Your Cryptocurrency Newsletter for January 21, 2021

If you are interested in cryptocurrencies, this newsletter is for you. [img]  [Learn more about RevenueStripe...](   [Learn more about RevenueStripe...]( [img]( [FeedBinary Newsletter]( [How Blockchain Technology Could Support Democracy]( The extraordinary spectacle of a pro-Trump mob invading the US Capitol on 6 January was the work of a myriad of economic and social forces. Essentially, this violent attack stems from a breakdown in trust – in politicians, in the electoral process, and in the mainstream media, whom Trump excoriated for its alleged peddling of “fake news”. While the protestors were disorganised and, like a dog chasing a car, did not know what to do once they had breached the interior of the Capitol, they could have created constitutional chaos had they stolen and destroyed the contents of the ballot box containing the confirmation of the electoral college votes. While the broader cultural forces that drove the mob are beyond the scope of this comment, the idea that the election was “stolen” – though it has been refuted in every case the Trump campaign has brought – was clearly compelling to his support base. Many of these claims focused on the paper-based voting process, a technology that has been in use since Roman times. I believe this argument could have been eliminated in advance, had a voting solution based on the rapidly developing field of blockchain technology been used. A blockchain is a publicly available database, maintained by a network of computers that validates new entries on the system. Because it is public, and verified by every computer on the network, the database does not rely on an intermediary, such as a government or a bank, to ensure it is trusted by its users. Instead, trust is distributed across the network’s computers, or “miners”. Every miner performs computational work and compares its results – “proof of work” – to the computation that every other node has done. These verified results are published as “blocks”, forming blockchains. Miners are economically rewarded for verifying truthful results, and if they try to corrupt the outcome, they are economically penalised. Every verified block in that blockchain’s history, back to the first computation, is available for all to access. Blockchains are not immune to attack – no system is. If a bad actor can take control of a majority of computers on the network, they can edit blocks as they please. This type of “51 per cent attack” has been used by hackers to rerun tens of thousands of transactions made using Ethereum Classic, a cryptocurrency with a market capitalisation of over $1bn. The technologies that people use to access blockchain technology, such as the encrypted “wallets” in which access keys are stored, the exchanges on which cryptocurrencies are traded and the marketplaces in which they are spent, have their own security challenges. However, the sheer scale of computing power required to take control of the largest blockchain – Bitcoin – has prevented anyone from doing so in its 12-year existence. An election conducted using blockchain technology would require that each voter be given a secure and unique identifier or “key” to access a “smart contract” – an agreement written in code – which they would use to vote without having to attend a polling station. Those without internet access could cast their paper ballot in the usual manner, and officials would transfer these votes to the blockchain. The process would be cheaper and more efficient than a paper-based system, and the results would be nearly instantaneous. If the system could be made formally secure, the recording of these votes would be immutable and verifiable to anyone with access to the internet. I believe this would make any subsequent chants of “Stop the Steal” irrelevant. Blockchain elections have already been trialled in several US jurisdictions, and there is clearly work to be done. In the 2018 US midterm elections, West Virginia used a platform called Voatz to allow internet voting for a small number of people, and other states such as Oregon have since followed suit. Security researchers from MIT later identified serious flaws in the system, and other trials such as the 2019 Moscow election have shown the system to be vulnerable to attack. However, Estonia, a pioneer of online voting, has executed several elections since 2015 without any major controversy. Any system needs to be tested extensively to show that it can preserve the integrity of the votes cast and the secrecy of those ballots. This does not mean the principle of allowing better access to more openly verifiable voting is to be abandoned. To use blockchain for voting would also help bring its benefits to other areas, such as decentralised finance – or “de-fi’ – which promises secure direct lending verified by a blockchain, democratising access to currency and financial services beyond the purview of the traditional “high priests of finance” such as banks. This creates opportunities for, say, a farmer in Africa who does not have access to the banking system, to receive credit and make payments from a smartphone. [Read Full News]( The post [How Blockchain Technology Could Support Democracy]( appeared first on [Feed Binary](. [Read Full Story]( ------------------ You Might Like     [Learn more about RevenueStripe...]( ------------------ [Arbitrage Traders Make 10x Returns on New DeFi Platform for Wrapped Assets]( A lucky trader turned 0.34 BTC into 4.6 BTC in just one swap. A recently launched decentralized finance platform, Saddle Finance, has netted one particular trader a more than 10x return on an arbitrage trade between different permutations of synthetic Bitcoin (BTC). According to transaction data from Etherscan, a user swapped 0.34 sBTC, Synthetix’s Bitcoin-based token, in exchange for 4.36 Wrapped Bitcoin, a custodial wrapper offered by BitGo. The trade offered an almost 13x return on investment, netting $150,000 to the trader. Two other similar transactions were registered on the platform, as noted by the analyst Igor Igamberdiev. One transaction swapped 0.09 tBTC for 3.2 WBTC, an even higher return of 35x. The trades were likely made possible by single-token liquidity providers. While Saddle pools allow committing only one asset into a four-sided pool, this still upsets the balance of prices for the other tokens. Given the pool’s low liquidity, major deposits of just one token suddenly made it much cheaper compared to the other three assets in the pool. Arbitrage traders were then able to capitalize on this oversight by extracting the value created by these single-side LPs. As a result, those who provided liquidity in these pools likely lost sizable amounts of money. Saddle Finance is an automated market maker platform focusing on exchanging pegged assets, similarly to Curve Finance. It is backed by a host of particularly notable venture funds, including Framework Ventures, Polychain Capital, Electric Capital, Dragonfly Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Alameda Research and Boost VC. This background led some to describe it as the venture capitalist equivalent of SushiSwap — a venture-backed fork of a community-launched project. Saddle does not appear to be a direct fork of Curve code, as it uses the Solidity language instead of Vyper. Nonetheless, it is using Curve’s StableSwap algorithm for its platform. The project has been audited by OpenZeppelin, Quantstamp and CertiK. It is also adopting the guarded launch mechanism, limiting deposits and maximum swap amounts to ensure smooth functioning. While the protocol has worked as intended in this scenario, it may be meager consolation for those losing funds on these arbitrage trades. [Read Full News]( The post [Arbitrage Traders Make 10x Returns on New DeFi Platform for Wrapped Assets]( appeared first on [Feed Binary](. [Read Full Story]( ------------------ You Might Like     [Learn more about RevenueStripe...]( ------------------ ------------------ Connect with TheFeedBinary on Facebook and Twitter [fb](  [tw]( ------------------ You received this email because you operate or create content for a website/service and based on your website it seemed like this could be important information to you and your users. 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