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Binance Coin Dubbed “Winner Of 2021” By Crypto Research Firm

It’s official, this was Binance Coin’s year. There are no two ways about it, BNB crushed it throughout 2021 and cemented itself as the third more popular coin in the world by market capitalization. Not a small feat, considering the phenomenal year that altcoins had. Several projects had their moment in the sun, capturing capital, headlines, and attention. No one got near Binance Coin, though.

Binance Coin’s stellar performance | Source: The Weekly Update

According to Arcane Research’s The Weekly Update:

“Bitcoin may have beaten the stock market in 2021, but it has been left in the dust by other cryptocurrencies. Binance Coin (BNB) is the best performer of the three biggest cryptocurrencies by market cap, with a 1344% gain. The Binance Smart Chain ecosystem has seen massive growth in 2021, taking some market share from Ethereum.”

That’s why they dubbed Binance Coin as “the winner of 2021,” and their point is well taken. However, there’s more to the story. Binance as a company was in hot water for a while there. And their own validators blasted the Binance Smart Chain, saying things like, “There doesn’t appear to be any reasonable testing process in place. Every update appears to make things worse.”

Let’s explore the Binance Coin ecosystem’s tumultuous year.

Big Projects Decided To Operate On The Binance Smart Chain

There’s no denying it. As The Weekly Update says, “Ethereum has lost its indisputable position as the “one and only” smart contract platform.” And Binance has a lot to do with that. A controversial project from the start, the Binance Smart Chain has been dubbed a centralized Ethereum clone. And the critics have a point. However, even though the Binance team did fork Ethereum’s code, they were always upfront with the direction of the project. 

In BSC’s documentation, the team shamelessly claims that the “Binance Smart Chain uses a consensus model called Proof of Staked Authority (PoSA). (…) This consensus model can support a short block time and low fees, and it only requires 21 validators to run.” Contrast that with the 11.000 nodes that reportedly support the Ethereum ecosystem.  

However, their plan worked and projects flocked to it:

“Binance Smart Chain was developed explicitly to solve Ethereum’s rising gas fees and offers faster, scalable, and cheaper transactions. In the past, several alternative blockchains have tried to become ‘Ethereum Killers’ but couldn’t succeed in capturing new project’s interest. However, Binance Smart Chain is hosting numerous blockchain, Defi, and crypto projects.”

Problems And Connection To The Binance Coin

However, as in Ethereum’s case, success came with scalability problems. A set of validators took to GitHub to raise concerns about the state of the network and how running a complete node’s cost has increased tremendously.  “There is no code review, patches are simply committed, in most cases even without a proper description of what they do or what problem they try to solve,” the original poster said. 

“I’ve rarely seen something handled so unprofessionally,” the OP accused. “I have many full nodes running there and now all of them are unable to sync. Each of these servers costs me $800 per month (previously only $200), then you told me that I need faster bandwidth and disk which means the cost will keep rising,” a commenter claimed. 

What does this have to do with the Binance Coin? Everything. As the native currency of the Binance ecosystem, BNB’s success is tied to the success of the whole network. Binance is still doing amazing, but, can Binance Coin holders count on that to be the case in 2022?

BNB price chart for 12/29/2021 on Binance US | Source: BNB/USD on TradingView.com
Make No Mistake, Binance Coin Won 2021

It was an action-packed year, but Binance Coin rose to the test. Besides the validators uprising, the Binance team took care of these flash loan hacks and kept BNB’s price rising throughout the year. When CZ himself called for other entrepreneurs to create their own coins, NewsBTC was the voice of reason:

“Binance is not only the biggest exchange in the world; it also has the most activities, features, things to do. BNB powers all of that. How many coins support that huge of an ecosystem? How many coins have that many use cases? And yes, BNB provides its user with superpowers while in the Binance ecosystem and helps them save money. How many other coins can do something similar?”

Let’s not kid ourselves, the Binance Coin AKA BNB is a unicorn. A one-of-a-kind project that did many things right and rewarded the early believers with a phenomenal year. A 1344% increase in price is not something we see every day. Congratulations to Binance Coin for owning 2021.

Featured Image: Foundry on Pixabay | Charts by TradingView & The Weekly Update

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Jack Dorsey’s TBD Presents Whitepaper For Decentralized Bitcoin Exchange

The first product of the Bitcoin-focused TBD will be tbDEX. A decentralized exchange that they deem “A Liquidity Protocol” in the recently released whitepaper. The Bitcoin network is permissionless, anyone with an Internet connection can jump in at any time. However, the Fiat world we live in is not. The banking system has endless requirements for participation, and those leave a high percentage of the population bankless and vulnerable. “We believe that the economy should be inclusive. We need to build on-ramps to this future where everyone can access and participate in the economy,” says TBD in the post that announces tbDEX.

Related Reading | Jack Dorsey: Square Could Build Bitcoin Mining System

A subsidiary of Jack Dorsey’s Square, they created TBD “with the sole goal of making it easy to create non-custodial, permissionless, and decentralized financial services” for Bitcoin. And now, they have a plan. 

What Is TBD ‘s Value Proposition?

The tbDEX aims “to build bridges between the fiat and cryptocurrency worlds,” that much is clear. We still live in a Fiat world and, if Bitcoin is going to succeed, we need new, simpler, and cheaper ways to interact with said world. “There are serious challenges to realizing this vision. Fiat rails are regulated, and no interface with either the traditional monetary system or “real world” can be completely trustless.” 

