PancakeSwap V3 will offer new features such as improved liquidity provisioning, competitive trading fees, trading incentives and enhancement for yield farming tools.

PancakeSwap, a leading multichain decentralized exchange (DEX), will launch its version 3 (V3) in the first week of April, developers told CoinDesk on Monday.

PancakeSwap, like other DEXs, relies on smart contracts to allow users to swap cryptocurrencies without intermediaries, earning revenues on each swap and distributing a cut of those revenues to liquidity providers in the form of rewards.

V3 will be available only on BNB Smart Chain (BSC), which is known for its fast and low-cost transactions. PancakeSwap is currently deployed over BSC, Aptos and Ethereum networks.

The upgrade adds features such as improved liquidity provisioning, competitive trading fees, trading incentives and yield farming tools.

Such products are expected to attract more capital, increase protocol revenue, and ultimately bolster PancakeSwap’s value proposition among investors.

The DEX holds over $2.4 billion in locked tokens as of Monday. It has processed $438 billion in trading volume since its April 2021 launch, making it among the most widely used DeFi protocols. Its native cake (CAKE) tokens have a market capitalization of $670 million.

PancakeSwap burned $27 million cake tokens in a planned event in European morning hours on Monday. Burns refers to the permanent deletion of tokens from the total supply, which may contribute to price rises in the future as demand increases.

The 7 million burned tokens were generated from fees earned from PancakeSwap’s trading, lottery, NFT marketplace and prediction markets, the company said in a tweet.

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Klaytn intends to establish KLAY as a deflationary asset and provide more tools for developers intending to launch products on the network.

Increasing demand and value for Klaytn’s native KLAY tokens are at the center of the latest technology and developer roadmap released by developers earlier this week.

Klaytn, a public blockchain platform developed by South Korean internet giant Kakao Corp, recently passed a governance proposal to burn nearly 50% of its token supply – a move that contributes towards making KLAY more valuable eventually.

In the roadmap, Klaytn that it would identify key crypto infrastructure services, such as decentralized oracles, where KLAY can be used to utilize said services, further increasing transactional utility and leading to more gas burns.

Oracles are a mechanism to connect smart contracts with the outside world, primarily to feed information from the world to a blockchain. Gas burns, also known as coin burnings, are when a project decides to take a certain number of coins out of circulation from the fees that blockchain generates on user transactions.

Klaytn will launch a permissionless network pilot in the second half of 2023 on its Cypress mainnet. This automates the entry and exit of validators, or entities of any blockchain and are responsible for verifying transactions on that network

On the governance front, some new initiatives include establishing community governance council selection and dismissal processes.

Klaytn will gradually transfer its decision-making authority to the community, allowing token holders users to have a say on who sits on Klaytn’s Governance Council (GC). The GC is a group of network participants that currently oversee governance of the Klaytn network.

KLAY tokens are nominally changed in the past 24 hours and have a $823 million maket capitalization at writing time on Wednesday.

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Yearn was among the first yield aggregators in the now-mature decentralized finance ecosystem.

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The round, which was funded by angel investors, will provide capital for the company to implement innovative sidechain solutions on the Bitcoin network.

Layer 2 Labs has raised a $3 million seed round from angel investors to bring drivechains and other innovative technologies to Bitcoin.

Drivechains are a type of sidechain – a secondary blockchain that interacts with a primary blockchain and aims to offer a better user experience (UX). The company’s CEO and founder, Paul Sztorc, a well-known Bitcoin researcher and developer, has been working on drivechains since 2015.

Sztorc outlined the concept of drivechains in Bitcoin improvement proposals (BIPs) 300 and 301. The technology, which will be Layer 2 Labs’ primary focus, allows users to move bitcoin (BTC) back and forth between the main Bitcoin blockchain and multiple drivechains.

According to Sztorc, the purpose of drivechains is to give Bitcoiners access to innovative features and products currently confined to altcoin networks. Examples would be Zcash’s zero-knowledge proofs, a way of proving something without revealing sensitive information, and Ethereum’s Augur, a prediction market where users bid on specific outcomes.

“We believe that drivechains have the potential to kill altcoins, increase Bitcoin adoption, and provide the catalyst for hyperbitcoinization,” said the company in a release provided to CoinDesk. (Hyperbitcoinization is the point where Bitcoin becomes the world’s dominant monetary system.)

Besides Sztorc, Layer 2 Labs’ founding team includes Bitcoin Core contributor CryptAxe and 8-year Kraken veteran Austin Alexander.

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The Canadian firm said that 5,800 machines will provide computing power of upward of 630 petahashes per second by end-January. That’s less than the October forecast of 1 exahash.

