Archive for the ‘Smart Contracts’ Category

How Smart Contracts And Seasonal Tokens Are Revolutionizing Crypto Investing – Benzinga

Seasonal Tokens represent a new frontier of investing, fusing the potential of blockchain technology with the rhythms of seasonal pricing. This is largely achieved through the use of smart contracts, which enable predictable changes in supply and demand, creating exciting opportunities for investors everywhere.

The following discussion will explore the crucial role of smart contracts in the Seasonal Tokens ecosystem, as well as the detailed mechanics that make Season Tokens a game-changer in the world of cryptocurrency investing.

Seasonal Tokens are a new breed of cryptocurrencies that have been specially designed to represent the idea of seasonality in the cryptocurrency market. At its core, seasonality refers to a recurring and predictable pattern of price changes that occur within markets.

To get a firmer grasp of this concert, imagine a field of crops such as cotton or wheat Throughout the year, the price of the crop fluctuates predictably in response to demand, harvest seasons and production levels. During harvest season, there is a surplus of crops available which leads to lower prices. Conversely, during periods of low production, the supply of crops decreases, resulting in an increase in prices.

Seasonality is a natural phenomenon that holds immense value for a broad range of stakeholders. The predictable changes in supply and demand create predictable fluctuations that allow traders to make informed decisions on when to buy or sell commodities. This fosters an equitable and level playing field, where investors can compete based on knowledge and skill, rather than just relying on luck or speculation.

Seasonal Tokens consist of four unique cryptocurrencies, each with its own distinctive name: Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter. Just as the seasons bring about distinct changes in nature, each token reflects a different phase of the crypto market cycle.

However, while the names of the tokens may evoke a sense of simplicity, the truth is that Seasonal Tokens operate with a high degree of sophistication and intricacy. The following section will delve into their sophisticated ecosystem, the role of smart contracts, unique production schedules and the intricacies that make Seasonal Tokens a disruptive force in cryptocurrency.

Before diving into how Seasonal Tokens leverage smart contracts and blockchain technology, it is essential to understand what these terms mean

Like most cryptocurrencies, Seasonal Tokens leverage blockchain technology and smart contracts to operate in a decentralized, transparent, unbiased and trustless manner, eliminating the inefficiencies and failures that arise from human intervention. To achieve this, Seasonal Tokens employ a proven validation method of proof-of-work (PoW), which involves miners competing to secure the blockchain and validate transactions for a reward. Simply put, this process is like a high-stakes game of computation power, all in the pursuit of maintaining the integrity of the system.

Smart contracts not only secure the blockchain, but also facilitate cyclical shifts in supply and demand in the Seasonal Tokens ecosystem. Every nine months, one of the four Seasonal Tokens undergoes a systematic halving of production rates, akin to the changing of seasons in nature. This results in predictable shifts in supply and demand, leading to changes in price.

Compared to Bitcoin and other crypto assets, Seasonal Tokens offer a unique composition, with more frequent halving cycles that minimize volatility. Moreover, Unlike Bitcoin, which consists of a single native asset (BTC), Seasonal Tokens consist of a suite of four unique cryptocurrencies.

While the concept of seasonality may sound familiar to experienced cryptocurrency investors, Seasonal Tokens are unique in their composition compared to other assets like Bitcoin. Rather than a single native asset like BTC, Seasonal Tokens are made up of four unique cryptocurrencies. Together, these attributes result in a pricing structure that is less volatile and more predictable, which benefits traders. Additionally, miners can switch between tokens to maintain profitability during a halving event, highlighting the versatility and value of Seasonal Tokens.

Seasonal tokens offer a fresh and innovative approach to crypto investing, combining the power of smart contract technology with the reliability of seasonal price shifts. Through smart contracts, Seasonal Tokens create a fair, secure and efficient ecosystem that caters to the needs of traders and miners alike.

Moreover, the concept of seasonality further enhances the value of Seasonal Tokens by offering more stable and predictable pricing dynamics compared to other cyclical assets in the market. The confluence of these factors positions Seasonal Tokens at the cutting edge of innovation in the cryptocurrency industry.

Featured Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

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How Smart Contracts And Seasonal Tokens Are Revolutionizing Crypto Investing - Benzinga

USDC is bouncing back with smart contract surge, heres why – AMBCrypto News

According to data from blockchain analytics firm Glassnode, USDC one of the most commonly utilized stablecoins has experienced an increase in its supply within smart contracts.

This positive development starkly contrasts the coins recent struggles and marks a notable deviation from other stablecoins as well.

Glassnodes latest report on 27 March highlighted a promising surge in the percentage of USDC supply held in smart contracts. The data indicated that the percentage has risen to 42.08%, as depicted in the chart. It marks a significant increase, reaching a six-month high for the stablecoin.

Upon closer examination of the chart, it becomes evident that the metric experienced a decline towards the end of 2022. It has since picked up momentum and started an upward trend in March. It maintained its growth even during the recent bank run, resulting in FUD around it.