So, what solution does TBD proposes? The tbDEX will allow participants to interact and transact with each other like Bisq and similar projects. However, TBD will also let users “mutually and voluntarily rely on trusted third-parties to vouch for the counterparty.” In the whitepaper itself, TBD contemplates that Participating Financial Institutions or PFIs will be part of the network. 

“PFIs can be, but are not limited to, fintech companies, regional banks, large institutional banks, or other financial institutions; PFIs have access to fiat payment systems and the ability to facilitate fiat payments in exchange for tokenized cryptocurrency assets or vice versa.”

The tbDEX will provide financial institutions with tools for KYC and AML procedures:

“The protocol will also carry the required regulatory-clearing information required by PFIs to conduct their AML and KYC checks before they provision liquidity to the wallet owner. However, the necessary information may vary based on the jurisdiction.”

Wait a minute… a decentralized exchange that requires KYC? What would be the point of that? Well, the protocol doesn’t require KYC procedures, but some institutions might. The good news is, participants don’t have to deal with those institutions if they don’t want to. They can just interact with each other and establish trust in other ways. 

BTC price chart for 11/20/2021 on FX | Source: BTC/USD on TradingView.com
The Cost Of Anonymity

This is where it gets interesting. According to the whitepaper:

“The tbDEX protocol facilitates decentralized networks of exchange between assets by providing a framework for establishing social trust, utilizing decentralized identity (DID) and verifiable credentials (VCs) to establish the provenance of identity in the real world.”

It’s important to notice that “the protocol itself neither collects nor records any personally identifiable information.” However, if a participant wants anonymity it’s his or her responsibility to optimize for it. Once again, the whitepaper: 

“Our goal is not to maintain anonymity of transactions at all costs. Nor is it to undermine an individual’s ability to optimize for anonymity. Nothing in principle precludes anonymous transactions for financial privacy on the tbDEX network. A PFI could, in principle, require no VCs, but such transactions would represent a high degree of risk to the counterparties.” 

To assume that risk costs money. It’s as simple as that. The announcement post puts it nicely.

“Transaction costs are ultimately driven by risk. At maximum anonymity, transaction costs will necessarily be higher; at maximum disclosure, they should be lower. This approach to price discovery allows the marketplace to find the right balance.”  

Related Reading | Is Hyperinflation Inevitable? Jack Dorsey Says It’ll “Change Everything”

If You Have A Suggestion, Send It To TBD

The whitepaper is a rough outline of that tbDEX will eventually be.

“This initial draft of the whitepaper is meant to establish a conceptual understanding of the high-level design of the proposed tbDEX protocol. It should not be considered complete or final. It represents a proposed design for public comment.”

If you have any suggestions, contact TBD via Twitter or send them a pull request on GitHub.

Featured Image: tbDEX diagram from the whitepaper | Charts by TradingView

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Ethereum Software Client Geth Issues Hotfix To Tighten Security

Geth, the most renowned software client of Ethereum, has provided a hotfix to the threatening security challenges in its code. The news was posted on Tuesday at 07:08 UTC to GitHub. However, the details of the terms were not disclosed immediately.

The release is titled Hades Gamma (V1.10.8); it was posted to Ethereum GitHub on Tuesday at about 07:08 UTC.

According to one of the posts on the release page, it didn’t disclose the details of the vectors, including their fixes. This would have allowed the dependent downstream projects and node operators to update their software and nodes.

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A report from Ethernodes.org states that close to 75% of all the nodes on the Ethereum blockchain run Geth. Therefore, these users are advised to upgrade to Geth V.1.10.8, the updated version, immediately.

Guido Vraken Discovering The Bug In Ethereum

A software developer Guido Vraken announced on August 18th that he had discovered the bug. Guido Vraken is a scientist who specializes in discovering open-source software code vulnerabilities.

He is also interested in scientific works, product development and validation, regulatory matters, and teaching. Guido Vraken is a graduate of the  University of Ghent and a volunteer at Natuurpunt.

As stated earlier in the GitHub security advisory post, Geth’s vulnerability can make a node unable to execute Ethereum blocks.

The Ethereum experienced a temporary split on its chain during the last Geth code’s fix for a software bug. The split resulted from communication lapses from Geth developers regarding the bug, which was a deliberate act.

However, several computers known as ‘nodes’ don’t bother to customize their Geth users to the normal implementation. This led to a consensus failure in the blockchain, as recorded in November 2020.

Geth Developers Take On The Latest Version

In a blog post, the Geth developer team mentioned that not exposing the security vulnerability is backed by some reasons. First, the act delays all potential attacks on intending node operators that require more time to migrate to the newest version.

Now, Geth developers emphasize how urgent it is for all their software users to migrate to the latest version. However, their formal August 18th announcement didn’t explicitly describe the vulnerability nature and form.

Related Reading | Former DigitalX Executive Appointed As The New Binance Australia CEO

One of the Geth developers, Péter Szilágyi, stated his opinion while tweeting about the code release on Tuesday. He said that “People were not happy with our hotfix last time; they noted that we didn’t make the announcement. So we have decided to do it differently this time; let’s know the one that works better,” – he added.

Infura and other major Etherum-based wallets and services have pledged their support for this latest Geth release. They publicly made this announcement on Twitter.

Featured Image From Pixabay