will know that I picked the worst time to begin my quest to mint generative digital art NFT on the platform. But three…

The Layer 1 blockchain Harmony unveiled a $300M ecosystem fund today to back startups working on applications and protocols. There are many large blockchains now, but to a certain degree each one is a bit of a walled garden, Stephen Tse, Harmony’s founder told The Defiant, via a spokesperson. “Harmony was purpose-built so that developers…

Blockchains really only know themselves. That’s what blockchains are good at: knowing the current state of assets held by all the blockhain’s users with confidence grounded in cryptographic verifiability. “[Blockchains] don’t have the ability to speak to the outside world, so they aren’t able to incorporate that into their logic and their contracts,” Kanav Kariya,…