Since the previous article on Avalanche in September—”Avalanche Gains Momentum as Blockchains Battle Breaking Out” by Footprint — Avalanche’s TVL has risen from $2.3 billion to $13.9 billion.

1. Sustained ecosystem support

The Avalanche Foundation launched Avalanche Rush on August 18, a $180 million liquidity mining incentive program that drove Avalanche’s first surge. Since then, the project’s incentive mechanism has been ramped up. Benqi, a native lending project, also launched a $3 million liquidity mining incentive program with the Avalanche Foundation, rewarding AVAX and protocol token Qi for users who borrowed on Benqi, which became the highest TVL protocol on the chain in less than a week.

Two months later, the Avalanche Foundation re-launched a $200 million fund (Blizzard), that will be used to incentivize four key areas of the Avalanche ecosystem (DeFi, enterprise applications, NFTs and culture applications), while seeking other emerging applications. Avalanche’s support for the project will include equity investments, token purchases and various forms of technical, business development and ecosystem integration support.

Avalanche is also expanding its external ecosystem. Shopping.io, a well-known crypto e-commerce platform, has announced support for users to use Avalanche’s token AVAX to shop on Amazon, Walmart, eBay and other platforms, with a 2% discount in some areas.

Wyre, a U.S. cryptocurrency payment infrastructure provider, has also integrated its payment network into Avalanche’s ecosystem, supporting users in more than 50 countries/regions in converting nine currencies, including the US dollar, to AVAX.

2. A strong multi-chain framework

Avalanche is a proof of stake chain and the prominent difference from other blockchains is the adoption of three core chains. Each of the three chains takes on a different role by using different data structures.

X-Chain (Exchange Chain)

Used for trading and creating assets and has a fast transaction speed

X-chain allows users to create and trade assets on other instances of X-Chain and AVM (Avalanche Virtual Machine)

C-Chain (Contract Chain)

Made for creating, deploying and interacting with smart contracts

Since the chain supports the EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine), it is fully compatible with all smart contracts on Ethereum

Usually, users will use C-Chain for mining and lending

P-Chain (Platform Chain)

Supports creating subnets, adding validators, and creating blockchains as the metadata blockchain on Avalanche

Previously, the transaction fees were high compared to other blockchains due to the complex multi-chain. However, Avalanche activated the Apricot Phase Three upgrade to optimize API requests in August, which reduced transaction fees by 66%.

With this mechanism, Avalanche has been able to increase the overall transaction speed on the chain, with a TPS of over 4500, while the cheaper transaction fees make Avalanche a superior transaction experience compared to Ethereum. With the addition of the native cross-chain bridge, Avalanche Bridge, users can easily move their assets from other blockchains.

3. A developer-friendly dApp ecosystem

EVM compatibility makes it easy for developers in Ethereum to migrate all kinds of dApps to Avalanche. Unlike other blockchains that focus more on their own dApps, Avalanche deploys early on to bring in the leading protocols on Ethereum and gets more growth and more attention.

Aave and Curve, the current leading DApps on Ethereum, have been deployed to Avalanche and contribute about 33% of TVL, with Aave quickly overtaking Trader Joe and Benqi at the top of the pack after its launch in October.

The number of protocols on Avalanche that exceeded $100 million in TVL rose rapidly from just 4 in August to 12 in November, with five exceeding $1 billion. In November, Avalanche Fund also announced that it would begin a 3-month liquidity mining bonus program together with SushiSwap totaling $15 million, half of which from each part.

In addition...

Binance founder and CEO, Changpeng Zhao, recently revealed that the crypto exchange aims to become a registered service provider in the UK in six to 18 months, reported The Telegraph.

Roughly six months after the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) warned that Binance is operating in the UK without permission, the cryptocurrency exchange revealed plans to build its business in the country.

Meeting UK’s anti-money laundering standards

Back in June, Binance was told by the UK regulator to remove advertising and make it clear on its website that the exchange isn’t permitted to offer its products and services in the country.

Since then, Binance onboarded a “number of ex-regulatory staff from the UK and a couple of hundred compliance people,” said Zhao, revealing the extent to which the crypto exchange bolstered its UK office.

“We’re fully re-engaged there. We’re making a number of very substantial changes in organizational structures, product offerings, our internal processes, and the way we work with regulators,” Zhao noted, as he announced the exchange’s plans for pursuing the licence to operate in the UK.

