Project Tracker — Issue 26
Sentinel
Sentinel announced a partnership with StrongBlock, the leading global Nodes-as-a-Service (NaaS) provider to take another step towards scaling the decentralized VPN. The partnership will also strengthen the node ecosystem of StrongBlock across blockchain protocols while rewarding them for running nodes. Sentinel also announced their native $DVPN token on AscendEX. This listing was celebrated by the project giving $80,000 USDT Worth of Prizes to the community! AscendEx and Sentinel also held a joint AMA to answer questions regarding the listing. Sentinel also held several $DVPN incentive programs on its native Cosmos-based Sentinel Hub to support both new infrastructural and user-related onboarding, while also creating incentives for the existing network stakeholders.
BAND Protocol
BAND announced a partnership with Omm Finance for the Mainnet launch of Open Money Market. BAND will provide strategic support in oracle design, implementation, and growth in the DeFi space. Band Oracle has been integrated into the Cosmos ecosystem, through Starport, to further the realization of the Internet of Blockchains. With this Band Protocol integration in Starport, the Cosmos blockchain development tool, newly created chains are able to exchange feeds of varying types of data by using an oracle and the Cosmos interoperability standard: Inter-Blockchain Communication protocol (IBC). Cosmos announced in a blog that “this growth-enabling integration of the Band Protocol Oracle opens up a wide range of possibilities, further developing use cases such as lending, staking, and NFT development”. The BandChain Laozi Mainnet Upgrade was delayed on July 13th after several validator nodes failed to connect to their peers. Two problems were identified during this: differences between the testnet environment to the production Mainnet and unexpected requirements necessary for the upgrade process.
Thorchain
THORChain reported that it suffered two back-to-back exploits on its ETH Router. The first took all the ETH from the system via an attack contract that sat in front of the Router, and the second took all the economically significant ERC20s via an attack contract that sat behind the router. In light of these exploits, the THORChain team and community have kicked off a 5-Pronged Plan to address, fix and recover. There are a number of changes being made to the THORChain protocol to make it more impervious to attacks and giving it the ability to react quickly to save funds. The team shared that these changes will have a brief negative effect on the user experience until all problems are solved. The team is constantly working and reported “It’s currently a battlefield, and THORChain is bringing its best armor until the battle is won”.
Bitsong
Bitsong announced that they are launching a new bridge connecting Ethereum to the BitSong mainnet. Once it’s live, the bridge will allow the BitSong community to seamlessly transfer their BTSG tokens between the BitSong and Ethereum networks. The bridge operates using centrally managed hot wallets with liquidity provided by BitSong. Bitsong also released an article on how they plan to empower the music industry using the Cosmos-SDK based Ecosystem by allowing artists to connect their music directly to audiences and introducing standardization for music metadata to ensure attribution every single time and introducing new ways to monetize music and a musician’s brand through innovations such as fan tokens and NFT-based digital collectibles.
e-Money
e-Money announced that they are integrating with the Polygon Network to bring e-Money’s compliant European digital currencies to a broader audience. The European stablecoins eEUR, eCHF, eSEK, eNOK & eDKK issued by e-Money will be available on the Polygon Network, encouraging more users within the region to join the network and use their native currency to facilitate transactions. This comes after a partnership announcement with PhoenixDAO late last month. e-Money also underwent a rebrand and a new website this month! With this comes a new logo, new brand identity, a new website, and brand ethos.
Terra
This month, Terra announced their new Ecosystem Fund, supported by capital commitments of $150 million from an all-star ensemble of investors that will serve as a capital foundation for builders to access the resources of some of the industry’s leading investors to manifest their vision for applications, protocols, and tooling on the Terra network. Terra expects the new fund to propel Terra towards its next adoption phase, augmenting an accessible, cross-chain DeFi supersystem targeting mainstream adoption. The team also announced that through Crypto.com’s Terra (LUNA) price page, you can now directly access Terra’s RSS feed. This feature will enable Crypto.com users to obtain the latest news and updates on Terra, a delegated proof-of-stake (DPoS) blockchain.
Althea Network
Wave 7 Communications, LLC is an Internet Service Provider, empowering the rural community of Enfield, NC who received a $154,000 grant to help answer to the lack of internet access in the rural town of Enfield. As part of this initiative, the Althea system will be providing internet via a small antenna on their roof and a smart router. Althea appears to be making great progress in its goal to bring the open market and interoperable peering from the data center to the field and empowering communities to build multi-stakeholder networks faster and more affordably than legacy telecom models.
Vega Protocol
The Vega team released an article on how to become a Mainnet Validator. They will release the first version of the protocol software in September 2021 and when this happens, independent validators will be able to launch the first Vega network, kicking off the Restricted Mainnet phase. This is the second of three launch phases, in which the public Vega chain will go live for staking and governance. They also released the vesting details of the VEGA tokens which are standard Open-Zeppelin ERC20 tokens. Once the network is live, all VEGA tokens, both locked and unlocked, can be staked to delegate to network validators, as well as to conduct governance actions.
Regen Network
Regen Network Development has developed custom emissions accounting calculators for Proof of Stake and Proof of Work networks, capable of analyzing everything from home offices, virtual meetings, travel, data centers, cloud consumption, and location-based emission factors. Regen Network’s custom accounting allows F2Pool and Stakefish to accurately measure their emissions and carbon footprint. This announcement comes after Regen announced they were conducting a case study to accurately offset the minting and transaction costs of NFT’s at Natively Digital, an online auction platform, to further support and combine art, sustainability, and decentralization. After being live for three months, the Regen mainnet is working on enabling token transfers using Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) and will undergo an upgrade to a new version of Regen Ledger in mid-August 2021. The progress was shared in a new series “A Ledger For The Earth” where they will keep the community updated.
CertiK Foundation
Early this month, CertiK announced a security partnership with Polygon to further secure the Polygon ecosystem. CertiK’s Security Leaderboard will provide the Polygon community with a one-stop shop for critical security information, including Real-time community alerts, Transparent audit results and resources, and Real-time security scoring of projects via Skynet. This will give the community the tools they need to conduct their own research into projects. CertiK is now integrated with CoinMarketCap so users can see if a project is audited directly from CMC! CertiK is pushing forward the adoption of provably secure software.
Summary
These project updates were researched from git repos and project blogs. If you have a project that’s active but not listed here, please reach out to us so I can make sure your update is included in future posts. Cypher Core is dedicated to the Cosmos ecosystem and community and is here to help as a validator, as well as to help projects solve business needs like getting your project the sunshine it needs to thrive.
Until next time.
