The Ethereum Protocol Fellowship (EPF) is a program designed to reduce the barrier to entry for developers interested in working on the core protocol. As core developer (and EPF creator) Piper Merriam likes to say, the door is comically wide open. EPF helps you walk through it.

Over the past two cohorts, one of the most frequent request we’ve received from applicants & participants was for better onboarding materials. Josh and Mario, the coordinators of the EPF, are excited to announce the launch of the EPF study group (EPFsg): a 10 week education series intended as a precursor to the Ethereum Protocol Fellowship (the fifth cohort is coming ). EPFsg has been designed to guide and grow the next generation of Ethereum core developers and provide a deep understanding of Ethereum’s internal mechanics.

Bridging the Gap

Understanding the Ethereum protocol is a complex, but important, endeavor. The study group aims to bridge the gap by offering a curriculum focused on all parts of the Ethereum stack & roadmap.

Ethereum Protocol Studies Program Overview

Program Details

The EPF study group is a live webinar-style program, consisting of two phases. The first phase, which will consist of one 90 minute class per week, will be focused on a general overview of the underlying structure of Ethereum. In the latter phase, students will choose between the research or development tracks (or both). Each track will have its own weekly 90 minute class and will be a deep dive into the chosen topic.

During the study group, students will gain a better understanding of Ethereum’s core protocol, diving into topics that include:

• Protocol design
• Execution and Consensus layer architecture, specs, and implementations
• Testing methods and tools
• Current research and roadmap items:
  
  • Verkle trees
  • Sharding
  • MEV
  • Proof of stake improvements
  • State and history expiry

Each online session will be led by current core dev and researchers from various client teams and research groups, come with pre-meeting reading materials to get you familiar with the topic and terminology and post-meeting activities to strengthen and solidify your understanding.

Additionally, students will collaboratively develop a comprehensive wiki, serving as an evolving knowledge base for current and future core developers. This will provide students with practical experience in contributing to open source resources, while gaining invaluable experience in documentation and community-driven development.

Who is Protocol Studies for?

While this program is designed to act as a precursor to the Ethereum Protocol Fellowship, this study group is for anyone that is interested in learning more about the inner workings of the Ethereum Protocol. Those that have general knowledge or use of Ethereum and/or blockchains as well as those that have some computer science, technical, or developer experience will get the most from this program.

Register for the Ethereum Protocol Fellowship study group here.

— Josh Davis & Mario Havel | EPF Coordination

This registration will allow us to expand into an important European market and offer our industry leading products to Dutch clients. We are committed to growing our business in compliance with European regulations and have obtained a number of registrations over the past year. In addition to the Netherlands, we hold registrations in Spain, Italy and Ireland and are actively pursuing registrations in other European markets.

“With the addition of the Dutch VASP registration, our European growth strategy continues to accelerate,” said Brian Gahan, Managing Director Europe for Kraken. “We see a lot of opportunity to introduce our offering to both retail clients and professional traders in the Netherlands and across Europe. Whether for existing crypto investors or people looking to buy crypto for the first time, Kraken is a top choice with a very competitive offering that continues to expand.” 

The Netherlands has a vibrant startup and technology sector, a strong financial services industry and the highest fintech adoption rate among developed economies. It also has one of the highest crypto adoption rates in Europe with around 20% of Dutch citizens owning crypto.

As a result, we see the Netherlands as a strategically important market for its European growth strategy, as evidenced by our proposed acquisition of Dutch crypto broker BCM, which was announced in October 2023. 

Ahead of the planned implementation of the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulatory framework, we have accelerated our investment in the region’s long-term crypto industry growth. The European landscape is highly fragmented; rising costs and growing competition are expected to drive consolidation.

By leveraging our financial and operational resources,  we plan to grow our market share in the years ahead. Through our extensive product offering, clients gain access to more than 200 digital assets, market-leading liquidity, superior security standards and 24/7/365 live client support.

07 Feb What is Sei (SEI)?

Sei stands out as the first parallelized EVM blockchain, merging Ethereum’s leading development framework with Solana’s high performance. Sei prioritizes reliability, security, and high throughput and has been live on the mainnet since August 2023, and claims it has consistently been finalizing blocks at 390ms, making it the fastest layer 1 blockchain.

