Protocol Village: Casper Blockchain Upgrade Allows for Debugging of Live Smart Contracts

Aug. 29: Casper Association, the Swiss-based organization that oversees the Casper blockchain, said its new “1.5” upgrade comes with unique “Speculative Execution Endpoint” feature, making the project “the only Layer-1 blockchain to enable the debugging of live, composable smart contracts on mainnet.”

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Aug. 29: Oasis, a privacy-focused blockchain project, said its Sapphire main network has integrated with Celer Network’s cBridge, supporting the bridging of ETH, USDC, USDT, WBTC, BNB and MATIC.

Aug. 29: Alchemy, a platform for developing Web3 applications, has added support for Base, Coinbase’s layer-2 network on Ethereum.

Aug. 29: OpenZeppelin, a provider of blockchain security solutions, released the 2.0 version of its Defender platform, which provides automatic code analysis and can be used for ongoing monitoring of threats and automation of community governance proposals; developers and operators can use the tool to prevent and fix security issues pre- and post-deployment, according to the team.

Aug. 29: The team behind Interlay, a decentralized network designed to provide DeFi tooling for Bitcoin, announced plans for BOB, a new Bitcoin layer-2 network compatible with Ethereum’s EVM software environment, “featuring Rust smart contracts compatible with Bitcoin libraries such as Lightning and Ordinals.”

Aug. 29: Polygon, the Ethereum scaling firm, is releasing a toolkit for developers to help them build blockchains fueled by zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs. The Chain Development Kit (CDK) is an open-source codebase that developers can use to create their own customizable layer 2 chains using Polygon’s ZK technology.

Aug. 29: Helix, a decentralized orderbook exchange built on the Injective network, announced the launch of Helix Institutional, which “enables the trading of DeFi derivatives products in a permissioned, KYC-enabled environment.” Currently Helix offers trading in perpetual futures contracts on bitcoin (BTC), ether (ETH), Cosmos’s ATOM and Injective’s INJ. Injective is a layer-1 blockchain built with Cosmos software and featuring “instant transaction finality” for financial applications.

Aug. 28: Token withdrawals out of the Shibarium bridge are now live and available to users, weeks after a much-hyped launch quickly fizzled out after being riddled with software bugs that led to millions of dollars in limbo on the network. Shibarium is an Ethereum layer-2 network, created via a fork of Polygon, that uses SHIB tokens as fees in what is part of a broader plan to position Shiba Inu as a serious blockchain project.

Aug. 27: Binance Labs wrote in a blog post that it has invested in Delphinus Lab, an infrastructure provider that is “leading the zkWASM space, where zero-knowledge (ZK) cryptography is deployed in WebAssembly (WASM) environments.” The funds will be used for development of Dephinus’s zkWASM-based application rollup platform, zkWASM Hub, according to the post. WASM is a programming environment used by several blockchains, including Cosmos and Polkadot, often positioned as an alternative to the Ethereum Virtual Machine or EVM, that’s used by the Ethereum blockchain (and associated layer-2 networks) as well as Binance Smart Chain and Avalanche.

Aug. 24: Num Finance, a stablecoin issuer, rolled out a Colombian peso-pegged token, named nCOP, on the Polygon network.

Aug. 24: 1inch Network, an aggregator of decentralized exchanges or DEXes, said it has deployed on Coinbase’s new layer-2 blockchain, Base.

Aug. 24: Radix Publishing, publisher of code for Radix, a layer 1 smart-contract platform, said the final update of its two-year-old Olympia Protocol would be released at the end of August, as part of the move toward Radix’s Babylon mainnet migration at the end of September.

Aug. 24: Pancake Swap, a decentralized exchange, has expanded to the Ethereum layer-2 blockchain Linea, from the big Ethereum developer Consensys. PancakeSwap was already available on Ethereum, BNB Chain, Aptos, Polygon zkEVM, zkSync Era and Arbitrum.

Aug. 23: Unstoppable Domains, a provider of digital identities that include crypto addresses, said it has launched a new “messenger feature powered by XTMP that allows owners of UD domains — or any Web3 wallet address — to chat with each other across the blockchain. You can use it for any kind of decentralized, end-to-end encrypted messaging. This could be as simple as making plans with a friend. You could even use it to negotiate an NFT trade or domain purchase. Many people in Web3 use their domain as an alias, meaning Messaging can support Web3 community building.”

Edited by Bradley Keoun.