Archive for the ‘Smart Contracts’ Category

Cardano Gains Momentum: Innovative Developments Promise Continued Expansion and Evolution – West Island Blog

In the dynamic world of blockchain technology, Cardano (ADA) has maintained its innovative edge. Gaining recognition as a forward-thinking pioneer, this proof-of-stake blockchain platform is now teetering on the precipice of significant expansion, all thanks to extensive technological development steered by Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK), the frontrunner engineering firm managing the Cardano blockchain.

A recent statement from IOHK gives us a tantalizing glimpse into fresh enhancements across many key facets of the platforman underpinning promise of continued expansion and evolution for Cardano.

Lets look first at the essential realm of smart contract optimization. Sources reveal that substantial progress has been made within the ledger team, especially concerning the test frameworks and data quality in the Newconstraints phase3. This was accomplished by the introduction of constraints and size-related types including Size, SizeSpec, and Sized.

Moreover, IOHK has reported advancements in wallets and services. The much-anticipated release of Lace v.1.9 from the Lace team is now brewing excitement among Cardano enthusiasts, promising new features and enhancements.

In the intricate sphere of smart contracts, the astute minds of the Plutus team have unraveled a guide in the documentation. This new guide aims to demystify the method of utilizing the AsData functionality to streamline scripts. This isnt all. The team has brought to life a UPLC optimization pass to shrink the number of forces and delays in the scripta significant stride indeed.

The Mithril team has also been extraordinarily instrumental, rolling out a major update, namely, the Mithril distribution 2412.0. This update encompasses critical enhancements and upgrades. Some noteworthy points include the support for the Prometheus metrics endpoint in signer, deprecation of the snapshot command in the client CLI, and compatibility with the Cardano node v.8.9.0.

Updates extend to token trading volume where ADA has been drawing attention. Data from DeFiLlama shows Cardanos total value locked (TVL) at a staggering $422 million, boasting a market capitalization of $23.3 million in terms of stablecoin.

Break down of data from the Token Terminal reveals key market signals for Cardano, including a fully diluted market cap of $29.20 billion, reflecting a commendable 4.9% increase over the past month. Simultaneously, active circulating market cap stands robustly at $22.88 billion, borne on a 5.2% growth rate.

Now lets consider the long-term outlook for ADAit remains bullish as ever. Depicting the pulse of the crypto market, Trend Rider, a seasoned crypto analyst, recently shared an assessment of ADAs current price action.

As per the given analysis, after achieving a yearly high of $0.811 on March 14, ADAs price dipped and is now oscillating between the parabolic red line of resistance and the rider band of support. While some see this as a sign of ADA taking a breather before its next major rally, others perceive it as a slowdown in the upward momentum, which could lead to a period of consolidation or sideways trading.

Nonetheless, ADA appears resilient, with the current prediction indicating sustained long-term bullish momentum, potentially laying the groundwork for a bright panorama ahead for ADA. The token trades at $0.652, displaying sideways price action. Regardless, ADA has proven its mettle, pulling through previous losses over the last week and posting a 5.4% gainan undeniably promising sight for its community.

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Cardano Gains Momentum: Innovative Developments Promise Continued Expansion and Evolution - West Island Blog

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Stellar will invest $100M in Soroban smart contract apps in bid to beat Ethereum – VentureBeat

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Stellar is a blockchain that is trying to beat Ethereum. And so the Stellar Development Foundation will invest $100 million to get developers to make apps for its platform.

The foundation is launching the Soroban Smart Contracts Platform, which gives Stellar a better footing to compete with Ethereum. In the past, it handled just payments in cryptocurrency. But now it has a smart contracts platform that developers including game makers can use to create blockchain apps such as non-fungible tokens (NFTs), games and decentralized finance (DeFi) apps.

The $100 million fund to kickstart those apps comes as an important time, as funding for blockchain games dried up in the last few quarters.

Soroban is the Stellar Development Foundations long-awaited smart contracts platform. With Soroban now live on the networks mainnet, Stellar enters a new era, enabling developers worldwide to create, deploy, and interact with decentralized applications (dApps) on its blockchain.

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The release of Soroban represents the most substantial upgrade to the Stellar network in its decade-long history. Stellar, known primarily for its prowess in crypto payments, expands its capabilities to support decentralized finance (DeFi) and various applications with this major development, the company said.

During Sorobans two-year testing phase, which concluded in January 2024, it garnered significant attention from developers globally. Over 190 projects spanning diverse sectors such as gaming, lending, insurance, and more participated in testing Sorobans capabilities. Stellar says that the advantages are speed and scalability.