“We want to continue to establish a presence in the UK and serve UK users in a fully licensed and fully compliant manner,” Binance CEO added.

The FCA approval would enable the crypto exchange to offer products such as futures and derivatives in the UK.

Where’s your headquarters?

Back in August, the financial watchdog reiterated its stance, arguing that Binance is “not capable of being effectively supervised.”

“We understand that now. So now we’re in the process of setting up real offices, legal entities, a proper board, proper governance structures in most places, including the UK,” said Zhao.

This in mind, Zhao’s company could opt for establishing a separate entity called Binance UK, similar to the existing one in the US–and address the FCA’s concerns pertaining to Binance not having a designated headquarters.

The FCA’s notice was one of the first warnings that Binance received from regulatory bodies around the world, which prompted Zhao to take a more proactive approach to the company’s compliance strategy.

Join us at “Bybit Next Level”, our very own live event, happening at 8AM UTC on Dec. 9, 2021.

2021 has been a huge breakout year for cryptocurrency, not just in terms of its performance but also in its adoption. The crypto market is now worth more than $3 trillion! So what’s next?

Our CEO, Ben Zhou, will take you on a journey of Bybit’s key 2021 moments and all the exciting new products and services we revealed in the past months (there were a lot of them!). As we continue to listen, care, and improve, Bybit is looking forward to bringing your crypto trading experience to a whole new level in 2022. You definitely won’t want to miss what we have in store for you!

Tune in to catch our updates and stand a chance to win from our $225K bonus giveaway. Terms and conditions apply.

Want a recap of what Bybit has achieved so far? In anticipation of our upcoming live event, check out our previous product launch by Ben right here!

Disclaimer: Bybit is an advertising partner of CryptoSlate.

Less than a year after its main net launch, NFT protocol Charged Particles is on track to check every item on its rather ambitious roadmap. Created to enable people to “do more with their NFTs,” the protocol has already begun pushing the boundaries of what an NFT can do.

While not a new concept to those invested in the crypto industry, NFTs have only recently begun gaining traction in mainstream media. With news of pixelated JPEGs selling for tens of millions of dollars, the public has built a rather one-dimensional idea of what NFTs are.

Charged Particles, on the other hand, is everything but one-dimensional. Founded by two industry veterans, Ben Lakhoff and Rob Secord, it offers truly unique, fully programmable NFTs. While at its core still standard non-custodial ERC-721 tokens, NFTs issued through Charged Particles offer much more than just proof of ownership—they can represent a basked of other token holdings with fully configurable settings.

Its founders say their functionality is much like a traditional index fund, which holds hundreds of equities, bonds, and other products. In the case of Charged Particles, all of these products are locked in an ERC-721 token for users to own, trade, and collect.

NFTs should contain more than just JPEGs

In an interview with CryptoSlate, the company’s founders said that while they sought out to offer thoughtful ways to use the token standard, they were caught off guard by the innovations proposed by the Charged Particles community. As the protocol developed, more use-cases and mechanics kept popping up and changing the shape of the products it offered.

“The community continues to surprise us with new and ingenious ways of leveraging this nesting functionality to add layers of value and create new asset classes altogether. I think people are really starting to see that NFTs are so much more than just jpegs, visual art, and collectibles, but really a basic quality of the digital future,” said Ben Lakoff, the company’s co-founder and business lead.”

He went on to explain that NFTs add a layer of realism to various digital objects. The composability of real objects is a critical functionality we tend to take for granted in the physical world, and is certainly something that’s missing from our growing digital presence, he noted.

This basic premise is what attracted a huge user base to Charged Particles. Since its main net launch in February this year, the protocol facilitated over $3 million in NFT sales on its Art dApp. To further expand the protocol’s use cases, Charged Particles launched a proprietary governance token, $IONX. It also passed the Arcadia Group smart contracts audit, ensuring smooth operation and robust security.

Aside from its experienced development team and tight-knit community, a factor that significantly contributed to Charged Particles’ success is Polygon. The Ethereum scaling solution has quickly positioned itself as a go-to platform for NFT protocols due to its low fees and scalability. In June, Charged Particles joined a long line of protocols looking to take advantage of this infrastructure and offer its users the smoothest possible experience.

