BTC makes a stand
What's being bought and sold*
TOP TRENDING ASSETS
*Trading activity in the past 24 hours on the Uphold platform, as of 8 a.m. EST 8th September 2023.
The combined total of buy and sell percentages can exceed 100% due to customers who engage in both buying and selling the same asset within the 24-hour time frame.
All investments and trading are risky and may result in the loss of capital. Cryptoassets are largely unregulated and are therefore not subject to protection.
What’s up
Largest Crypto Quietly Ticks Higher
Bitcoin crawls along in a low-energy market and, yes, that is a trace amount of green spatter visible on the chart.
The largest crypto hit well above $26,000 for a decent stretch of Thursday night. BTC kicks off the weekend right around $25,800 on a gain of 0.7% in 24 hours as of Friday at 9:08 a.m. (EST).
Except for Solana (+0.8%), most Big Ten assets are unchanged or slightly in the red.
No. 64 coin Radix (XRD) is the biggest gainer within the ranks of the Top 100, per CoinGecko. Radix's native XRD shot up 7%. It's not clear why but momentum seems to connect with the testing and advancement of the Babylon mainnet, allowing smart contract capability on the network. Boasting of apparently some kind of decentralized Big Rock Candy Mountain (where there are no security risks and scalability is limitless), Radix has not been shy promoting itself to DeFi developers. Radix's Scrypto, touted as an "asset-orientated smart contract language," is said to give developers a tool for creating more hacker-resistant DeFi projects.
What's down
Trading Volume Shrivels
Better odds for truly positive catalysts – lower interest rates, more liquidity and a potentially looming tidal wave of ETFs – completely failed to inspire more crypto trading.
On centralized exchanges, spot trading volume fell for a second straight month. The month of August’s aggregate total of $475 billion worth of bought/sold coins reflects a 7.78% decrease compared to July – and it represents the lowest total since March 2019, according to CCData (CoinDesk).
Derivatives volume fell 12% to $1.62 trillion, the second-lowest level in two years.
What's next
Some People Want To Fill The DeFi World With Silly Jargon; But What's Wrong With That?
Okay, sure, the term "proto-danksharding" doesn't quite roll off the tongue without leaving us feeling sheepish. It still doesn't change the fact that scaling up the Ethereum ecosystem remains a challenge and that "rollups" can be a solution, provided they don’t become absurdly expensive.
Zero-knowledge (ZK) rollups bundle transactions and related data in compartmentalized fashion, off the Ethereum blockchain, alleviating congestion.
Sharding is a type of database partitioning that separates large databases into smaller, more manageable pieces, or "shards."
Proto-danksharding, also known as EIP-4844, is a way for rollups to add data to blocks only way less expensively. (The name comes from the two researchers, Protolambda and Dankrad Feist, who proposed the idea). Their core concept boils down to "data blobs" sent and affixed to blocks temporarily but ultimately deleted, as opposed to data being processed, permanently, by all Ethereum nodes, at a nonsensical cost.
Funny sounding though this terminology may be, proto-danksharding and data blobs could conceivably make rollups 10 times cheaper, said Nicolas Liochon, who heads zkEVM Linea, a generic rollup tool that Consensys recently launched for developers.
Liochon explained to Cointelegraph that if rollups can send transaction data less expensively, the savings could be passed on to end users. “The cost of rollups comes down to data availability," he said. "We are writing all the data to layer 1, which is why we have the same security, but it represents 95% of the cost.”