With $100 million allocated to the Soroban Adoption Fund, the Stellar Development Foundation aims to incentivize and support projects leveraging the smart contract capabilities of the network. This investment underscores SDFs commitment to fostering innovation and growth within the Stellar ecosystem.

Tomer Weller, VP of product at The Stellar Development Foundation, said in a statement, SDF aims to deliver the tools and technology necessary to power a next-generation financial system one that is both decentralized and real-world ready. Soroban opens the doors for decentralized applications to easily plug into the existing global financial market, without compromising speed or scalability. We look forward to seeing a variety of world-changing dApps built on Stellar.

Soroban, engineered to address industry demands and democratize financial services, offers a faster, cost-effective, and secure alternative to existing smart contract platforms. By streamlining transactions and reducing computing power requirements, Soroban minimizes smart contract fees while ensuring accessibility and ease of use for developers.

The launch of Soroban signals Stellars commitment to advancing blockchain technologys real-world applications, promoting financial inclusivity, and driving global economic empowerment. Developers interested in exploring Soroban can find more information at stellar.org/soroban.

Stellar, a decentralized and sustainable network for financial products and services, connects the worlds financial infrastructure, facilitating cross-currency transactions and digital asset issuance. Over six million accounts are active on the Stellar network, which serves as a platform for financial institutions worldwide.

The Stellar Development Foundation, established in 2014, supports the growth and development of the Stellar network. As a non-profit organization, SDF maintains Stellars codebase, fosters community engagement, and advocates for equitable access to the global financial system through blockchain technology.

But it wont be easy to beat Ethereum, the king of decentralized applications for the past decade. Three of the five largest blockchain games are on Ethereum and $57 billion in locked in the network, or about 58% of the decentralized finance market share.

But Ethereum also has notorious scalability issues, both in cost and speed. Stellar has mastered scale thats why the UN uses it for crypto disbursements, and MoneyGram uses it for its global cash-to-crypto service.

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Stellar will invest $100M in Soroban smart contract apps in bid to beat Ethereum - VentureBeat

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How smart accounts and account abstraction can unlock Ethereum’s full utility – Cointelegraph

The Ethereum ecosystem is on the cusp of realizing advanced security features and transaction functionality through the advent of smart contract wallets and account abstraction, but adoption of the technology remains gradual.

Cointelegraph spoke to Safe co-founder Lukas Schor during ETHGlobal in London to unpack why smart contract accounts and account abstraction promise to unlock Ethereums full utility.

Vitalik Buterin recently put out this blog post with the three transitions we need to go through, and one of them is moving to smart accounts. Thats where we see our role, Schor said.

Safe, a smart wallet infrastructure provider in the Ethereum ecosystem, was initially developed as an in-house multisignature wallet by Ethereum sidechain Gnosisto manage a significant amount of Ether (ETH) raised during its initial coin offering.

They wanted to have multisig wallet, but there werent any battled-tested ones out there at the time, Schor said.

Gnosis founder Stefan George opted to build his own multisignature wallet and open-sourced it. Ethereum community members began to adopt it, and the wallet became the de facto standard for multisignature wallets.

Gnosis Safe was born, but the project eventually became a standalone offering, Safe, that now serves as the smart account infrastructure for Ethereum users, layer-2s like Optimism and Polygon, and exchanges like Bitfinex. Safe secures over $100 billion in value across more than 7.5 million smart account addresses.

Smart accounts fundamentally improve the security and user experience (UX) within the Ethereum ecosystem, enabling a broad set of functionalities that a conventional ETH wallet cannot perform.

As smart accounts are programmable accounts, they provide entirely new design spaces to solve long-lasting UX and security challenges of Ethereum, such as cross-chain interoperability and key management, fundamentally reducing the barriers of adoption, Schor elaborates.

Smart account features include the ability to batch transactions, which Schor says can create more seamless decentralized application (DApp) interactions that bundle multiple on-chain actions into one single transaction.

Security guarantees are another fundamental feature that makes smart accounts increasingly important. Aside from multisig functionality, the key rotation allows users to detach the signing key from an ETH wallet, enabling the exchange of the signer setup without migrating assets to a new account.

Smart accounts also allow for the automation of common Web2 or traditional finance concepts like subscriptions. They can enable on-chain security features, like allow and deny lists and the ability to block interactions with malicious contracts.

The functionality can also remove friction for non-Web3 natives without an ETH wallet. This means users can be onboarded using Web2 social accounts or email addresses with the option to migrate to a more trustless setup at a later point.

