Lens Network to migrate to zkSync

On-chain social network infrastructure Lens is getting a new home.

The new Lens Network will build upon the work of the original Lens Protocol as one of zkSync’s ZK Stack hyperchains.

Lens Lab develops the protocol under the umbrella of Avara, which also built DeFi giant Aave.

But Avara CEO Stani Kulechov told Blockworks that the non-financial use cases of crypto — citing identity and online social interactions — have the potential to be even bigger.

“The way I think about finance and social [spaces] is that there are a lot of people who have financial capital, but everyone on the planet has social capital — the content we create, the relationships we create and the identities…

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Fiat Debases Marriage

The following is an excerpt on the debasement of marriage from “Fiat Ruins Everything” by Jimmy Song. Visit the Bitcoin Magazine Store to order a print, digital or audio copy of the book.

LOVE HAS BEEN debased.

In the past, love referred to the virtues present in enduring, intimate relationships. It demanded sacrifice, discipline, and patience. Classical writers saw love as a virtue because of its inherent difficulty. To paraphrase Apostle Paul, love is patient, kind, unenvious, and humble.59 Cultivating these qualities requires tremendous internal work and…

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Stablecoins bots are a feature, not a bug

A Bloomberg headline recently claimed that “more than 90% of stablecoin transactions aren’t from real users,” sparking concern about the authenticity of transactions within the blockchain ecosystem. 

This isn’t the first time that the digital assets industry has faced scrutiny about an apparent lack of authenticity in transactions. Last year, the SEC accused Binance.US of inflating trading volumes. Way back in 2019, a study by Bitwise found that 95% of spot bitcoin trading volume by unregulated exchanges was faked. Both findings have their detractors.

This isn’t the first moral panic around crypto’s legitimacy, and it won’t be the last.

However, a deeper dive into this…

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Developing Financial Privacy Tools Was Today Criminalized by the Dutch Court

In the Netherlands, open source developers are now liable for how their software is used.

Alexey Pertsev, a 31-year old Russian national living in the Netherlands and one of the developers of the Ethereum-based privacy tool Tornado Cash, was today found guilty of money laundering by the Dutch court: he’s been sentenced to 64 months in prison. The fact that Pertsev never held custody of any cryptocurrency flowing through Tornado Cash — or could even control how the smart contract operated — was deemed irrelevant by the panel of judges, as he did contribute to the development of the software.

In line with Dutch public prosecutor Martine Boerlage, the court ruled that Tornado Cash was…

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Bitcoin may stay in a ‘consolidation phase’ until US election: Novogratz

The upcoming US presidential election may spur bitcoin out of its current “consolidation phase,” according to Galaxy CEO Mike Novogratz.

Crypto will likely stay politicized until more Democrats pivot their anti-segment stance, he argued, meaning a change in administration could be significant for the space.

Novogratz said during a Tuesday earnings call that, following the approval of spot bitcoin ETFs and last month’s block reward halving, he believes bitcoin could keep trading between $55,000 and $75,000 in the near-term. 

The price of bitcoin (BTC) was at about $61,450 at 12:30 pm ET Tuesday.

“I think that’s probably where we are — certainly for this quarter and maybe…

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LATEST: Vitalik Buterin Proposes EIP-7706 as a Way to Improve the Ethereum Gas Problem

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has come up with a new protocol, EIP-7706, with an intention to overhaul the gas fee structure on the Ethereum blockchain. This new model introduces a third category of gas fee meant to be applied only to call data—that is, the information that gets relayed to smart contracts through transactions. That would be meant to help, in turn, reduce costs by segregating call data charges from transactions that are data heavy but light in computational demand. Further improvements in overall efficiency are synchronized in the management of execution, blob storage, and call data fees in Buterin’s dynamic model.

Currently, Ethereum has separate policies for the pricing of transaction execution, data storage, and access to data. EIP-7706 aims to unify the first two and build on them with the newly proposed call data fees. Call data costs being introduced explicitly may severely cut the theoretical maximum size of call data per block, which in turn may result in cheaper transactions on average.

This is in line with Ethereum’s constant moves to solve problems related to high gas fees that have always affected the network since its inception. The consensus of proof of stake was one such step, reducing costs, and this latest promise by Buterin only puts more credibility into those initial promises by further fine-tuning the fee structure to perfectly match the widely varying demands in Ethereum transactions.

EIP-7706