Recognizing the limitations current Layer 1 blockchains impose on trading apps, such as speed, scalability, and reliability issues, Sei aims to resolve these by offering specialized infrastructure. This infrastructure is built to cater specifically to the needs of trading applications to offer seamless user experiences.

At the core of Sei’s protocol improvements are several features. The Twin-Turbo consensus, for instance, enhances block propagation and transaction ordering. This approach is intended to significantly reduce the time validators take to receive a block, thereby streamlining the consensus process.

Furthermore, Sei introduces advanced parallelization techniques, optimizing both transaction and block processing for maximum efficiency. These features make Sei a potential platform for a wide range of trading-related applications, from decentralized finance (DeFi) to non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and gaming. With its ability to process transactions concurrently and its integration of a native price oracle for accurate asset pricing, Sei could revolutionise the trading experience in the web3 space.

The Sei v2 upgrade, proposed by Sei Labs in October 2023, will make it the first parallelized EVM blockchain. This upgrade aims to combine the benefits of Ethereum and Solana, resulting in a hyper-optimized execution layer that benefits from the tooling and mindshare around the EVM. The proposal suggests using optimistic parallelization to support processing more transactions per second.

Sei (SEI)

Sei is an extremely fast and high throughput Layer 1 blockchain, as well as the first parallelized EVM blockchain, serving as a potential scaling approach for the broader Ethereum ecosystem. This blockchain is structured to prioritize reliability, security, and high throughput, which are crucial for the efficient functioning of any kind of DApps built on Sei.

By offering built-in orderbook infrastructure, Sei promises fast execution, deep liquidity, and a fully decentralized matching service.

Addressing the limitations of current Layer 1 and Layer 2 infrastructures, Sei aims to solve the “Exchange Trilemma” faced by exchange apps, which struggle to simultaneously achieve decentralization, scalability, and capital efficiency. Sei’s approach is tailored to cater to the unique requirements of exchange applications, such as speed, throughput, and protection against front-running.

This focus makes Sei an optimal choice for not only traditional trading platforms but also for gaming economies, NFT marketplaces, social trading apps, DeFi, and DEXs. With features like the fast time to finality, built-in parallelization, Twin-Turbo consensus, and automatic order bundling, Sei provides infrastructure that aims to enhance the user experience and performance of trading applications. By concentrating on trading, Sei addresses a core blockchain use case, attracting a wide range of Web3 applications and developers to its ecosystem.

How does Sei Work?

Sei is composed of different software components that all work with each other to support the blockchain. Some of these components are tied to the consensus layer, and others are tied to the execution layer.

Sei introduces the Twin-Turbo consensus mechanism, which is an advanced approach to block propagation and transaction ordering. This mechanism significantly reduces the time validators spend waiting to receive and process blocks. It optimizes the steps involved in the consensus process, including prevote, precommit, and commit phases, leading to quicker finalization of transactions.

Unlike traditional methods where block processing starts after the pre-commit step, Sei initiates an optimistic processing of the first block proposal. This means validators start processing a block as soon as they receive it, writing the candidate state to a cache. If the block is accepted, the cached data is committed; if rejected, the cache is discarded. This approach speeds up transaction processing considerably.

A key feature of Sei is its ability to process transactions in parallel. This is achieved through advanced parallelization in both the DeliverTx and EndBlock phases of block processing. By processing multiple transactions simultaneously, Sei improves its throughput and overall performance.

Sei integrates a native order matching engine within its infrastructure, facilitating efficient and decentralized order matching for trading applications. This engine allows DEXs to deploy their order books at the chain level, offering features like frequent batch auctions and uniform clearing prices to prevent front-running and ensure fair trading.

The matching engine in Sei is designed to be flexible and asset-agnostic, enabling decentralized exchanges to decide how to represent assets. This feature provides versatility in handling different types of trading assets, including tokens and NFTs.

Sei enhances performance through client order bundling and chain-level order bundling. This reduces the latency associated with multiple virtual machine instantiations and improves app throughput.

Sei maintains security and governance standards, ensuring that the blockchain operates reliably and transparently. This includes mechanisms for validators to participate in governance decisions and maintain the integrity of the network.

Sei V2 is set to change the execution layer to support optimistic parallelization and optimized state storage. It will also introduce a new component to support EVM smart contracts. These contracts will benefit from the changes made to consensus and parallelization and will be able to interact with existing Cosmwasm smart contracts.