“All the amazing, innovative actions on Charged Particles—minting NFTs, depositing assets, time-locking assets, etc.—require a bit of gas to complete. On Layer-1 Ethereum, this can be quite expensive, which is unfortunate if you’re looking to create something that is low cost. Polygon allows creators to access the powers of Charged Particles without worrying about transaction costs.”

This approach has led to a wide variety of use cases for the protocol.

“There is a never-ending stream of excitement and interesting industry-changing projects we get to build and work with,” the founders said. “We saw artist Dina Brodsky use Charged Particles to create a mosaic piece with 1,000 other artists to raise money to save the life of a child with spinal muscular atrophy (SMA). We saw sports legends like Italian goalkeeper Gigi Buffon...

LunarCrush, a popular social analytics platform, announced the launch of LunarCrush Opinions™. The company’s latest feature was designed to complement its current offering and provide insights as to how the crypto community is feeling about the market.

According to the company’s announcement, this is set to provide investors with an entirely new dimension in understanding crypto.

LunarCrush’s social intelligence for crypto is about to get smarter

The new Opinions feature will enable users to provide opinions on trending topics, sentiment on their favorite coins, the value of specific influencers, and rate the accuracy of social media posts. In a Monday Medium post, LunarCrush said that it anticipated millions of opinions to be posted each day.

Its social analytics platform already collects well over 2 million social posts every day, which is then analyzed for a myriad of different characteristics by LunarCrush’s proprietary machine learning system. However, classifying all that data requires specific modeling, which, in turn, requires a lot of feedback. Adding feedback in the form of user-generated opinions will improve the accuracy of the information the platform provides, LunarCrush said.

“We’re excited to move into capturing the emotions of the LunarCrush community. With millions of pieces of feedback each day, not only will this provide a valuable new dimension to the crypto community, but it’ll also provide greater accuracy across all LunarCrush data,” the company told CryptoSlate.

Aside from fortifying the accuracy of its data, Opinions will also enable users to see how social sentiment differs across the globe and ultimately drive the direction in which LunarCrush grows.

“As data is collected, we’ll be providing many ways to visualize and share opinions. The most exciting thing about this is the community will be able to understand how various countries and individuals are feeling about similar topics in real-time.

LunarCrush Opinions is just one way that we’re looking to capture feedback from the community. Over time, we’re focused on the community driving the direction of LunarCrush as well as providing many tools to help onboard and educate the crypto community.”

LunarCrush ‘s new feature will reward users with 1-3 points for each opinion provided. With the ability to earn up to 90 points each day and have those points converted to LUNR tokens, the company expects

Blockchain platform Syscoin (SYS) announced the launch of its Network-Enhanced Virtual Machine (NEVM) upgrade that brings Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) smart contracts to the network’s ecosystem.

According to the announcement, the pivotal upgrade will combine the best of Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) in one platform, while enabling smart contracts to scale up for global mass adoption.

Bitcoin-secured Layer 1 for EVM smart contracts

With NEVM, Syscoin is set to combine Bitcoin’s security model and merge-mined hashrate potential with Solidity and full EVM compatibility into a single decentralized platform.

Merge-mining, a process that utilizes the same computational power to mine blocks on various blockchains, enables the platform’s Proof of Work (PoW) security to ‘recycle’ resources already being spent on Bitcoin.

”Syscoin will utilize the best features of the top two cryptocurrencies, namely Bitcoin and Ethereum. Hence, Syscoin will provide the security offered by Bitcoin while maintaining the programmability of Ethereum,” explained Jagdeep Sidhu, Syscoin’s Lead Core Developer.

During the initial stage, NEVM will run at speeds comparable to other EVMs, but with longer blocktimes–due to Syscoin’s PoW commitment.

Next step– introduce Layer 2 with zk-rollups

Following this initial NEVM mainnet deployment that introduces Layer 1 support for EVM and smart contracts, scaling solutions will be released in the two subsequent steps.

In Q1 2022, zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) will be implemented–leveraging true Layer 2 scalability and trustless interoperability.

“Scalable applications will be mounted on this system via ZKPs which will introduce our proposed decentralized cost model on Ethereum gas fees,” added Sidhu.

Following the introduction of Layer 2 with zk-rollups, smart contracts will be able to scale up to 210,000 transactions per second (TPS), while the fees will remain minimal.

