Stacks supercharged

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Stacks (STX) has soared 33% since yesterday on reports that OKCoin and some other backers will bankroll the project's bid to develop decentralized applications on Bitcoin.

The new initiative, dubbed The Bitcoin Odyssey, is supported by a cadre of venture capital firms, including Digital Currency Group and White Star Capital.

“If you talk to any cryptocurrency aficionado about DeFi, dApps, DAOs and NFTs, they aren’t likely to think of Bitcoin as the first relevant blockchain,” CryptoPotato said. “OKCoin wants to change that.”

STX is the 72nd-largest crypto by market capitalization, per CoinGecko. It reached $1.44 as of Friday morning at 8 a.m. (EST). STX has declined 16% over the past month. It is up 28% over the past 12 months. And compared to two years ago, right around when the Covid-19 pandemic was first declared, STX has increased more than 3,000%.

Bitcoin and Ethereum each began to glow slightly emerald on Friday morning with St. Patrick's Day less than one week away.

Merriment is on pause, though. The past seven days saw stout – volatility – brewed by war in Ukraine and inflation. During this period, BTC has shed 6%.

Massive price swings have churned stomachs with the intensity of an unrefrigerated plate of rancid corned beef, but, as CryptoPotato noted, the volatility spike "failed to produce a directional change." At last check, about 7:55 a.m. (EST), BTC's spot price was hovering just shy of $40K.

Meanwhile, Polygon (MATIC) is experiencing some unwanted downtime over the past half-day or so, owing to an upgrade that did not go as planned, creating consternation in its community of Layer-2 users. The protocol’s development team deployed a temporary hotfix and assured users that their funds were safe.

MATIC, which is the 17th-largest coin by market cap, has increased 2.5% to $1.45 in the past 24 hours.

Layer-2 network Polygon, an Ethereum scaling solution, is really three layers. On-chain smart contracts run on Ethereum. A "bore" layer supports the production of blocks. And then there is the Heimdall layer, a set of Proof-of-Stake (PoS) nodes that help the network reach consensus.

The Polygon team revealed that there “may have been a bug” in yesterday's Heidmall upgrade, which led to different Heimdall validators being on different versions of the blockchain, thwarting the ability to reach two-thirds consensus.

Heimdall is used for validator-related bridging and transactions but, developers have emphasized, doesn’t handle user transactions (CryptoPotato).

The last major bug that Polygon fixed, a few months back, put $24 billion worth of funds at risk – but was patched up without issue, according to Cointelegraph.

Following a 50% plunge between just after Christmas and lasting through the end of January, MATIC has not been able to get back toward $2, let alone near $3, which is its all-time high.

Yesterday, DappRadar said the number of Polygon network addresses interacting with dApps saw an increase of 5% in the past month, according to Cointelegraph. This data point suggests that Polygon is holding its ground versus competing chains.

Ukraine long being one of the more crypto-friendly countries in the world left it uniquely positioned to leverage the future of money in its struggle for survival right now. Alex Bornyakov, Ukraine’s deputy minister at the Ministry of Digital Transformation, confirms that the government has received about $100 million in crypto donations, including some $60 million that has flowed into a key fund run by the Ukrainian crypto exchange Kuna (CoinDesk).

The funds sent to Kuna are being spent on civilian aid, medical supplies and non-lethal military equipment, including fuel and bulletproof vests for soldiers.

The six-year-old exchange has evacuated staff to different countries around the world, according to an audio message sent last week to The Wall Street Journal by Kuna's founder Michael Chobanian. At the time, he said he'd relocated to Western Ukraine.

About one month ago, the company moved its servers/entire IT infrastructure outside of the country, so, he said, "if the internet goes down in Ukraine, there is no risk of our sites going down."