Why is Sei v2 Unique?

 The specialization behind Sei allows it to efficiently handle the specific requirements of trading platforms, NFT marketplaces, DeFi infrastructure, social or gaming DApps, such as high throughput, low latency, and optimised order book management, which are crucial for a smooth and efficient trading experience.

By implementing parallel transaction processing, Sei aims to dramatically increase transaction throughput. This is essential for trading applications that demand high-performance capabilities to handle large volumes of transactions efficiently.

The infrastructure of Sei is fine-tuned to support the unique needs of decentralised exchanges, such as deep liquidity and rapid execution. This optimization ensures that DEXs built on Sei can offer a competitive trading experience comparable to centralised exchanges. Sei balances scalability with security, ensuring that the platform can handle a high volume of trading activities without compromising the integrity and security of the network.

And there are four major advancements in Sei v2:

1. Backwards compatible EVM:
   Sei integrates Geth to offer full EVM bytecode compatibility, enabling developers to utilize the extensive array of Ethereum tools like MetaMask, Foundry, Remix, and Hardhat. With Sei v2, developers can now deploy audited smart contracts from EVM compatible blockchains without any code modifications, further enhancing the building experience on Sei.
2. Optimistic parallelization:
   Unlike blockchains like Solana that offer optional parallelization. Sei automatically parallelizes smart contracts, eliminating the need for developers to manually handle this process. This approach enables the chain to support parallelization effortlessly, without requiring developers to define any dependencies, streamlining the development experience.
3. SeiDB:
   SeiDB improvements to the storage layer by splitting state commitment and state storage. This division is designed to decrease block processing time and reduce state bloat, facilitating a quicker setup for new full nodes. Moreover, Sei DB prevents state bloat, boosts state read/write performance, and simplifies the synchronization process for running new nodes, enabling them to catch up with the network more efficiently. These enhancements collectively aim to optimize network performance and accessibility.
4. Sei v2:
   Sei v2 enhances interoperability with existing chains, ensuring seamless composability between EVM and other execution environments supported on the platform. This advancement opens up avenues for top developers from the Cosmos ecosystem to collaborate effortlessly with leading Ethereum builders, fostering a unified development environment that leverages the strengths of both platforms.

What is the Sei Ecosystem?

The Sei ecosystem represents a comprehensive and specialised environment built around the Sei blockchain. This ecosystem encompasses various components and stakeholders, each contributing to its unique functionality and appeal.
●  DEXs and NFT marketplaces – At the core of the Sei ecosystem are decentralised exchanges that leverage Sei’s specialised trading infrastructure. These builders benefit from Sei’s high throughput, low latency, and built-in order-matching engine, offering a trading experience that competes with centralised platforms in terms of efficiency and user experience.
●  Highlighting the diversity and ingenuity within the Sei ecosystem, several featured dApps have emerged as trailblazers. Astroport, Compass Wallet, Fin Wallet, and Seiyans lead the charge in redefining decentralized finance (DeFi), trading solutions, and meme community spirit. Pyth, Pallet Exchange, WeBump, Dagora NFT marketplace, and Flipside stand out for their innovative approaches in data provision, asset management, social engagement, and analytics, respectively. These builders are deploying remarkable applications in the Sei ecosystem, showcasing the breadth and depth of possibilities in blockchain and crypto utilities.

●  The Sei ecosystem is continually expanding, with an ever-growing number of developers building within its framework. This not only enriches the ecosystem but also underscores Sei’s commitment to supporting a wide array of blockchain-based solutions and services, reflecting the dynamic and multifaceted nature of the Sei network.

What is the SEI Token?

The SEI token plays a pivotal role within the SEI ecosystem, acting as the fundamental unit of value and utility that interconnects various components and functionalities of the network. Sei operates as a decentralized “Proof of Stake” blockchain, powered by the SEI token. The SEI token serves several functions on the network:

• Network Fees: Pay for transaction fees on the Sei blockchain.
• DPoS Validator Staking: SEI holders have the option to delegate their holdings with validators or stake SEI to run their own validator to secure the network.
• Governance: SEI holders can engage in future governance of the protocol.
• Native Collateral: SEI can be used as native asset liquidity or collateral to applications built on the Sei blockchain.
• Fee markets: Users can pay a tip to validators to get their transactions prioritized, which can be shared with users that are delegating to that validator.
• Trading Fees: SEI can be used as fees for exchanges built on Sei blockchain.

