Welcome Reader, to the first post of Kintsugi’s “Featured Use Case” Series. Over the next weeks we will be sharing deep dives into Kintsugi kBTC use cases on Kusama — explaining in which DApps you can use your BTC to earn some of that juicy Kusama DeFi yield.
Disclaimer: As always, none of this is investment advice! Don’t try to buy tokens just because some dude on the internet wrote a blog with a few dank memes. DYOR! DeFi is fun — but you gotta stay frosty to avoid being rugged.
First things first: Kintsugi, interBTC’s canary network on Kusama…
11 June 2021
We’re excited to announce the first edition of the Interlay Dev Newsletter! As Kusama auctions come closer and closer, interBTC development progress has exploded over the past weeks. To keep our community up to speed with all things that are happening at Interlay and PolkaBTC (now interBTC!) we have launched a bi-weekly dev newsletter.
To stay up to date even better, follow us on Twitter or join our Discord community channel!
News
PolkaBTC >> interBTC: we have started to rebrand polkaBTC to interBTC to emphasize that interBTC will be available not only on Polkadot, but also on Kusama…
In this article, we attempt to provide a high level comparison of the three most actively discussed interoperability protocols for communication between smart contract capable blockchains: XCMP (Polkadot), IBC (Cosmos), and Optics (Celo).
There exist numerous implementations of cross-chain communication between smart contract chains, mostly between Ethereum and another EVM blockchains. These include, but are not limited to, Near’s Rainbow bridge, Polkadot’s SnowBridge, and Cosmos’s Gravity bridge. We do not discuss these in detail — they function similarly to IBC, which describes a more generically applicable standard.
Cross Chain Communication: Model and Impossibility
Before we dive in, it is critical to understand that cross-chain communication is…
“This is the day people finally realize why we need DeFi” — this is the message that has been broadcast (in various forms) all over Twitter following the GME showdown. “The people have finally realized that the “free” market is actually not free”.
As someone who has dedicated his entire time to decentralized systems since 2014, I was just as hyped as the majority of DeFi proponents on Twitter. The events around GME were a public display of why the financial system is not a “free” market, and why the “little man” will ultimately lose when playing the “suit’s game”…
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What a year to start a company. Global pandemic, economic crisis, DeFi hype, Bitcoin ATH… 2020 was a roller-coaster ride all way long. Nevertheless, 2020 was a fantastic year for Interlay.
Interlay has been growing fast (even “aggressive” as some would say). We started as two PhDs with a vision and have grown to 10 people, surpassed all revenue targets, closed the year with profit — and are just getting started.
From PhD to Start-up Life
Dominik and I met in London in October 2017 — we were the first two PhDs in the Imperial College’s cryptocurrency research lab. For two years we worked on…
At Interlay, we envision a future where permissioned and permissionless blockchains, regardless of design and purpose, can seamlessly connect and interact. Over the past months, we have been hard at work building novel cross-chain DeFi products and expanding our team.
We are pleased to announce our new Head of Operations: David Garai.
David started his career as a magic-circle lawyer at Allen & Overy, where he advised investment banks, multinational corporations, blockchain startups and VC funds on market-leading transactions and financial regulations. …
The general idea of reusing proof-of-work such that the computational effort invested may also serve to verify a separate computation was first introduced by Jakobsson and Juels under the term bread pudding protocols in 1999. The selected terminology points towards the main idea of the scheme: reuse computation by-products to minimize wasted resources. In the context of proof-of-work, this means to recycle unused or stale computations and utilize them as proof-of-work for other tasks.
It is, however, necessary to differentiate between the concept of reusing the properties of the performed proof-of-work in a self-contained manner and without modification thereof, and…
Merged mining refers to the process of reusing (partial) PoW solutions from a parent cryptocurrency as valid proofs-of-work for one or more child cryptocurrencies. It was introduced as a solution to the fragmentation of mining power among competing cryptocurrencies and as a bootstrapping mechanism for small networks. Merged mining was first implemented in Namecoin in 2011, with Bitcoin acting as the parent cryptocurrency. One of the earliest descriptions of the mechanism as it is used today was presented by
Satoshi Nakamoto in a bitcointalk forum post. …
The idea of weak blocks was initially proposed by TierNolan (Pseudonym) in 2013 and later extended in Rizun’s subchain concept. Weak blocks represent otherwise valid blocks, which do not meet the target difficulty D of the underlying cryptocurrency but satisfy some lower difficulty D_weak, i.e. D_weak < D. Instead of being discarded, these blocks can be reused and exchanged between miners to potentially reduce transaction
confirmation times.
Weak blocks form so called subchains between consecutive full blocks by referencing the previous’ weak blocks block header in an additional pointer. Taking Bitcoin as example, full blocks have an interval of 10…
P2Pool is a decentralized Bitcoin mining pool and was announced and launched in 2011. In contrast to conventional mining pools, P2Pool requires no operator to verify each miner’s contribution to the mining operation of the pool. Instead, a network of peer-to-peer miner nodes is created parallel to Bitcoin and the proof-of-work of mining pool shares is reused for verification of each miner’s contribution.
The key concept behind P2Pool is the so called sharechain. The sharechain is a fully functional blockchain, which runs in parallel to Bitcoin but maintains a significantly lower difficulty D_share < D_BTC, targeting a block interval of…