However, with the implementation of Syscoin’s Validium technology, which is planned for Q3 2022, the platform is projected to achieve four million TPS– ready to meet the Web3 needs.

According to the announcement, numerous partners have already started onboarding, including NFT marketplace Luxy, DeFi flash loans platform Equalizer, and Gold Standard DAO, a decentralized reserve currency backed by gold, to name a few.

The crypto industry has had one of the best years as it witnessed a whole level of mass adoption from both retail and institutional investors.

While this has had a positive effect on the value of some flagship digital assets like Bitcoin and Ethereum, the market cap of these assets also shows the extent of the growth the space has seen.

Ethereum market cap is now ahead of the largest bank in the world

According to available data, Ethereum’s market cap has now flipped that of some of the biggest financial institutions, including that of JPMorgan, in the world.

So $ETH has surpassed every global bank’s market cap.

and you’re “still not sure” if this whole blockchain / crypto thing is here to stay?

Tether’s circulating supply has increased to $76 billion as the team minted an additional $3 billion worth of the asset during the last 2 weeks, and most notably $1 billion of those new coins were minted on Tron Network on December 4.

Tether mints new coin, faces scrutiny about its backing

According to available data, USDT’s new circulating supply which is around $76 billion is now less nearly double that of its closed rival, USD Coin (USDC)

This new mint came when USDT is generally facing heightened criticism from market experts who believe that the token has less cash to back its reserve, as there are reports that just a small fraction of the Stablecoin is fully backed by dollar reserves. A report from Financial Times revealed that Tether only has 2.9% of its supply in Dollar reserves.

Even though Tether has stepped up its transparency efforts, it continues to face scrutiny from regulators and the community at large. In fact, with regulators becoming more interested in regulating the stablecoin market, interest over its cash reserves and other backings would only increase with time. Just recently, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission fined Tether $41 million for its lack of transparency.

We have doubts about the legitimacy of Tether, so today we announce the Hindenburg Tether Bounty Program, a reward of up to $1,000,000 for details on Tether’s backing.

(1/x)

Hindenburg Research (@HindenburgRes) October 19, 2021

Another platform, Hindenburg Research, has offered rewards of up to $1 million for any information regarding the details of Tether’s backing.

As still part of the concerns over its operations, the U.S Senate Banking Committee chair Sherrod Brown wrote the CEO of the stablecoin company, Jean-Louis van Veld regarding concerns over the stablecoin and its operations. Tether, however, has vowed to remain cooperative with global lawmakers on issues about stablecoin.

Other stablecoins have also vowed to take transparency and accountability steps. Earlier in the year, USDC-issuer Circle said it would take such measures in an announcement after it was subpoenaed by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

In the month of November, DeFi’s Total Value Locked (TVL) surpassed a record high of $288 billion, up by 32.7% MoM, and Bitcoin and Ethereum surpassed previous all-time peaks.

Although NFT trading activity slowed, it has not affected fundraising in the sector.

BTC, ETH hit record highs

Bitcoin

The price of BTC hit another record high on Nov. 8, surpassing $67,670, a 25% monthly increase, bringing its market cap to $1.28 trillion. As of Nov. 30, the BTC price returned to May levels, with overall coin price fluctuations remaining between $50,000 and $60,000.

BTC’s first all-time high resulted from the first Taproot upgrade, which aims to enhance the Bitcoin protocol by improving privacy, introducing smart contract functionality and process complex transactions at a lower cost. These are major changes and important factors directly affecting BTC’s price increase.

Ethereum

Likewise, the price of Etheruem rose to a new high of $4,800 on Nov. 8 and has remained above $4,000 as of writing. This rise comes not only from the launch of Etheruem 2.0, and features of Layer-2, providing users and projects with a better experience, higher efficiency and lower gas fees.

Most importantly, with the upgrade from POW to POS and the formation of automatic destruction, the circulating supply of ETH has been restricted, causing a scarcity of ETH and a natural price rise.

DeFi’s TVL exceeds $288 billion

Compared to October, DeFi’s TVL has been booming, reaching an all-time high on Nov. 9. The competition for TVL dominance within DeFi has also become increasingly fierce among chains and projects.

Here are just a few November highlights:

The emergence of DeFi 2.0 as a concept, which aims to solve issues such as inefficient funding and selling pressure.

DeFi platform Acala won the first Polkadot parachains auction to enable cross-chain information interaction.

