"Sleeping" Bitcoin addresses are waking up more and more often
This week, three old BTC addresses resumed activity after a long period of inactivity. One of them, which had not operated since February 2012, transferred 119 BTC (about $6.8 million) through two transactions to a new address.
On July 2, BTC, inactive since June 2011, began to move in the amount of 33.99 BTC. The unknown owner distributed more than $2.1 million in assets between two new addresses, making transfers of 30.66 BTC and 3.33 BTC with fees of $1.13 and $0.94, respectively. These BTC coins, which have been dormant for 13 years, are part of the miner's reward for the block mined on July 16, 2010. After 10 days, the assets were split into two new wallets, receiving 44 BTC and 6 BTC respectively.
Also, a wallet that had been inactive for more than 10 years moved 1,004 BTC worth $57 million to a new address. The wallet purchased its first cryptocurrency at an average price of $731 in 2013 and 2014, and over 10.6 years, the value of these bitcoins increased approximately 77 times.
Vitalik Buterin proposes a new plan to speed up Ethereum transactions
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has proposed a new approach to speed up transactions on the blockchain, using technologies that can reduce L1 confirmation times from seconds to milliseconds. In his latest essay, he proposed abandoning the current epoch and slot mechanism in favor of a single-slot finalization (SSF) system, pointing out the main shortcomings of the existing model.
Buterin noted that The Merge hard fork, which allowed Ethereum to move from PoW to PoS consensus, has already reduced the transaction confirmation time on the main network to 5-20 seconds. Although this time is comparable to paying with a credit card, there is potential for even greater acceleration, the developer believes.
One possible improvement would be to change the structure of slots and eras. Slots currently represent a 12-second period during which a randomly selected validator can add a block to the network. Every 32 slots form one era.
Buterin emphasized that the current slot voting system and finalization method are causing increasing inconvenience for the Ethereum Foundation, as it is prone to many errors and complications. He added that with such an infrastructure, the final confirmation of a block takes about 12 minutes. To solve this problem, Buterin proposed switching to SSF.
SSF is not yet complete and may face a number of problems, such as the need for validators to publish two messages every 12 seconds, which increases the load on the network. To address these challenges, the Orbit SSF proposal is being developed and is still in its early stages.
Manta Network Founder: Polkadot Has No Real Value
The founder of the second layer protocol for scaling Ethereum, Manta Network, viktorji.eth expressed the opinion that Polkadot does not have significant value for Web3 and is considered a “toxic” project. He noted that in the Polkadot ecosystem there is discrimination against participants, giving preference to teams from Europe and the USA, to the detriment of their Asian colleagues. As an example, viktorji.eth cited the Polkadot Academy in Hong Kong, held in February, which cost more than a million dollars. He pointed out that only a quarter of the event's participants were Asian.
Viktorji.eth also spoke about a meeting with Polkadot founder Gavin Wood, who, according to him, did not know that Manta Network was one of the largest projects in the ecosystem he created. The developer believes that the Polkadot team is not decentralized enough. He supported criticism of blockchain management launched by a former developer under the username Web3 Philosopher, who pointed out the “unjustified” costs of “inappropriate” marketing. Web3 Philosopher compared the actions of Wood and his team to FTX and Crypto.com.
Bitcoin mining difficulty dropped by 5%
As a result of the recent recalculation, the difficulty of mining the first cryptocurrency decreased by 5%, reaching 79.5 T. The average hashrate for the period since the previous change was 568.75 EH/s, while the interval between blocks increased to 10.5 minutes. Average network computing power dropped to 580 EH/s, down 11.5% from the peak of 656 EH/s recorded in May. On July 4, the hash price was $44.9 per PH/day, which is close to the historical lows recorded in May.
Over the past week, some experts have noted the capitulation of miners. Cryptocurrency miners are turning off equipment that became unprofitable after the April halving and selling off Bitcoin reserves to maintain their operations.
Aave founder announces partnership with Aptos
The Aptos Foundation has proposed deploying the third version of the Aave landing protocol on the Aptos blockchain, which uses parallelization technology to improve efficiency. The proposal is currently in the "temperature check" phase, which includes gathering input and feedback from the community. Once this stage is completed, the proposal will be put to a vote.
If approved, the proposal will be formatted as an Aave Request for Comments (ARC), which will allow for further discussion of asset parameters and implementation details. This will be followed by the creation of an appropriate AIP, testing, auditing and deployment of the technology. Aave Labs has already prepared the integration code and activated it on the test network.
If the community supports this initiative, this will be the first deployment of the Aave platform on a blockchain that does not use the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).
Account hacking continues to promote meme tokens
Hollywood actress Sydney Sweeney's X account was hacked to promote a meme coin as part of a Pump & Dump scheme. Following several posts from her account, trading volume for her associated Solana-based SWEENEY token topped $10 million within just two hours of its July 2 launch. A little over an hour after the start of trading, the price of the asset collapsed by almost 90%, after which it stabilized.
In now-deleted messages, the attacker stated his involvement in the recent hacking of the X accounts of rapper 50 Cent and former wrestler Hulk Hogan to promote fake tokens. He also promised to carry out a similar attack on the account of a celebrity more famous than Sweeney, but did not provide details.