[2023] July Updates
Navigators!
By now we’ve all heard about Blackrock’s Bitcoin ETF application. Which means we’re all aware that crypto is moving further out on the mass adoption scale. From our point of view, this is a crucial time to make sure that this will not turn into a rehash of the traditional financial world.
Just look at the latest Curve debacle. Their CEO took out a huge loan to buy a house, the protocol got hacked and his huge position ended up at risk of being liquidated. As of now, it looks like big money was not going to let this liquidation happen, presumably to save DeFi’s reputation as a whole, and funds were pooled together to stop further losses from occurring. Some may call that a bailout, others see it as the opposite of decentralization.
We encourage you to pay attention to these kinds of news events and consider them a prompt to recognize that crypto has always intended to be an alternative to traditional banking systems. It’s important to lend your support to those platforms that truly uphold the principles of decentralized governance, resistance against censorship, and protection against surveillance.
In Navcoin news, we’re pleased to report that development is continuing for the new chain. A pull request has been created for the integration of private transactions in the new core.
And meanwhile, gogoex has been working on upgrading the range proofs and set membership proofs to the improved bulletproofs+ protocol. Bulletproofs+ improve block communication among Navcoin nodes by reducing proof sizes. In PePoS, set membership and range proofs enable anonymous staking. Set membership proofs validate staked coins within the list, while range proofs assess validator eligibility and locked coin amount without revealing details. Basically, more efficient data communication.
After a three month trial phase, we’ve decided to close our Zealy community. As it so often happens, too many users went against our terms by engaging with our tasks from burner twitter accounts. These accounts were created for the sole purpose of entering various giveaways and did not ultimately add value to match our rewards. We will brainstorm and find a new and better system for social mining in the future.
PriFi Roundup
GrapheneOS, an open source privacy and security focused app, has had their Paypal account forcefully closed on grounds of accepting cryptocurrencies as donation. They were asked to provide proof of their funds origin, which is ironic as this request only applies to crypto and not fiat. This was your monthly reminder that you are not safe in the hands of these big service providers and should manage your finances accordingly.
https://twitter.com/GrapheneOS/status/1684759147487592449
Our favorite (/s) surveillance project, Worldcoin, is being probed by French and German regulators. This should come as no surprise as the risks of uploading your biometric data are numerous, yet it is important that its legality is brought into question.
https://decrypt.co/150473/france-germany-corrdinate-worldcoin-investigation/
Another attempt at turning private, personal data into commodities. After the launch of Arkham’s bounty marketplace, which will let people buy and sell on-chain cryptocurrency data, privacy advocates are ringing the alarm. Comparing it to the “deanonymization of the blockchain”, this goes against everything the crypto space has managed to achieve in the past ten years.
Until the next one! Cheers.