DApps, exchanges, layer-2 protocols and other chains are also able to sponsor gas fees, which Schor says could massively increase the user experience of Web3 interactions:

The adoption of smart accounts is something that Schor sees as being a first slowly then all at once kind of thing. The Safe co-founder highlights that their work on developing smart accounts has been ongoing for six years, which is indicative of a very gradual adoption curve.

One of the blockers of adoption is that most users still use EOA accounts[externally owned accounts], via wallets like MetaMask, so many applications and wallets optimize for this, Schor explains.

He adds that layer-2 protocols have an opportunity to start from scratch, and the recently proposed migration EIP-7377 could expedite adoption, as wallets and DApps dont have to optimize for legacy users anymore.

Schor says Safe intentionally focused on specific user groups would benefit the most from additional security and flexibility of smart accounts, including Ethereum ecosystem teams and DAOs.

Over time, hes witnessed adoption gradually shift more and more to less technical and lower-value use cases. Schor highlights Worldcoins deployment of six million smart accounts as evidence of this adoption and says that 2024 could be a breakout year:

New catalysts, like Coinbase leveraging smart accounts, the development of cross-chain smart accounts and EIP-7377, could drive the migration to smart accounts.

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How smart accounts and account abstraction can unlock Ethereum's full utility - Cointelegraph

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Top 10 Intriguing Ways EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) Was Popularized By DeFi Craze – Blockchain Magazine

The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) is a runtime environment integral to the Ethereum blockchain. It serves as the execution engine for smart contracts, enabling decentralized applications (DApps) to run on the Ethereum network. It is designed to be Turing complete, allowing it to execute any computation that a classical computer can. Smart contracts written in

The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) is a runtime environment integral to the Ethereum blockchain. It serves as the execution engine for smart contracts, enabling decentralized applications (DApps) to run on the Ethereum network. It is designed to be Turing complete, allowing it to execute any computation that a classical computer can. Smart contracts written in high-level programming languages like Solidity are compiled into bytecode that the EVM can understand.

Operating as a decentralized, stack-based virtual machine, the processes and executes smart contract instructions. It utilizes a unique concept called gas to measure and allocate computational costs, preventing abuse and ensuring fair resource usage. Users pay for computational services in gas, and the gas limit determines the maximum amount of gas a user is willing to spend on a transaction.

The EVMs decentralized nature, combined with its ability to execute self-enforcing smart contracts and handle complex computations, forms the foundation for Ethereums decentralized ecosystem, fostering trustless and automated transactions across the network.

Also, read- The Top 10 DeFi Challenging Hurdles for Mass Adoption In Finance World

The Ethereum Virtual Machine is a fundamental element within the Ethereum blockchain ecosystem, playing a pivotal role in the execution of smart contracts. It serves as a runtime environment for executing and processing these self-executing contracts, enabling decentralized applications (DApps) to run on the Ethereum network.

1. Smart Contracts Execution: It is designed to execute smart contracts, which are self-executing agreements with the terms of the contract directly written into code. Smart contracts enable decentralized and trustless transactions by automatically enforcing the terms without the need for intermediaries.

2. Turing Complete: It is often described as Turing Complete, meaning it can perform any computation that a classical computer can. This versatility allows for the development of complex and sophisticated decentralized applications with diverse functionalities.

3. EVM Architecture: It is a virtual stack-based machine, which means it operates using a stack data structure to manage and execute operations. It uses a bytecode language, often compiled from higher-level programming languages like Solidity, the primary language for writing smart contracts on the Ethereum platform.

4. Gas and Gas Limit: To prevent abuse and ensure a fair and secure network, Ethereum introduces the concept of gas. Gas represents the computational cost required to execute operations on the EVM. Each operation has a gas cost associated with it. Users pay for computational services in gas, and the gas limit is the maximum amount of gas a user is willing to spend on a transaction. This mechanism helps prevent infinite loops, denial-of-service attacks, and inefficient code execution.

5. Decentralization and Consensus: It operates across a decentralized network of nodes that reach a consensus on the state of the blockchain. Each node in the network runs a copy of the EVM, ensuring that smart contracts produce consistent results across the entire Ethereum network.

6. Upgradability: The EVM allows for the upgrade of the Ethereum protocol through a process known as a hard fork. This enables the network to adopt new features, improvements, and changes by reaching a consensus among the network participants.

7. Challenges and Scalability: Despite its foundational role, the faces challenges related to scalability and the efficiency of smart contract execution. The network has seen congestion during periods of high demand, leading to delays and increased transaction fees. Ethereum 2.0, an ongoing upgrade to the Ethereum network, aims to address these scalability issues.