The recent increase in USDC supply held in smart contracts becomes even more significant when compared to USDT. According to data from Glassnode, the percentage of USDT supply in smart contracts as of this writing was 14.0%, with the highest percentage this year reaching only 14.7%. It indicated that USDC was more extensively being utilized for smart contract-related transactions.

An analysis of the Exchange netflow volume comprising both inflow and outflow indicated that USDC had been experiencing a steady and robust flow across all exchanges.

However, the outflow volume has been notably higher recently and stood at over 55 million, as of this writing.

Furthermore, according to Santiments transaction volume data, it has been exhibiting normal transactional activity for a stablecoin, with a volume of around $1.4 billion as of this writing.

Additionally, as per CoinMarketCap, USDCs market capitalization was over $33 billion. Thus, positioning it as the fifth-largest cryptocurrency at press time.

In another notable development, MakerDAO recently passed a proposal affirming USDC as its primary reserve. The move indicated a vote of confidence in the stablecoin.

Moreover, the recent surge in DeFi protocols has likely contributed to the increasing supply of the stablecoin held in smart contracts.

USDC is recovering well from the setback it faced earlier in the month. It is also displaying signs of growth and stability in the digital currency market.

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USDC is bouncing back with smart contract surge, heres why - AMBCrypto News

EOS Ethereum Virtual Machine Testnet Goes Live Ahead of April Mainnet Deployment – Yahoo Finance

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A testnet for the EOS Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) feature went live on Tuesday ahead of an April rollout.

The EVM is housed within an EOS smart contract and aims to offer high-speed transactions at cheap fees for users and developers. The move aims to eventually bolster decentralized finance (DeFi) development on the EOS network, which ultimately accrues value for eos tokens.

EVMs refer to the environment in which all Ethereum accounts and smart contracts live, serving as a virtual computer utilized by developers for creating decentralized applications (dapps).

When deployed on other blockchains, EVMs can allow developers to build dapps and decentralized finance (DeFi) applications similar to how they would on Ethereum.

EVMs are a large part of EOS future plans, touted as the blockchains "second innings."

Many of the developers who have left EOS have done so not because they want to, but because Ethereum, for all its deficiencies, is where the action is, the foundation said in a January post.

EVM compatibility is essential to the potential of EOS, not just technically but also from a business perspective. Ultimately, it is essential that we welcome more Solidity developers and users to EOS, and an EVM on EOS is an excellent bridge to do just that, it added at the time.

The EOS EVM contract is available on eosio.evm and a token bridge for transferring compatible Ethereum-based tokens to EOS is live on bridge-testnet2.trust.one.

EOS native tokens remained nominally changed in the past 24 hours.

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EOS Ethereum Virtual Machine Testnet Goes Live Ahead of April Mainnet Deployment - Yahoo Finance

This Ukrainian Startup Is Looking to Automate Crypto Crime Reporting Using Smart Contracts, AI – CoinDesk

HAPI Labs has launched a platform for reporting scam- and crime-related addresses, in partnership with Ukraines cyber police.

Scamfari OSINT, currently in beta mode, allows users to report cryptocurrency wallets related to scams, sanctions violations, terrorism financing and other crimes. The project is supported by Ukraines cyber police, which will work on freezing such wallets, the agency announced on Monday.

HAPI, a crypto startup working on cybersecurity tools for decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms, previously ran two-week-long contests asking people to find and report crypto wallets related to fraud and other crimes, with a special focus on the money pro-Russian volunteers raise to help Russian troops invading Ukraine. Users who report the most wallets get rewards in HAPIs own token, but only if the reports are approved by the firms team and are really linked to some kind of crime.

This week, another week-long contest went live. Even after this season is over, the hunting for criminal crypto will not stop but continue on a new website.

It works like this: A user signs up via a Telegram bot, fills out a form and submits a blockchain address and a screenshot proof that the address is being used for criminal purposes.

Then, two HAPI staffers manually check whether reports contain truthful and relevant data, then either approve or reject them. After a report is approved the reporter is assigned a reward in HAPIs own tokens, which are now trading around $13 each: $1 for a new address in the database, 10 cents for an address previously reported and $5 for an address related to a sanctioned person or entity, HAPI head of research Mark Letsyuk told CoinDesk.

For now, rewards are being distributed manually every two weeks, but in future HAPI wants to automate the reward distribution using smart contracts. The community might also have a vote soon as to whether to replace the HAPI token with a stablecoin as a reward, Letsyuk said.

Many people in Ukraine lost their jobs [because of the war] and some made several hundred dollars during the past season, he said. In these times, its good money. Now, people want to try and do it on a regular basis.

He added that since Scamfari OSINT launched in beta last week, over 15,000 addresses have been submitted, including the wallets raising funds for Russian mercenaries fighting in Ukraine.

In the future, HAPI is considering using AI to automate report approval, too, Letsyuk said: Were now feeding the reports we get to the [latest AI product by OpenAI] GPT-4 it looks very raw at this point, but promising. Not trying to catch some hype here, but we believe that it can be helpful in the near future.

