By Mohamed Fouda and Qiao Wang Zero Knowledge technology, or zk in short, is an enabler technology that will transform not only Web 3 but other industries as well. It is a general enough technology to have a multitude of use cases. We are in the early innings of figuring…

Over the past year, several high-profile applications have launched their own application-specific chain or announced plans to do so in the future. This appchain direction was predictable for a number of high-growth projects. The appchain thesis predicted that every popular Web 3 application will eventually have its own blockchain. The…

When looking at the evolution of blockchain technology, we can recognize a strong trend of new L1s that focus on parallel execution. The idea is not new and is currently used in Solana’s Sealevel execution environment. However, the last bull market which has seen impressive activity in DeFi and NFTs…

We’re pleased to announce Volt Capital subsidiary TD Labs is actively participating in the Celo Network and running a highly secure validator on the network in collaboration with Staked.us. The Celo network graduated to mainnet on May 18th after running for ~three weeks as a release candidate. This is a…

Part 1: Progress and Investability of BTC Off-Chain Solutions — In 2017, the crypto bull run triggered explosive trading activity which stress-tested both Bitcoin and Ethereum networks. They each suffered congestion, delayed transactions, and higher fees. In response to these conditions, several scalability solutions were proposed or revisited with renewed interest in off-chain and layer-2 implementations. Entrepreneurs, researchers, and investors…

On November 30th, the Monero network executed its scheduled hard fork to the new mining algorithm: RandomX. The hard fork is part of Monero’s continuous efforts to expel specialized hardware from mining on Monero. The frequent forking strategy is not new and initially began as a response to Bitmain’s introduction…

Community Mining as a Bootstrapping Mechanism — Kadena is a project that strives to solve PoW scalability by using several parallel chains that work together to form a unified braided chain. Over the first week of November 2019, the Kadena team decided to quietly launch the project’s mainnet to the public in limited functionality mode. Limited functionality…

Can Ethereum Lose DeFi to its Competitors? — There’ve been many shots taken at defining Ethereum’s predominant narrative and Decentralized Finance seems to be the dart that’s hit the PMF bullseye. This perspective isn’t unique to Ethereum. DeFi is a popular topic of discussion within all smart contract ecosystems — and understandably so. Competing chains are taking note…

Initial Thoughts on tBTC — Bitcoin DeFi has been a dream for bitcoiners and for the crypto industry in general. Bitcoin is the most liquid, familiar, and decentralized cryptocurrency in the world. Although there are multiple pathways to bring Bitcoin into the DeFi realm, bringing Bitcoin into the Ethereum ecosystem seems like the easiest approach…