Crypto mining firm Hive Blockchain (HIVE) will receive less computing power than forecast from its mining rigs using Intel’s (INTC) new chips.

The 5,800 new machines, dubbed Hive Buzzminers, will have total computing power of more than 630 petahash/second (PH/s), the Vancouver based firm said Friday. In October, it estimated a total of 1 exahash/second (EH/s).

Hive did not give a reason for the discrepancy, and had not responded to CoinDesk’s request for comment by the time of publication. It’s possible it changed the specification of the machines to lower power consumption during a period of high electricity costs. It’s also possible it ordered fewer machines than anticipated as the price of bitcoin fell more than 60% this year.

Some of the machines have already been installed, with the rest expected by the end of January. The rigs’ computing power of about 109 terahahes/second (TH/s) per machine is a little over that of Bitmain’s Antminer S19 Pro, released in 2020. Hive didn’t divulge the energy efficiency or cost of the rigs, key metrics for miners struggling to keep up with high power costs. The Intel chip is touted as environmentally friendly, indicating that efficiency will be its strong suit.

Intel’s second-generation Blocksale application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) for bitcoin mining rigs was announced in April. It is expected to break the Bitmain and MicroBT duopoly in the bitcoin mining ASIC market. Miners can configure the chip into machines of their own design, such as Hive’s. That is a marked difference from the Bitmain machines, which are notoriously closed-source. The flexibility, however, comes with the difficulties of deciding on designs and bringing them to production.

Argo Blockchain (ARBK), another one of Intel’s early clients, decided to redesign the machines, leading to delays in deployment. The London-based company, which is working with ePIC Blockchain on the rigs, said it wanted to reorient the machines more toward power efficiency, bringing them closer to close to Bitmain’s Antminer S19 XP with 134 TH/s at 21.5 joules/terahash. Initially, the machines were designed for computing power, Argo said.

Griid Infrastructure and Block (formerly Square) have been named as other first customers.

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The firm said when using Infura as an RPC on MetaMask, a user’s IP address and wallet address information would also be collected.

One of the firms behind the Ethereum merge, ConsenSys, said on Thursday that it also collects user data related to its on-chain wallet service MetaMask.

The revelation comes days after decentralized crypto exchange (DEX) Uniswap made a similar update to its privacy policy, as reported.

ConsenSys said that it collects some data related to user identification, such as contact details, profile information along with some other user data.

The firm added that when using Infura, which is the default remote procedure call (RPC) provider, on digital wallet MetaMask, Infura will collect the user’s IP address and Ethereum wallet address for transactions. RPC is a protocol for requesting data and information from a program running on a third-party computer server.

If a user switches to a different RPC on MetaMask the financial data will not be collected. Blockchain tool developer Infura and the digital wallet MetaMask are both products that are offered by ConsenSys.

Meanwhile, Crypto Twitter community members expressed displeasure at the move, which some felt invaded a user’s privacy — one of the core ethos of the crypto space.

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USDA would be the first fully fiat-backed, regulatory-compliant stablecoin in the Cardano ecosystem, Emurgo said.

Emurgo, the official commercial arm and a founding entity of the Cardano blockchain, plans to launch USDA, a U.S.-pegged stablecoin, in early 2023.

USDA will be the first fully fiat-backed, regulatory-compliant stablecoin in the Cardano ecosystem.
“The introduction of a fully fiat-backed, regulatory-compliant stablecoin is the next step in realizing the future for our community,” wrote Emurgo Fintech Managing Director Vineeth Bhuvanagiri, in a note to CoinDesk.

Stablecoins are tokens backed by an asset, or a basket of assets, and pegged to fiat currency, such as the U.S. dollar. They serve as an entryway to the crypto market for traditional market participants and are extensively used within the ecosystem as instruments for trading, borrowing, and lending.

USDA is part of Emurgo’s Anzens product, a broader plan that would offer users several financial services and products functioning on Cardano-based assets. These plans include lending and borrowing services, crypto-based card payments and bridges between traditional markets and decentralized applications (dApps).

This could help bolster Cardano’s decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem, which locks just over $53 million in value as of Friday, as per DeFiLlama data. That’s an 82% slide since March highs of over $300 million.

USDA is planning to launch on the Anzens platform in Q1 2023 where users will be able to tokenize their USD into USDA via credit/debit cards, wire transfer or conversion of ADA, Emurgo said.

Emurgo has partnered with a regulated financial services company based in the United States as the banking partner to issue USDA, ensuring the stablecoin is fully compliant and adheres to regulatory guidelines, Emurgo said, without naming the company.

