Observation
August-5th-2020
Market
Chainlink is poised to break ATH every single day, on its way to $10 for each LINK. Link Marines (the community behind Chainlink) truly have taken advantage of every price dip to buy more tokens, pushing price to higher level even with the FUD from Zeus Capital. Here is the summary of LINK price against major pair, as well as growth in volume number :
News
Ethereum 2.0 Testnet with Codename Medalla is Officially Live, marked as final test before the mainnet roll out, tentatively scheduled at the end of 2020. It is reported that 20,000+ validators have signed up and joined the network with 650,000+ ETH being staked, with average balance per validator is 32 ETH per wallet address. According to Beaconcha.in block explorer, there are currently 2,615 pending validators, which will use testnet ETH rather than real ETH.
Medalla itself is unlike other testnet, due to its public nature means the validator of the network is not centrally coordinated by developer team. Currently Medalla is onboarding five clients including ChainSafe’s Lodestar, Sigma Prime’s Lighthouse, PegaSys’ Teku, Prysmatic Labs’ Prysm, and Status’ Nimbus. These clients later on will get NFT, as appreciation for their support.
From the technical side, ETH 2.0 Testnet must require at least 16,000 unique validator nodes to be deemed as decentralized network. The network itself uses “beacon chain” to specific group randomly picked by dedicated validators into 64 shards. The throughput transaction is expected to be close to 1,000 TPS, reducing cost of broadcasting transaction on Ethereum network.
August-3rd-2020
Market
The crypto market just experienced one of the most volatile weeks in a while. BTC rallied from $11,000 to a high of $12,100 before retracing back to the $11,200 level. Roughly $1 billion dollar was liquidated in the said move.
News
Decentralized Exchange (DEX) volume reached record high in July 2020, topping $4.3 billion. The large majority of this increase in volume is caused by the interest in Decentralized Finance (DeFi), which tokens are often only traded in DEX.
We think that this trend is going to persist in the next couple of months. Its price growth might be stalled if Bitcoin price experiences a massive rally, but general investor sentiment is still very bullish on DeFi assets.
Part of this confidence came from the fact that DeFi assets and the protocols behind them are relatively easier to understand compared to traditional blockchain protocols. The exchange of values in an underlying DeFi protocol tends to be more straightforward and can be modeled by investors with a higher level precision compared to traditional blockchain protocols. However, we do think that investors need to pay attention to US regulators' actions towards DeFi. As of now, DeFi hasn’t garnered much attention outside of the crypto space yet to receive the regulators’ attention.