SEI Tokenomics

How to Buy SEI on Bitfinex?

How to buy SEI with crypto

1. Log in to your Bitfinex account or sign up to create one.
2. Go to the Deposit page.
3. In the Cryptocurrencies section, choose the crypto you plan to buy SEI with and generate a deposit address on the Exchange wallet.
4. Send the crypto to the generated deposit address.
5. Once the funds arrive in your wallet, you can trade them for SEI. Learn how to trade on Bitfinex here.

How to buy SEI with fiat

1. Log in to your Bitfinex account or sign up to create one.
2. You need to get full verification to be able to deposit fiat to your Bitfinex account. Learn about different verification levels here.
3. On the Deposit page, under the Bank Wire menu, choose the fiat currency of your deposit. There’s a minimum amount for fiat deposits on Bitfinex; learn more here.
4. Check your Bitfinex registered email for the wire details.
5. Send the funds.
6. Once the funds arrive in your wallet, you can use them to buy SEI.

Also, we have Bitfinex on mobile, so you can easily buy SEI currency while on-the-go. [AppStore] [Google Play]

SEI Community Channels

Website | X (Twitter) | Telegram | Discord | Github

Do you feel like it’s been a while since something big happened? In our latest report, we’ll be recapping some things that occurred recently and are worthy of your attention. But first and foremost, the numbers.

Numbers

Total May 2021 revenue: €1,635,016
May 2021 Revenue share: €163,502
Share per 100 CPAY: €0.181
Distribution date: June 10th, 2021
May 2021 Revenue share in ETH: 78.7845 ETH

Analysis

The last month has been… interesting.

First of all, Bitcoin is down 41% in comparison with early May, which might not have entirely escaped you, even if you don’t have any stake in the business whatsoever (who knows, maybe you’re more of a Doge person). The coin currently trades at just above $34k.

The fall from grace can finally be attributed to 2 very specific reasons. One of them being the Chinese government cracking down on crypto, and the other, unexpectedly, Elon Musk — the very catalyst behind the newfound crypto boom. Well, at least up until recently.

At the moment, some 75% of the world’s bitcoin mining happens in China due to its cheap electricity, which, of course, can’t be good for the environment. Purely political aspects aside, this goes against the ambition of the government to make China carbon-neutral by 2060, and so it’s “clamping down on bitcoin mining and trading activity”.

As regards Mr Musk, he seems to be flip-flopping all over the place as Tesla will no longer accept Bitcoin as payment for its cars, citing, again, climate change concerns as the reason. Fair enough, but still, a nasty shock for a casual investor engaging in some cheeky momentum trading. So much so that some investors actually plead with Mr Musk to stop tweeting.

Amidst the kerfuffle, Ethereum is getting ready for a transition to a Proof-Of-Stake consensus mechanism, which promises a more scalable, secure and sustainable future. According to some estimates, a PoS Ethereum will consume at least 99.5% less energy.

A complex process that consists of several essential steps (introduction of the Beacon Chain, the Merge and Sharding) is expected to culminate sometime in 2022.

‘At the beginning, I thought we might do a blockchain in three months… but we found out that it takes 18 months to finish,’ shares Ethereum’s creator and co-founder Vitalik Buterin. ‘We thought it would take one year to do the Proof-of-Stake, but it actually takes six years.’ Boy, can we relate.

Revenue

Despite a significant increase in revenue in May 2021, most products showed similar results comparing with April. However, both Exchange operations (Wallet) and the EEA card programme managed to outperform themselves. The Wallet owes its success to an increased volume of transactions made by several large retail customers, while the card programme is continuing with its organic growth.

The B2B, card deposits and bank transfers remained practically at the same level, with the latter showing moderate organic growth as well, which can also be said about B2C as a whole: at this stage, it’s still largely organic and spontaneous.

We’ve just started applying major changes to the product and our marketing approach and thus should reap what we sow towards the end of the summer. Have a lovely end of the week!

Claim revenue. Find out how.

