In this week’s episode of “Mapping out Ethereum 2.0,” CoinDesk’s Christine Kim and Consensys’ Ben Edgington invite Alexander Blum, the managing director of digital asset investment fund, Two Prime, to discuss institutional interest in ether, regulatory trends in DeFi and key metrics to suggest ether is outperforming bitcoin.  This episode is sponsored by Unique One Network. Two Prime is a fund that only invests in two crypto assets, bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH). The firm also trades BTC and ETH options to further amplify the returns of their underlying holdings. Near the beginning of the ..read more

In this week’s episode, CoinDesk’s Christine Kim and Consensys’ Ben Edgington are joined by cybersecurity and privacy litigator Sean C. Griffin to discuss the regulatory environment of non-fungible tokens (NFTs).  This episode is sponsored by Unique One Network. Edgington bought his first NFT from English contemporary artist Damien Hirst. Hirst is expected to raise up to $20 million by selling 10,000 tokens worth $2,000 each. Upon purchase, the NFTs can be redeemed for a physical painting but only for a limited time period of one year. At the end of the year, Hirst will burn the correspon ..read more

In this week’s episode, CoinDesk’s Christine Kim and Consensys’ Ben Edgington are joined by Flashbots researcher Alex Obadia to discuss the noble yet futile fight to vanquish Miner/Maximal Extrable Value (MEV) on Ethereum.  This episode is sponsored by Unique One Network and Mimo. MEV is the additional rewards earned by miners as a direct result of their ability to reorder, censor or insert transactions into a block. Since November 2020, Flashbots has created research and built software to assess the impacts of MEV on the network, its users and decentralized applications (dapps).  Th ..read more

In this week’s episode, CoinDesk’s Christine Kim and Consensys’ Ben Edgington discuss mounting concerns over the potential for block reorganizations on Ethereum. They also discuss the lack of supply growth in the world’s largest stablecoin, tether (USDT), and the annual Ethereum conference in Paris, France, EthCC.  This episode is sponsored by Unique One Network and Mimo. Time bandit attacks are a Miner/Maximal Extrable Value (MEV) strategy involving the reorganization of past blocks. If the reward is great enough, Ethereum miners may be incentivized to propose competing blocks containing ..read more

In this week’s episode, CoinDesk’s Christine Kim and Consensys’ Ben Edgington interview Elina Sinelnikova, the Co-founder and CEO of Metis and CryptoChicks, about her Layer 2 scaling project and her role in bringing women into crypto.  This episode is sponsored by Unique One Network and Mimo. Metis, named after the Greek goddess of prudence and wisdom, is a Layer 2 solution to help boost the speed and lower the cost of transactions on Ethereum.  Sinelnikova called the Greek goddess the icon of her project and explained her goals to “move forward with the same spirit as Metis as well ..read more

In this week’s episode, Christine Kim and Ben Edgington chat with CoinDesk Senior Markets Reporter Omkar Godbole about the evolution of ether trading markets. The duo also discussed the earnings of CoinDesk’s Ethereum 2.0 validator in recent months and the ways validator reward dynamics are expected to change after the network’s first system-wide upgrade, Altair.   This episode is sponsored by Unique One Network and Mimo. “Compared to 2017, the [ether] market has matured and we have more sophisticated players,” said Godbole. “I’m not surprised by just how fast the ether markets have ..read more

In this week’s episode, CoinDesk’s Christine Kim and Consensys’ Ben Edgington discuss the activation of EIP 1559 on Ethereum’s test network Ropsten and two potential protocol-level changes impacting Ethereum 2.0 validators.  This episode is sponsored by Unique One Network and Mimo. The London upgrade containing Ethereum’s fee market change, otherwise known as Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 1559, was activated Friday, June 25, on the Ropsten test network. Kim noted early statistics about the activation of London on Ropsten, saying, “It looks like about over 80,000 testnet ETH was take ..read more

In this week’s episode, CoinDesk’s Christine Kim and Consensys’ Ben Edgington chat with the CEO and founder of Allnodes, Konstantin Boyko-Romanovsky. Allnodes is a blockchain node hosting, monitoring and staking service supporting over 25 cryptocurrency networks.   This episode is sponsored by PumaPay.io. Among the networks for which Allnodes provides hosting services, Boyko-Romanovsky said, the set up for validator nodes on Ethereum 2.0 was by far “the most stressful.”  “Ethereum 2.0 is like playing Diablo in nightmare mode. I didn’t sleep well for two months when Ethereum [2.0 ..read more

In this week’s episode, CoinDesk’s Christine Kim and Consensys’ Ben Edgington discuss why the term “validator” is a misnomer on Ethereum 2.0 and the different ways decentralization can be measured on a proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain.  This episode is sponsored by PumaPay.io. The community behind the PoS network, Avalanche, attacked Kim on Twitter for her use of the term “validator” when describing the growth of the Eth 2.0 network.  “The kind of comments I was getting was, Christine, you’re misleading and intentionally misrepresenting the growth of the Ethereum network. You don’t kn ..read more

In this week’s episode, CoinDesk’s Christine Kim and Consensys’ Ben Edgington interview Kosala Hemachandra, the co-founder and CEO of My Ether Wallet (MEW), about MEW’s two-step solution to staking on Ethereum 2.0. This episode is sponsored by PumaPay.io. “Whenever we see a bottleneck, whenever we see a problem, like an accessibility problem for us … that’s where we jump in,” said Hemachandra. “We’re like, okay, let’s reduce it down to three steps maximum and then let’s take [users] through these steps and then it'll make it easy for them to get into Ethereum and use Ethereum. Therefore, Ether ..read more