1) Review the history of Ethereum hard fork

On May 4, 2020, the number of blocks dug up by Ethereum exceeded 10 million. MyCrypto reviewed the history of hard forks of Ethereum in this article.

2) What is the next phase of Web3, interoperability?

This article by NFTY is short and suspicious, but it is meaningful. The author believes that the next stage of explosion of Web 3 is related to interoperability rather than composability.

The past month has seen more developments in the crypto asset space than ever before. This includes - the launch of multiple DeFi products including: FutureSwap, tBTC, Compound Governance, Curve, Balancer, Zapper; and the launch of some top smart contract platforms: NEAR and Solana.

So the question everyone starts thinking is: what's next? I believe we will see an explosion of Web3 applications enabled by Ethereum's middleware. The Graph, 3box, Unlock will drive this movement.

According to Block123,The GraphDesigned to help developers use GraphQL to quickly build decentralized applications on Ethereum and IPFS;3BoxIt is a distributed database infrastructure on Ethereum, which supports public and private data of Ethereum users and is scalable;Unlock is a blockchain-based access control protocol that enables creators to monetize their content or software without relying on middlemen.

We are on the verge of the next phase of web3, which I think has more to do with interoperability than composability. Interoperability enables developers to read and write data across protocols, creating entirely new applications never before possible. On Ethereum, much of the interoperability that will exist will be strictly around decentralized finance - so the ecosystem will stick to (product) building blocks like the Zerion DeFi SDK, (making it usable across applications) Financial assets/data just got simpler.

But more interestingly, the new smart contract platform has better scalability. With blockchains like NEAR and Solana, transactions and finality will be faster, giving users a Web2-like experience. Computation will be cheaper, allowing for more on-chain interactions. As more interactions happen on-chain, more transactions will occur, and then we can start reading data from applications that may have hundreds of millions of transactions per day.

And, we need middleware protocols (such as Unlock, 3box, and The Graph) that are compatible with these new smart contracts to help create new business models, new identities, and easy ways to share data between applications.

3) The stable currency heat map shows that Tether is mainly used in Asian and European trading hours

To analyze stablecoin usage as the market size continues to grow, Coinmetrics analyzed the on-chain transaction times of different stablecoins and created a heatmap to show their usage data over the course of the day.

Here are the relevant points:

• USDT-ETH (USDT issued on the Ethereum chain) has a clear usage pattern between 2:00-16:00 UTC, which corresponds to the opening hours of Asian and European stock markets;

• Prior to March 12th, PAX's on-chain transactions also seemed to be concentrated between 2:00-16:00 UTC (though less intensive than USDT-ETH), but by April, PAX's on-chain transactions had become more dispersion;

• Before March 12th, USDC was slightly denser during the US (market open) hours, but after March 12th, its usage increased significantly during the period 1:00-8:00 UTC, which is similar to that in Asia The opening hours of the market are consistent;

• The on-chain transactions of DAI are mainly concentrated during US working hours (UTC 14:00-22:00);

At the same time, Coinmetrics also analyzed the number of BTC/ETH held by different exchanges (reflecting user activity to some extent), and the results showed that the number of BTC held by Bitfinex and BitMEX fell to a new low after a sharp drop of 312.

4) Examine the on-chain transactions of highly scalable blockchains

Scalability has been a bottleneck for mainstream blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum. While several high-profile blockchain projects claim to have dramatically improved scalability, little is known about how their transaction throughput is being used.

In this report, the three authors examine the latest three-month network performance of three major high-scalability blockchains (EOS, Tezos, and XRP). Its analysis shows that only a small percentage of transactions are used for "value transfer" purposes. It is worth mentioning that 95% of on-chain transactions on EOS are triggered by an airdrop of a token that currently has no value; on Tezos, 82% of throughput is used to maintain the network consensus mechanism; only 2% of transactions in XRP are used to value transfer.

5) The Great M&A Movement: The DeFi Edition

This article attempts to explain why after experiments in the existing DeFi field, there will eventually be a wave of mergers and acquisitions dominated by leading DeFi protocols. Its interesting point is that it makes us think about what is the moat of DeFi applications?

The author enumerates the complete life cycle of an emerging industry: birth, scale, specialization, balance, and alliance.

The authors point out that existing synthetic asset protocols (such as MakerDAO, UMA, Synthetix, Yield, etc.) seem to follow a similar formula: require users to deposit collateral, use it to mint synthetic assets, and make the value of synthetic assets follow a pre-set price feed mechanism.

Although these protocols differ in the parameters that guide the minting and redemption process of synthetic assets, these differences include: the collateral supported (crypto-native cryptoasset/encryption of USD), the percentage of collateral that needs to be placed to protect the synthetic asset, and what A price feed mechanism, and how its price is determined.

The author believes that the protocol grows through network effects. The author believes that the DeFi protocol consists of two main components: collateral management and oracle management, both of which have network effects.

• It is better for protocols to have large, decentralized, liquid collateral pools rather than smaller, homogenized, illiquid collateral pools. The size of the collateral pool increases (asset) issuance capacity, diversification reduces risk, and liquidity increases security and usability.

• This is the end of this issue of Satoshi Mamoto's Notes, see you next time.

This is the end of this issue of Satoshi Mamoto's Notes, see you next time.