Completion of the EVM equivalency upgrade for Optimism, the Etheruem Layer2 scaling solution, simplifies the development process for developers and reduces transaction costs.

Blockchains Avalanche, Solana and Terra reached new highs in DeFi TVL.

Curve leading DEX, Convex overtakes Aave to rank third

Convex Finance, which officially launched on May 17 this year, has overtaken Yearn Finance ($16.27 billion) as the leading yield project in terms of TVL ($6.06 billion) on Nov. 30. It is now the third-largest DeFi project, even overtaking Aave ($15.72 billion).

What made Convex Finance so popular?

Convex aims to improve on Curve’s UX shortcomings with a one-stop platform for CRV pledging and liquidity mining. It aims to simplify the process of locking and pledging CRVs on Curve through an easy-to-use interface with CVX tokens, and to boost the growth of the CRV ecosystem by increasing the compensation of CRV holders and liquidity providers. Its new economic model is one of the key features of DeFi 2.0.

Curve continues to lead the DEX category with $21.5 billion in TVL. From its inception, it has positioned itself as a decentralized exchange specifically designed for stablecoins, solving the issue of high slippage in the AMM model as well as high gas fees, which will undoubtedly be taken into account when using stablecoins, thus making inroads with investors.

Fierce multi-chain competition

Footprint Analytics show that the market share of Etheruem and BSC was gradually divided by other blockchains in November, with slow growth in Ethereum and a decrease in BSC (Ethereum TVL: $181.74 billion in November compared to $164.55 billion in October, an increase of 10.4%; BSC TVL: $20.37 billion in November compared to $20.83 billion in October, an increase of -2.2%).

In the past 30 days, one of the fastest-growing chains has been Avalanche, with TVL rising from $8.63 billion in October to $14.2 billion in November, a 65% increase, ranking the fourth in TVL. Its success comes from its growing liquidity mining activities, increased incentives and EVM compatibility.

In November, NFT trading volumes fell by ano...

In the last seven days, digital lands were in high demand. The Sandbox played the main role — its land collection was the most traded NFT over the past week, with a total of $70.5 million sales, beating the Bored Apes and CryptoPunks with $58.4 million and $17.5 million respectively, according to NonFungible, as referenced below.

The digital lands sales represented almost 25% of all NFTs sales made last week, including Decentraland with $6.6 million sales, and the top 5 related metaverse NFT collections were related to virtual real estate sales on the Ethereum blockchain.

What is The Sandbox?

The Sandbox was created by Sébastian Borget and Arthur Madrid in 2011 as a mobile game, in 2018 the project changed its version and started using blockchain technology as a 3D multiplayer game in a virtual world where players can earn money with its utility token SAND, this metaverse is built on LANDS, where there will be only 166,464 LANDS available, according to The Sandbox official GitBook.

Last week was very big on The Sandbox metaverse, a property was sold for $4.3 million, and a yacht was for $650 thousand. Additionally, The Sandbox has recently partnered with Adidas, and had previous partnerships with celebrities such as Snoop Dogg and world DJs/producers Deadmau5 and Richie Hawtin, according to The Sandbox’s website.

Is buying digital real estate like buying real estate in Manhattan in the 1600s?

In 1626, Peter Minuit, of the Dutch West India Company, bought Manhattan Island from local Indians for 60 dutch guilders, which later was worth around $24, and it has been one the greatest real estate deals in history, according to History Today.

Two weeks ago, Tokens.com bought 116 parcels worth approximately $2.4 million in the center of Fashion District in the metaverse of Decentraland, aiming for a good location property, so fat it has been the largest land sale transaction in Decentraland.

“We are happy to make history by closing the largest public metaverse land acquisition to date. These assets will complement the existing portfolio of metaverse real estate already held at Metaverse Group. We are excited to have our subsidiary successfully close this landmark digital real estate transaction” said Andrew Kiguel, Tokens.com CEO.

It appears that many companies are heading in the digital world direction, with all new known partnerships, and high demand on digital real estate lands on the metaverse worlds, especially in The Sandbox and Decentraland.

What happens if years from now instead of buying luxury goods in streets like Champs-Élysées or 5th Avenue, we will be heading to the main fashion street on a metaverse? So the real visionaries are companies or people who are buying the parcels like Peter Minuit did in 1626 in Manhattan.