“Traditional funds investors continue to come into the space. Pension funds joining Dan’s [Tapiero] 10T. Bain [Capital Ventures] getting in deeper, Steve Cohen investing in more exotic instruments [high-frequency trading firms]. These things show that while we’re not getting a breaking news story about institutions coming to crypto every few days, like we were in January and February, that secular shift into the crypto space is very much alive.” — Nathaniel Whittemore, host of CoinDesk’s podcast The Breakdown
Good afternoon and happy Tuesday! The dog days of summer may be behind us, but at Binance.US we’re gearing up for a hot final quarter of 2021. Plus, we just celebrated our 2 year anniversary with a snazzy giveaway.
To recap this past month's action: Microstrategy added another 5,050 bitcoin to its reserves, Ukrainian parliament passed legislation to legalize cryptocurrency in the country, and we take a closer look at Solana's 17-hour network outage in our October Breakdown below.
Oh, and did we mention Binance.US customers can now trade SHIB and CRV?
Let's dive in...
*Note that the contents of this newsletter are subject to a legal disclaimer located below*
Top Movers in September
Top Headlines
- Business intelligence firm MicroStrategy has purchased a further 5,050 bitcoin, taking its total holdings to 114,042 BTC. The firm spent $3.16 billion on this entire stash, which has a current value of $5.1 billion — a 42% gain, according to The Block.
- The parliament in Kyiv has passed legislation determining the rules for crypto-related operations in Ukraine. The law “On Virtual Assets” recognizes cryptocurrencies as intangible goods while denying them the status of legal tender. It also regulates the activities and obligations of crypto businesses. Bitcoin.com has the scoop.
- Gary Gensler focuses on crypto trading platforms, payment for order flow in senate hearings. The Securities and Exchange Commission chairman says many crypto assets meet the definition of securities, covered by WSJ.
October Breakdown: Solana’s 17-Hour Network Outage
PHOTO BY CRYPTOSLATE
DATA BY MESSARI
DATA BY DEFILlAMA
Since its official launch 18 months ago, the Solana ecosystem has seen massive growth from a network participation and capital investment perspective. While still in mainnet beta testing, the market cap of SOL rose to over $55 billion in September, with the total value locked in Solana DeFi protocols reaching over $12 billion.
However, the crypto community went into a frenzy when Solana’s second major outage caused the network to come to an abrupt halt.
The Issue:
On the morning of September 14th, Solana encountered “a large increase in transaction load, which peaked at 400,000 transactions per second (TPS). These transactions flooded the transaction processing queue, and lack of prioritization of network-critical messaging caused the network to start forking,” according to the Solana Foundation via Twitter. (Forking is when the software of different validators becomes misaligned. If there isn't a unanimous decision on which blocks are valid, then this can result in the creation of multiple versions, or a “fork,” of the blockchain.)
The large inflow transactions were mainly a result of Grape Protocol, an application for building token-based membership communities, and its initial decentralized exchange offering (IDO) on Raydium, one of the largest DeFi protocols on Solana.
So how were these IDO participants able to flood the Solana network with hundreds of thousands of transactions per second? Individuals who were interested in participating in the IDO had all the bidding information and parameters needed prior to the beginning of the token offering. These individuals then set up bots to bid on these tokens, sending hundreds of thousands of transactions automatically, overwhelming Solana network validators. This also meant that critical network consensus messages were lagging further and further behind. Eventually, the backlog of transactions waiting to be validated reached a point where block production ceased on the network for 17 hours.
The Solution:
After efforts to stabilize the network were deemed insufficient, Solana network stakeholders decided, via a community Discord channel on September 15th, that a network restart and version upgrade to patch the issue was needed to restore operations.
"The Solana validator community successfully completed a restart of Mainnet Beta after an upgrade to 1.6.25. Dapps, block explorers, and supporting systems will recover over the next several hours, at which point full functionality should be restored." - Solana Foundation via Twitter.
Get the full scoop on Solana’s 17-hour outage on Unchained’s podcast with Laura Shin and Messari Research Analyst, Aidan Mott.
The Shards
- What Andreessen Horowitz’s recent hiring surge says about the venture capital investor (Fortune)
- OpenSea confirms executive used insider knowledge when buying NFTs (The Block)
- Uniswap under SEC investigation (WSJ)
CryptoTrivia
1. Over or Under - 6 Million? The total amount of ETH tokens staked for ETH 2.0.
2. What are Bitcoin miners competing to solve for a new block reward before other miners on the network?
a) The merkle root
b) The private key
c) The nonce
Answers below.
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CryptoTrivia Answers
- Over (7,817,146 ETH)
- The nonce
See what we're up to:
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