Here I summarize what the leading blockchain companies have been blogging about and announcing during the last month.
Perhaps everyone was focused on Dencun this month, but it seems a bit sparse on new releases. If I missed any notable updates, don’t hesitate to let me know.
March 5th: End of support of Goerli testnet (Base, Optimism, Arbitrum, Ethereum, Polygon, Starknet, Polygon Mumbai) on alchemy. Users are encouraged to migrate to Sepolia testnet.
March 7: Base incorporated the Dencun upgrade on Day 1. It is projected to reduce transaction fees for users by 10-100x through enhanced data availability for rollups. Base and Coinbase teams began contributing to EIP-4844 in early 2022 and have been actively driving the initiative forward over the past two years.
March 6: Dune integrated with Aptos network and now has all of the historical data for us to query.
March 19: Dune partnered with Colorful Notion to bring Polkadot and Kusama relay chains onto Dune. The data is indexed by Colorful Notion but available on Dune to query. The complete set of Parachains “will be available soon”.
March 27: TRON Network data is live on Dune. TRON Network is a prominent blockchain for USDT (USDT on Tron) and the data will bring additional insights for stablecoin market analysis.
March 6: Revolut, the global fintech with more than 40 million customers worldwide, announced a new crypto offering in the UK and European Economic Area (EEA), Revolut Ramp, in partnership with the world’s leading self-custodial wallet, MetaMask. Revolut Ramp allows customers to on-ramp within seconds and purchase new tokens directly into their MetaMask wallets. Customers can purchase more than 20 different tokens, including ETH, USDC, USDT, SHIB, and 1INCH.
March 13: A summary of key points of Dencun upgrade with the interviews from the lead researchers. They discuss the EIP-4844, lowering of the transaction fees, data blobs, and how this enables full sharding in the future. Note, EIP-4844 will lower the costs for participating L2s to submit their data to the L1. Actual L2 gas prices are subject to policies set by that network.
March 29: Consensys published their comment letter to the SEC on the ETH ETF approval and whether Ethereum’s Proof of Stake (PoS) raises “unique concerns” of fraud and manipulation that the agency should consider.
March 14: Zodia Markets, a UK-headquartered institutional crypto trading business backed by Standard Chartered, has integrated Fireblocks to support the increased adoption of digital asset-based cross-border transactions.
March 1: Announced support for the Blast Mainnet. Blast is an EVM-compatible optimistic rollup that launched in November 2023 — a layer 2 network designed to provide native yield for both users and developers.
March 20: Quicknode added support for Starknet (Ethereum ZK Rollup Layer 2 that uses STARK proofs). Developers can now get Starknet mainnet and testnet nodes as a service from QuickNode.
March 25: Safe presents their case on how AI and their Smart Accounts will revolutionize crypto. More specifically, that the future of AI relies heavily on building AI agents on top of smart account infrastructures within the crypto space. According to September and October 2023 data, more than half of all Safe transactions on Gnosis Chain were made by AI agents. They highlight use cases such as autonomous agents, autonomous trading, gaming, and prediction markets and some organizations that are already using AI on top of Safe smart accounts. These include Olas, NIM Network, Composable CoW from CoW Swap, and Omen Platform.
March 28: The Safe token transferability proposal is up for a vote and if it reaches a successful vote by April 15, 2024, SAFE token transferability could be enabled on April 23, 2024. This would allow SafeDAO's governance tokens to be transferred freely. This was a long time coming since July 2022, as it was tied to achieving multiple key milestones.
March 15: Uniswap released a new research paper showing that their users swapping and LPing (Liquidity Providing) on L2s, did better compared to Ethereum even before Dencun. This is especially true for those trading under $125,000. LPing (creating and rebalancing positions) is both cheaper and more profitable on L2s. Uniswap highlights the drawback of multiple L2s that create liquidity segmentation that their in the works cross-chain Uniswap-X will solve.
March 1: 1inch announced improvements to the 1inch Swap and the limit order functionality. With these upgrades, 1inch users and integrators will have more efficient swaps and limit orders, saving up to 16% on transaction costs. They optimized the swap router to reduce gas costs when routing through Uniswap v2/3 and Curve protocols. They also upgraded their Limit Order Protocol, merging traditional limit orders and high-performance RFQ orders into one protocol.