Project Tracker — Issue 27
CertiK Foundation
On August 31st, Shentu Chain (aka CertiK Chain) underwent its upgrade to Stargate. This Shentu-2 upgrade comes with a plethora of upgrades. These upgrades include chain size reduction, protobuf migration, faster state sync, automatic chain upgrades, and full eWasm support. This upgrade also brings compatibility with the Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol. The upgrade occurred at block 4313500. CertiK says this brings them one step closer to fulfilling the promise of becoming the “Guardians of the Blockchain”. In addition to this, CertiK also released a how-to blog showing users how to stake their CTK with CertiKShield using their DeepWallet in three easy steps. They also released an educational article explaining the difference between staking, liquidity mining, and yield farming. With the new upgrade and being IBC compatible, there should be some more exciting news for CertiK soon!
Kava Labs
Kava had a big month in August. After announcing the new Kava Swap in May, it finally launched on August 30th. When the Kava Swap Testnet was announced in July, over 37,000 accounts registered to win $120,000 in prizes. Kava has secured the swap with a CertiK audit, while also using CertiK Shield for another level of protection. Kava has rebranded their product suite, which now includes Kava Mint, Kava Lend, and Kava Swap Protocols. Kava Mint and allows users to take out $USDX stablecoin loans using their assets as collateral, Kava Lend and allows users to earn rewards by supplying and borrowing assets from money markets, and Kava Swap and allows users to buy and sell tokens across the Kava Blockchain, and earn rewards by providing liquidity to pools. Kava also announced a governance feature using $KAVA.
Althea
While Althea continues to grow across the country with networks in states like Washington, Nebraska, and more bringing fast, affordable, and locally run internet to the forefront, they also announced the launch of the Cosmos Gravity Bridge, an Ethereum-Cosmos bridge designed for the Cosmos Hub. Althea created Cosmos Gravity Bridge as infrastructure for the Cosmos community and it is an independent and credibly neutral Cosmos-SDK blockchain providing the entire SDK community with a neutral bridge to Ethereum and eventually all major EVM chains. Althea has partnered with Code4rena to have a $100k+ challenge to hack Gravity Bridge to provide the security it needs.
Akash
Akash reported that their token, AKT, is now supported on Emeris, the Portal to Cross-Chain DeFi. They also announced the integration with Skynet Labs to provide the first full-stack decentralized web (dWeb) solution to handle backup, restore, and migration. As a part of this integration, Akash offered $10,000 to the developer or team that builds the best app that integrates Skynet and Akash to help expand the developer community, encourage collaboration between developers, and develop open-source projects to promote further adoption and usage of Akash Network’s decentralized cloud. Akash also released a Keplr wallet guide on their blog.
Agoric
Agoric underwent phase 4 of the ongoing Agoric Incentivized Testnet for validators which was the Stress Test phase. The goal of the phase was to exercise performance-related features and code they have recently put into the system. They reported that 900 network tasks, 84 community tasks, and 5 challenge tasks were submitted. The next step for Agoric is phase 5, the Adversarial Testnet.
Vega Protocol
Vega has over 50 validators from across the Vega community. They announced there will be 13 validators at the launch of their Mainnet. To pick the 13, there will be a governance vote. In light of this, Vega held an educational AMA with the validators to speak about validating decentralized networks and share the experience they have gained supporting chains like Vega.
BAND Protocol
This month marked the launch of BandChain Phase 2 Mainnet after rigorous migration tests. The mainnet launch includes many upgrades including Cosmos-SDK v0.43 and ibc-go v1.0.1. Band reported the total number of oracle requests on the BandChain decentralized oracle network continued to grow and surpass 9,992,860, less than ten thousand short of 10M fulfilled data requests in production without any oracle incidents or failure. Band has announced five new partnerships in August, including Eden Network, Fantom, Cronos Chain, BetaFinance, and 0Chain. These partnerships will provide front-running resistant oracles for developers and DApps, integrate BAND protocol and other products into other ecosystems, and more.
IRIS Network
IRISnet and ixo have teamed up to create NFT technological implementations and applications for the Cosmos ecosystem, aiming to have a catalytic change for averting devastating consequences of the Climate Crisis. IRISnet and ixo teams are both experienced core contributors to Cosmos and Interchain technology development. IRISnet has led the design and development of the NFT Module in the Cosmos SDK, and ixo has pioneered Interchain Standards for NFTs and Verified Metadata. IRIS also released a Coinswap Integrated Keplr Wallet guide on their Medium page.
e-Money
e-Money started the month by announcing they are lowering their stablecoin inflation rate from 1% to 0.5% after receiving feedback from institutional clients. They also partnered with Knit Finance to enable stablecoin Cross-Chain Interoperability. Knit Finance will have access to e-Money’s multi-currency stablecoins that will propel the adoption of Knit Finance amongst the European user base. e-Money will be integrated on the Knit Finance multichain platform encouraging more users within the region to join the platform and use their native currency to facilitate transactions. e-Money also announced integration with Elastos Blockchain and Netvrk to expand the reach of e-Money’s European digital currencies which will allow for faster integrations with European partners looking for native currency options for the regions they operate in.
Forbole
Forbole announced its soft-launch of $25 Million Forbole Ventures to invest in people who can build the next generation of internet, which is more open, public, decentralized, inclusive, and censorship-resistant, together. They also published a How-To on delegating ADA (Cardano) to Forbole which can be found on their blog.
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.