The Ethereum Virtual Machine is a critical component that facilitates the execution of smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain. Its versatility, combined with the concept of gas and a decentralized network, forms the backbone of Ethereums capability to support a wide range of decentralized applications and automated, trustless agreements. Ongoing developments, such as Ethereum 2.0, aim to enhance the scalability and efficiency of the EVM, further solidifying its role in the future of decentralized computing.

The Ethereum Virtual Machine plays a central role in the rapidly growing sector of Decentralized Finance (DeFi), transforming traditional financial services into trustless, transparent, and decentralized systems. Below are key aspects illustrating the impact of the EVM in the DeFi landscape.

1. Smart Contracts and Automated Financial Services: The EVM is crucial for executing smart contracts, the self-executing code that defines the rules and logic of financial agreements. Smart contracts automate various financial services, including lending, borrowing, trading, and yield farming, eliminating the need for intermediaries and enabling users to interact with financial protocols directly.

2. Decentralized Exchanges (DEXs): EVM-powered DEXs, like Uniswap and SushiSwap, leverage smart contracts to facilitate decentralized trading. Users can trade assets directly from their wallets, maintaining control of their funds without relying on centralized exchanges. Liquidity pools, automated market makers (AMMs), and other DeFi innovations are made possible through the programmable capabilities of the EVM.

3. Lending and Borrowing Protocols: DeFi lending platforms, such as Compound and Aave, are utilized to execute lending and borrowing operations through smart contracts. Users can earn interest on deposited assets or borrow against their holdings without requiring approval from a centralized authority. It ensures the secure and transparent execution of these financial interactions.

4. Flash Loans and Complex Financial Instruments: The programmability enables the creation of sophisticated financial instruments within. Flash loans, a notable innovation, allow users to borrow assets without collateral, execute complex transactions, and repay the loan within a single transaction block. Such functionalities showcase the flexibility and power of the EVM in enabling novel financial services.

5. Yield Farming and Automated Strategies: Yield farming platforms leverage the EVM to automate complex strategies for optimizing returns on deposited assets. Users can participate in liquidity provision and receive rewards in the form of additional tokens. The EVMs capabilities enable the seamless execution of these yield-generating strategies across a variety of DeFi protocols.

6. Governance and DAOs: Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) use for executing governance-related smart contracts. Token holders participate in decision-making processes, such as protocol upgrades or parameter adjustments, through proposals and voting mechanisms implemented on the EVM.

7. Challenges and Scalability: As continues to experience exponential growth, the faces challenges related to scalability and transaction costs. High demand can lead to congestion and increased gas fees. Ethereum 2.0, an upgrade to Ethereums infrastructure, aims to address these challenges and enhance the scalability.

The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) gained widespread popularity due to the DeFi (Decentralized Finance) craze, as decentralized applications within the ecosystem heavily rely on the capabilities provided by the EVM. Here are 10 ways in which the EVM was popularized by the DeFi craze:

In conclusion, the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) has emerged as a cornerstone of innovation, particularly during the craze. Its role in executing smart contracts has fundamentally transformed the financial landscape, enabling the creation of decentralized applications that provide users with unprecedented control over their financial interactions.

The DeFi craze, fueled by the capabilities of the EVM, has introduced a new era of financial services marked by transparency, automation, and decentralization. From decentralized exchanges to lending platforms and yield farming, the EVM has been the driving force behind the rapid development of diverse and sophisticated decentralized financial instruments.

The programmability of the EVM has allowed developers to experiment with novel financial models and instruments, leading to the creation of innovative protocols and governance structures. Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) and governance tokens have empowered users to actively participate in decision-making processes, marking a shift towards community-driven governance in the DeFi space.

Despite its success, challenges such as scalability and transaction costs have become apparent. The ongoing evolution of the Ethereum ecosystem, including initiatives like Ethereum 2.0, reflects a commitment to addressing these challenges and ensuring the continued growth and resilience of the EVM.

Looking forward, the EVM is likely to remain at the forefront of blockchain innovation, serving as a platform for the development of decentralized applications that extend beyond finance. Its impact on the broader blockchain ecosystem, coupled with the vibrant and dynamic nature of the DeFi space, suggests that the EVM will continue to be a driving force for transformative changes in the digital economy. As blockchain technology continues to mature, the Ethereum Virtual Machine stands as a testament to the potential of decentralized and programmable systems to shape the future of various industries.

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Top 10 Intriguing Ways EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) Was Popularized By DeFi Craze - Blockchain Magazine

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Solana vs Ethereum: Which Smart Contracts Blockchain Should You Pick? – CoinCodex

Solana vs Ethereum: Which Smart Contracts Blockchain Should You Pick?  CoinCodex

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Solana vs Ethereum: Which Smart Contracts Blockchain Should You Pick? - CoinCodex

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