Alongside the tokenization of USD, Emurgo will soon enable the conversion of other stablecoins, such as USD Coin (USDC) and tether (USDT) to USDA, with long-term plans to enable conversion and swaps of cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, ether and other cryptocurrencies.

The move comes months after Emurgo told CoinDesk on the sidelines of Singapore’s Token2049 conference that it would invest some $200 million in the Cardano ecosystem in the coming months to increase network participation.

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The attacker appears to convert the illicitly gained funds around the same time every day.

Whoever was behind last week’s $600 million exploit of crypto exchange FTX converted over about $7.4 million worth of BNB tokens into ether (ETH) and binance USD (BUSD), a U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoin, on Thursday.

Some 10,000 BNB tokens were converted into 2,000 ether, worth over $2.4 million at current rates, and a total of 19,714 BNB became $5 million of BUSD over two transactions. The BNB and BUSD tokens form the backbone of BNB Chain, a blockchain network closely related to the crypto exchange Binance.

It is not clear why the attacker is swapping the stolen funds and choosing to convert them to ether and BUSD specifically. No one has claimed responsibility for the attack.

The attacker, who carried the first conversion on Tuesday, seems to carry out the conversions at roughly the same time of day. The transactions on Tuesday and Wednesday occurred between 09:00 UTC and 11:00 UTC, as did today’s.

The funds were siphoned from FTX’s crypto wallets late Friday last week. Soon after, the exchange said on its official Telegram channel that it had been compromised, instructing users not to install any new upgrades and to delete all FTX apps.

Multiple addresses connected to the accounts drainer started moving funds on Tuesday, swapping it to over 34,000 ether. The address now holds more than 290,000 ether and is currently the 34th-largest owner of the cryptocurrency.

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The price of some 67 tokens dropped more than 90% following their issuance, on-chain data shows.

A new class of Shiba Inu-inspired tokens was birthed on BNB Chain and Ethereum this Tuesday a related tweet by technology billionaire Elon Musk.

Names like “BabyDogeTwitter,” “dogenaldtrump,” “SpaceTwitterDoge,” and “ElonDogeTwit,” populated the two blockchains after Musk tweeted an image of a Shiba Inu dog wearing a Twitter T-shirt in front of a classic Halloween pumpkin with the social media platform’s bird logo etched on the side of it.

Blockchain security firm PeckShield said in a tweet in Asian afternoon hours that over 67 of such tokens fell 90% in the hours following their issuance, with 45 tokens falling 100%. This cumulatively led to losses of thousands of dollars among investors who punted on the newly-issued tokens in hopes of a long-term price appreciation.

Over 42 tokens were marked by PeckShield as honeypots, a term that describes illicit tokens that change permissions on unsuspecting users’ crypto wallets, with the goal of eventually transferring all their crypto tokens out of those wallets into one controlled by a scammer.

Musk’s tweet also sparked off a rally in dogecoin, which jumped over 14 cents to gain more than 23% in the past 24 hours. Floki Inu, another Shiba Inu-themed token, also surged by a similar figure, while Shiba Inu’s SHIB tokens jumped 8%.

Such irrational exuberance came amid a relatively flat crypto market, with bitcoin and ether rising nominally in the past 24 hours.

Musk has been a major supporter of DOGE, which has become a proxy for sentiment about him. The entrepreneur’s statements about the token have also consistently influenced its price, as previously reported.

Dogecoin has been on a run ever since Musk confirmed his takeover of Twitter last week, with the token’s futures racking up over $90 in liquidations over the weekend in an unusual move.

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On-chain data shows that four projects affected in the attack received the stolen tokens over the weekend.

The attacker behind last week’s $14.5 million exploit of crypto launchpad Team Finance has returned some $7 million worth of tokens to four projects over the weekend, data shows.

Team Finance suffered a $14.5 million exploit in relation to a smart contract bug in its migration feature, as reported.

Blockchain security firm SlowMist said in a tweet on Monday that the attacker termed themselves as a “whitehat” on messages stamped on transactions. A whitehat is an exploiter or hacker that attacks any software with an intention of making that service better or more secure, as opposed to for nefarious purposes.

Over $765,000 worth of stablecoin DAI and 11.8 million TSUKA tokens were returned to blockchain protocol Tsuka, which confirmed the receipt. NFT marketplace Kondux received 209 ether (ETH), or 95% of the stolen funds, while Feg Token received 548 ether.

Caw Coin, which took the biggest hit during the exploit, received over $5 million worth of DAI and 74.6 billion CAW, its native tokens.

The attacker confirmed the deposit addresses of all affected projects in several blockchain messages, viewable here. The messages were generally incoherent, but the attacker said they would keep 10% of the stolen funds as a bounty.

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