First of all it is worth noting there seems to be some disagreement on this at the time of writing (February 2024).

instagibbs stated in his policy zoo doc:

There are N motivations for policy that I know of:

Anti-DoS: Only “cheap” things to validate get flooded to the network

Security: Certain types of transactions may mess up certain systems for no good reason

Upgrade hooks: We leave some things “forbidden” such that if we find a use for them later we don’t “confiscate” funds by refusing to relay e.g., a spend or pre-signed transaction

Pro-decentralization: Make it simple/cheap for miners to build blocks that pay well

Paternalism: We want wallet authors to use the least amount of public resources while still accomplishing their end goals(as long as that goal isn’t “attack the network”!).

Safe soft-fork process: Sometimes the only mechanism preventing an unupgraded miner from mining a block that would be considered invalid by upgraded miners (but valid by unupgraded miners) is policy discouragement.

Let people pay fees to make transactions in an acceptable API

All of these motivations obviously have to be weighed against the fact that bitcoiners want to make transactions, and miners want fees from those transactions. Ideally we make a mempool/relay system where both can live in relative harmony.

This corresponds to two of Suhas’ intended purposes in his Stack Exchange post.

The purpose of policy checks is generally to (a) close off DoS vectors and (b) to make future consensus changes safer to deploy, by preventing relay of transactions that would violate such future consensus changes well in advance.

Gloria Zhao talks about the trade-off between protecting the bitcoind user from attacks (e.g. CPU exhaustion) and maximizing the reliability of fee bumping for L2 protocols in her presentation on “Transaction Relay Policy for L2 Developers” at Adopting Bitcoin 2021.

These perspectives thus far seem relatively aligned although may include slight differences in prioritization.

A stronger disagreement is with those who think policy is and should be used as a tool to restrict the propagation of certain use cases (ordinals, inscriptions etc) even when those transactions are consensus valid and have a high fee rate. In addition Luke Dashjr takes the view (on X) that:

“Transaction pinning” AFAIK is a result of policy centralization efforts, not a real problem. The alternative is to encourage diverse policies, and at the technical level, to prepare multiple alternative transaction variants to ensure one being rejected won’t be a problem.

This alludes to a different disagreement on whether default (mempool) policy should be standardized across full node implementations to attempt to achieve its intended purposes. Full node operators are always free to change from the defaults (policy is not consensus) but standardization in this case would mean consistent defaults across different implementations.

Spot Bitcoin ETFs are approved but start with a hiccup, one stablecoin is going public and Bitcoin lifts off toward the moon, only to get lost in space?!  These stories and more, this week in crypto.

Bitcoin Makes History

On Wednesday, The US SEC finally approved 11 spot Bitcoin ETFs in a process that began in 2013 when the Winklevoss twins first sought approval. Trading volumes exceeded $4bn across the New York Stock Exchange, Nasdaq and CBOE on the first trading day. Grayscale’s bitcoin ETF accounted for half of that volume with $1bn of it coming in the first hour after markets opened. BlackRock’s iShares bitcoin ETF claimed the bulk of the other half with its first day trading of $1bn.

Fake Tweet Rocks Markets

A day before the approvals were announced, a fake tweet resulting from a hack of the SEC’s X account stated that all Bitcoin ETFs had been approved, causing upheaval in crypto markets. The account was hacked through an associated phone number, and was possible because the account wasn’t utilizing two-factor authentication. The post was quickly exposed as a fraud, but not before leading to $90 million in Bitcoin liquidations.

Bitcoin Dives as Euphoria Ends

After the first ETFs began trading in the US, Bitcoin briefly topped $49,000 for the first time since December 2021. Next day however, Bitcoin’s price dropped below $42,000, plunging nearly 10%, as the euphoria over ETF approvals gave way to a ‘sell the news’ rout.

SEC: We Don’t Support Bitcoin

SEC Chair Gary Gensler indicated that the ETF approvals were granted reluctantly, emphasizing that the decision does not reflect the commission’s endorsement of Bitcoin itself. Gensler said that last year’s Grayscale court decision forced the commission’s hand, but it doesn’t signal support for Bitcoin or any other crypto asset; a category that he still views as speculative and volatile.

