As ETH reaches new highs and the larger DeFi market booms, average gas prices have remained surprisingly stable throughout April––and that may be all thanks to one project working at the very core of the chain.  Flashbots Alpha is a proof-of-concept communication channel between traders and miners that allows formerly inefficient on-chain bidding wars to…

Ether and the most popular DeFi metrics are all smashing through new records. Ether continues to push higher, hitting a record of $2487 earlier today, according to CoinGecko. Rising ETH prices is pushing total value locked in DeFi to a new high in dollar terms of $55.9B. ETH locked in DeFi hit an all-time high…

The Ethereum Berlin hard fork ships tomorrow. The upgrade contains four Ethereum improvement proposals (EIPs) mainly aimed at optimizing gas costs, and is the first of its kind since Muir Glacier shipped on Jan. 2 2020. “Hard forks” are a result of distributed networks like Ethereum upgrading or making changes in their software. Node operators…

Compound has become the number one DeFi protocol by value locked. Compound had already been leading in terms of liquidity supplied—with over $15 billion deposited at the time of writing—but lagged behind MakerDAO in TVL. And one notable wallet recently made a significant contribution to those assets. The reason for this difference boils down to the…

Viewing eth2 through the lens of traditional financial tools will help the industry mature and grow. Historically, it was difficult to participate financially in the development of the interworking protocols that formed the basis of the internet. Web3.0, however, flips this on its head. Decentralization, a core tenant of most proof of stake (PoS) blockchains,…

Visa is now settling transactions via stablecoins on the Ethereum network. While these are just a tiny sliver of Visa’s total volume, and only apply to one client, the fact that the largest payments network is using a public blockchain signals the integration between traditional finance and crypto is strengthening. The first such transaction in…

As prices retrace across the board in crypto, it is helpful to analyze fundamentals and assess to what extent have prices and fundamentals changed. Leveraging key on-chain indicators from IntoTheBlock, it is evident that Ethereum’s demand and store of value proposition continue to grow, unaffected by the recent price volatility.  Ethereum’s fees have been notoriously…

In this week’s episode we speak with Antonio Juliano, founder and CEO of dYdX, one of the biggest decentralized exchanges on Ethereum, focusing on derivatives. dYdX recently made news by being one of the first major DeFi projects to move to Layer 2.  One of the main goals for his team this year will be to further…

ETH in whales’ wallets isn’t budging while smaller holders take their tokens to DeFi. The number of wallets with 100 to 10K Ether have dropped by 7.2% since the cryptocurrency hit an all-time high four weeks ago. In contrast, the amount of wallets with over 10K ETH, valued at more than $18.4M, dropped only 0.9%…

In this week’s episode I interview Ameen Soleimani, one of the most prolific builders in Ethereum. He’s the CEO of SpankChain, a blockchain-based adult entertainment platform, the co-creator of MolochDAO, a DAO to fund Ethereum projects, and the co-founder of Reflexer Labs, which created RAI, a purely ether-backed stablecoin. We talk about the need of a purely…