🚀 Cardano Launches Smart Contracts But Now Must Deliver on Ecosystem’s Promise

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Smart Contracts

🚀 Cardano Launches Smart Contracts But Now Must Deliver on Ecosystem’s Promise

TLDR 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 apps (dapps) until this upgrade.

SO WHAT Defiers appear to be taking advantage of the new functionality. Developers deployed a reported 23 smart contracts on Cardano in the first ten minutes. There are now more than 100 live contracts on the blockchain, according to Cardano data provider, AdaPools.org.

BLIP With an 8% decrease to $2.38 since Alonzo, Cardano’s ADA token’s performance has been lackluster coming out of the launch. Still, the token has gained 1,204% this year, making the last couple of days a blip on the radar for investors who held since January.

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Blockchain Outages

😡 Solana Blockchain Suffers Intermittent Stability

NEWS Solana, one of the biggest DeFi chains by value locked, suffered network outages Tuesday. The Solana team first alerted users to the issue on Twitter at 8:38 AM New York time, saying the network had been “experiencing intermittent instability” for the prior 45 minutes.

NODES Some nodes on the smart contracts chain went offline after the network had problems handling a higher-than-usual load, according to a spokeswoman for the team.

FORKING “Solana Mainnet Beta encountered a large increase in transaction load which peaked at 400,000 TPS,” said a statement emailed via Diana Bost of Hokku PR. “These transactions flooded the transaction processing queue, and the lack of prioritization of network-critical messaging caused the network to start forking.

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⚡️ Ethereum Layer-2 Chain Arbitrum Suffers Near Hour-Long Outage

OUTAGE Arbitrum experienced what its team is describing as an “outage” Tuesday 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.

ASSETS Arbitrum is an optimistic roll-up chain built to support the Ethereum blockchain, developed by Offchain Labs. It currently has $1.8B worth of assets locked up in different smart contracts on the chain, according to DefiLlama.

RISK At 11:31 AM the Offchain team tweeted that the chain was “fully restored.” The outage was a temporary failure of one component of the system, which did not put funds at risk, Offchain Labs said in a statement.

DEPLOYED “The root cause of the downtime was a bug causing the Sequencer to get stuck when it received a very large burst of transactions in a short period of time. The issue has been identified and a fix has been deployed,” the statement said.

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Blockchain Growth

📈 Upstart Project Helps Drive Up Arbitrum’s TVL 17 Times to $2.2B

MULTIPLIED Arbitrum, a Layer 2 which pushes Ethereum transactions onto a sidechain to enhance performance, is on fire (except for the temporary outage it suffered Tuesday). 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 market share after fully launching only a couple weeks ago.

TOKENS Despite established exchanges like Balancer, Sushiswap, and Uniswap all deploying to Arbitrum, $1.46B of the value locked on the L2 is coming from an upstart project called ArbiNYAN. ArbiNYAN is a yield farm that offers users NYAN tokens as an incentive for depositing their ETH, NYAN, or liquidity provider (LP) tokens of an ETH-NYAN pair on the project’s platform.

USERS DeFi users receive LP tokens in exchange for depositing pairs of assets on exchanges which other people use to trade. So in this case, users would receive an ETH-NYAN LP token from Sushiswap to deposit in ArbiNYAN, resulting in the project sending the user more NYAN tokens.

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Video

📺 Tutorial: How to earn fixed rate of interest on 88MPH

Links

🔗 Fidelity lobbies SEC to approve Bitcoin ETF in private meeting: CoinTelegraph

Multinational financial services firm Fidelity Investments has pressed the United States Securities and Exchange Commission to approve its Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF).

🔗 DeFi and the 3 Cs: CoinDesk

Imagine thinking that not collecting sensitive data is inherently a bad thing. That canard seemed to be the subtext of two memorable lines in last Sunday’s front-page New York Times story about the regulatory crackdown on cryptocurrency lending.

🔗 The Worlds Greatest NFT Portfolio | DC Investor: Bankless

DC Investor thought NFTs were cool before you did! Join us on this State of the Nation, as we explore DCs progression through the NFT universe.

🔗 An In-Depth Look Into the Lightning Network as a Bitcoin Scaling Solution: CoinDesk

The Lightning Network aspires to enable fast, digitally native payment infrastructure for Bitcoin without sacrificing its core tenets of security, privacy and availability.

🔗 Testimony of Gary Gensler Before the United States Senate: U.S. Senate Banking Committee

Good afternoon, Chairman Brown, Ranking Member Toomey, and members of the Committee. I’m honored to appear before you today for the first time as Chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

🔗 Zodiac: The expansion pack for DAOs: Gnosis Guild Mirror

Myths are resilient. Take, for instance, the stories we tell ourselves about the stars. The characters that accompany the constellations, like the Great Bear, the Bull, or the Seven Sisters, appear to pass singularly from one generation to the next.

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🧑‍💻 ✍️ Stories in this newsletter were written by Brady Dale and Owen Fernau and edited by Bailey Reutzel and Edward Robinson. Videos were produced by Robin Schmidt and Alp Gasimov. Podcast was led by Camila, edited by Alp.

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The Defiant is a daily newsletter focusing on decentralized finance, a new financial system that’s being built on top of open blockchains. The space is evolving at breakneck speed and revolutionizing tech and money. Sign up to learn more and keep up on the latest, most interesting developments. Subscribers get full access, while free signups get only part of the content. Click here to pay with DAI (for $100/yr) or sub with fiat by clicking on the button above ($15/mo, $150/yr.