The Ukrainian cyber police, in it announcement, underscored it will be looking particularly for wallets linked to financing Russian troops invading Ukraine. According to CoinDesks own investigation, such accounts have raised at least $1.8 million for ammunition, vehicles and other supplies for the troops since the beginning of the war. The Binance crypto exchange has said the number could be as high as $7.2 million.

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This Ukrainian Startup Is Looking to Automate Crypto Crime Reporting Using Smart Contracts, AI - CoinDesk

How Dangerous Is the EU’s Smart Contract ‘Kill Switch’? – BeInCrypto

The EUs new smart contract kill switch has angered many across the blockchain ecosystem. How much of a threat does it pose to the industry and the immutability of smart contracts?

Last week, the crypto community was up in arms about a provision in a new EU law that would mandate the inclusion of a kill switch to terminate smart contracts.

Article 30of the Data Act, which was passed on Tuesday, March 14, ensures that any smart contract must have a clearly defined mechanism to terminate or interrupt its operation. The passage in Article 30 states:

Safe termination and interruption: ensure that a mechanism exists to terminate the continued execution of transactions: the smart contract shall include internal functions which can reset or instruct the contract to stop or interrupt the operation to avoid future (accidental) executions; in this regard, the conditions under which a smart contract could be reset or instructed to stop or interrupted, should be clearly and transparently defined. Especially, it should be assessed under which conditions non-consensual termination or interruption should be permissible.

The other provisions in Article 30 are less controversial. Including a section that ensures smart contracts have strong security features to prevent mistakes or tampering by third parties.

The rules have caused consternation among those in the crypto, DeFi, and smart contract communities. But why?

First, smart contracts do something important. They allow developers to write web apps that consumers can use without having to trust the people who wrote them. A huge factor here is immutability, a fundamental concept in blockchain technology, including smart contracts. A smart contracts immutability refers to its inability to be changed once it has been deployed to the blockchain.

You can technically upgrade a smart contract. Whether to improve functionality, fix bugs, or adapt to better technology or user need. But such steps are the exception and not the rule. (Because a smart contract is immutable, upgrades are not done in the same way you would upgrade a non-blockchain-based app. In short, you deploy a new smart contract.)

In essence, once a dApp or smart contract is deployed on the blockchain, those using it can read its code and be certain it wont change.

The EU kill switch presents a challenge to this fundamental immutability, which many experts have found concerning. Thibault Schrepel, Associate Professor of Law and Technology at VU Amsterdam University, believes this has the potential to undermine the technology itself. Article 30, as currently drafted, goes a step too far in addressing the issues raised by immutability, he said in a March 14tweet.

Instead of enacting practical immutability (where immutability remains the principle and alterability theexception), it makes alterability the principle. In doing so, it endangers smart contracts to an extent that no one can predict, Schrepel continued. He also shared concerns that the definition (smart contracts for data sharing) used in the Article was not specific enough.

Rapolas Lakavicius, a Policy Offer at the European Commission, the EUs largest law-making body, is less worried. In a March 17tweet, Lakavicius claimed, This is a common industry practice already available on most smart contract implementations to prevent a situation of smart contract with some errors running on an immutable blockchain and no-one can do anything about it.

Lakavicious raises a valid point. Smart contract immutability is not without its downsides. As noted above, there are reasons why a user or developer might want a contract changed.

From the perspective some EU officials, adding a kill switch seems an obvious step. What if a smart contract is found to be illegal or becomes illegal because of a new law? What if the contract in question doesnt do what it says on the tin? A non-blockchain expert would see these concerns as logical. A kill switch also benefits the developer, who now has a way of terminating the contract if there is a fatal flaw in the code. Apostby Thomas Jay Rush outlines this very scenario.

In an interview with BeInCrypto, Luke Lombe, a Spool Core Builder, expressed his view that the kill switch poses risks to the safety and security of the DeFi industry. By making human intervention obligatory and essentially creating a backdoor into smart contracts, this mandate could potentially lead to unforeseen consequences with far-reaching and detrimental implications, he said.

The kill switch can be used for nefarious purposes, such as shutting down a smart contract to manipulate the market or unfairly gain an advantage over other market participants. This could ultimately harm consumers and undermine the integrity of the DeFi ecosystem, Lombe continued.

Moreover, this situation may suggest a limited understanding of blockchain technology and its benefits among the regulators responsible for its governance. We recommend increased collaboration between regulators and industry professionals to enhance comprehension of the potential repercussions associated with such measures before their implementation, he added.

Chao Cheng-Shorland, co-founder and CEO at ShelterZoom, also believes the kill switch to be counterproductive. Smart contracts provide massive benefits for efficiency, self-governance, and anti-fraud, she told BeInCrypto. Moreover, under EU laws, personally identifiable information is already well protected from being on the public blockchain. Therefore, while the EUs Data Act may have good intentions aimed at ensuring the security of smart contracts and the digital assets and data therein, the introduction of a mandated kill switch for contracts could reverse the trust and governance that smart contracts will provide as we move into the web3 era.

All the information contained on our website is published in good faith and for general information purposes only. Any action the reader takes upon the information found on our website is strictly at their own risk.

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How Dangerous Is the EU's Smart Contract 'Kill Switch'? - BeInCrypto