Layer 1
November 12, 2021

Polkadot’s Parachain Auctions Aim to Fulfill Promise of Scalability
Polkadot's auction of parachains may drive innovation and scalability for a project aims to improve on Ethereum.
November 04, 2021

Payments DEX Stellar First L1 to Offer Integrated Automated Market Making
Stellar has launched Protocol 18, integrating automated market maker functionality into its Layer 1 DEX.
September 15, 2021

Solana Outage Likely Caused by Bots Pursuing an Initial DEX Offering
At 2:01 AM New York time Wednesday morning, the Solana blockchain went live once again, according to @SolanaStatus. “The Solana validator community successfully completed a restart of Mainnet Beta after an upgrade to 1.6.25,” the platform reported. “Dapps, block explorers, and supporting systems will recover over the next several hours, at which point full functionality…
September 15, 2021

Cardano Launches Smart Contracts But Now Must Deliver on Ecosystem’s Promise
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…
September 09, 2021

Harmony Opens the Throttle on Layer 1 with $300M Fund for Myriad Projects
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…
September 09, 2021

Solana Attracts Oracles as Momentum Builds for Next Phase of DeFi
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,…
August 25, 2021

Layer 1 Boom Drives Terra’s LUNA Token to the Moon
And you thought Solana was hot. Well, it is, but Terra’s LUNA token has eclipsed SOL in the last month. LUNA has skyrocketed about 265% in the last 30 days compared to SOL’s 150% performance, according to CoinGecko. While Avalanche’s AVAX token has more than tripled in value in that period one thing seems clear…
April 17, 2021

"We're Lifting Barriers For Outside Users; If You Allocate Capital in a Vacuum, It's Kind of Meaningless:" Terra's Do Kwon
In this week’s episode, we interview Do Kwon, cofounder of the Terra ecosystem, which includes a payments network, a stablecoin, a lending protocol and a synthetic assets platform. We talk about how he was able to achieve what most crypto companies can’t: Get a broad non-crypto native user base. Terra’s Chai payments system, which uses the Terra stablecoin, has about…