USDC Issuer Files for IPO

Circle, the creator of stablecoin USDC, has filed for an initial public offering, to take the company public. The IPO is expected to take place after the SEC completes its review process. With a $25 billion market cap, USDC holds the spot as the second-largest stablecoin after Tether, which boasts a market cap of $95 billion.

New Ethereum Improvements Proposed

In an Ask-Me-Anything session, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin recommended a modest 33% increase in the gas limit to boost network capacity and reduce user expenses. However, the proposal comes with some risks, as larger blocks may lead to increased energy consumption, raising the potential for chain splits and abandoned blocks.

X Discontinues NFT Profile Pictures

Social media platform X has discontinued its NFT profile picture service that allowed subscribers to use Ethereum-based NFTs as profile images. Previously known as Twitter, X embraced NFTs and bitcoin tipping in September 2021, expanding its NFT offerings by October of the following year with “NFT Tweet Tiles.”

Houston, We Have a Problem

The Peregrine 1 space mission recently took off carrying a Bitcoin genesis block commemorative plaque, and a special Bitcoin token engraved with a private key for 1 BTC. The mission? To place those items on the surface of the moon, as a symbol that Bitcoin highlights remarkable progress in terms of technological advancement. Unfortunately, it seems there’s a problem with the rocket’s propulsion system, making it uncertain as to whether Bitcoin will ever reach the Moon safely.

That’s what’s happened this week in crypto, see you next week.

Welcome to our first newsletter of 2024, a year that promises to be a thrilling journey for everyone in the cryptocurrency community. As we embrace the new year, we’re excited to bring you the latest updates from around the cryptocurrency industry, insightful analyses on the evolving landscape of crypto payments, and the most recent advancements in our BitPay’s product offerings.

In This Issue:

An analyst has explained that based on a pattern forming in the Cardano price, a 32% rally could take place, if a close above this level can happen.

Cardano Has Been Forming A Descending Triangle Pattern Recently

In a new post on X, analyst Ali has talked about a Descending Triangle forming in the daily price of Cardano. The “Descending Triangle” refers to a pattern in technical analysis (TA) that, as its name suggests, looks like a triangle with a downward slope.

The pattern is made up of two lines, the first of which is a slopped line connecting lower highs in the price, while the second one is horizontal (that is, parallel to the time-axis) and joins together a series of lows.

The upper line of the pattern provides resistance to the price, so it can be a likely point of reversal for it. Similarly, the lower line may provide support, so bottoms can be probable at it.

A break out of either of these lines implies the continuation of the trend in that direction. This means that a breakout above the triangle can be bullish for the asset, while a drop under it can prove to be a bearish signal.

Like this pattern, there is also another pattern in TA called the Ascending Triangle. This pattern works similarly, except for the fact that the two lines are switched around (that is, the slopped line is the bottom line and connects together higher lows).

Now, here is the chart shared by Ali that shows the Descending Triangle pattern that has recently been forming for Cardano on its 1-day price:

Looks like the price is currently making a retest of the upper line of the pattern | Source: @ali_charts on X

From the graph, it’s visible that Cardano’s latest sharp upward surge means that cryptocurrency is now retesting the upper line of this Descending Triangle.

If the historical pattern is anything to go by, a break above could be a positive sign for the price. “A sustained daily close above $0.53 could lead to the start of a 32% rally, potentially pushing $ADA up to $0.68!” notes the analyst. Ali has chosen a target 32% higher as the height of the Descending Triangle was equal to a price swing of 32% as well.

Naturally, this bullish outlook would only be if a break can truly take place for the cryptocurrency. A rejection here is still a possibility, as it has already happened a few times over the course of this pattern’s duration.

ADA Price

The past 24 hours have been bullish for the cryptocurrency sector as a whole, but Cardano has clearly pulled ahead of the crowd as it has registered returns of almost 10%.

Following this surge, the coin has managed to break above the $0.53 level. The asset now has to hold above this mark if the Descending Triangle break has to register.

The price of the coin has observed some sharp bullish momentum over the past day | Source: ADAUSD on TradingView

Featured image from Shutterstock.com, charts from TradingView.com

Disclaimer: The article is provided for educational purposes only. It does not represent the opinions of NewsBTC on whether to buy, sell or hold any investments and naturally investing carries risks. You are advised to conduct your own research before making any investment decisions. Use information provided on this website entirely at your own risk.