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Since the summer of 2022, Zhao has been attempting to offload at least a portion of his shares, according to one individual that spoke with The Information.

The Ethereum network appears to have suffered a technical issue that, for a temporary period, meant that transaction finality wasn’t occurring.

The cause of the issue isn’t clear as of press time and Ethereum developers say the situation is being investigated. For now, network data and statements from developers indicate that transaction finality — referring to the state in which transactions can’t be changed — has returned.

“Finality has been restored,” tweeted Prysmatic Labs co-founder Preston van Loon. “We do not know the root cause yet, but something happened to cause several client implementations to work really hard to keep up with the chain.”

Data sources for Ethereum network activity show that the issue was experienced by validators. Validators propose attestations as the network processes transactions.

Data provider Beaconcha.in shows that Ethereum epochs 200,552 thru 200,554 saw a steep drop in the number of attestations received. The first problematic epoch was at 4:13 p.m. ET. The issue was resolved within a half hour, network data shows.

EthereumPools.info tweeted that “[f]or a couple of epochs almost every pool/operator that we monitor went offline.”

In the wake of the incident, community members pointed to client diversity — meaning a variety of software clients available for use by validators — as a reason for why the issue wasn’t more widespread or long-lasting.

This story is developing.

© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

MakerDAO, the decentralized platform responsible for the DAI stablecoin, published a broad roadmap on Thursday for a major update dubbed Endgame.

Designed to “enhance efficiency, resilience, and participation,” the update will use AI tools and apply them to “open, scalable processes.” The plan’s short-term goal is to become the most widely-used stablecoin project within three years. 

“Endgame will streamline and parallelize the Maker Ecosystem, launching a new unified brand identity and the flagship release of 6 new SubDAOs that can be farmed by users and that will spearhead permissionless innovation and collateral allocation,” MakerDAO co-founder Rune Christensen said in a forum post. 

The upgrade will ultimately lead to the deployment of a new blockchain “that is tightly coupled to Ethereum while increasing the governance security of the ecosystem and implementing the full range of advanced Endgame features and tokenomics,” Rune added.

MakerDAO’s first step to Endgame

As a first step, a beta launch set to arrive within several months will focus on establishing a unified brand for the ecosystem.

While the Dai stablecoin and MKR governance token will not be altered, an upgrade to new versions currently being called NewStable and NewGovToken will be possible.

NewStable will be “a new ERC20 wrapper of the same underlying stablecoin as Dai,” while NewGovToken will be a “a redenominated version of MKR with a larger supply.”

“Maker and Dai are established and trusted brands in the cryptocurrency space,” Christensen wrote. “Unfortunately they have drawbacks, including having two separate brands rather than a single cohesive concept. The Endgame transition is the ideal time to fix this fundamental issue.”

Following the beta, a second phase will see the launch of six so-called SubDAOs that will function as “born-decentralized, specialized divisions within MakerDAO.”

The plan aims to remove costs and complexity related to daily operations and delegate away “the bulk of complexity and risk.”

Plans for AI tools, new blockchain

A third phase will see the introduction of AI tools for governance monitoring and improvement, while a fourth phase will launch a program for governance incentives. 

A fifth and final phase will see the deployment of a new blockchain, currently being called NewChain.

The chain will have the ability to use hard forks as a governance mechanism, and it will also have features that optimize it “as a backend for AI-assisted DAO governance processes and AI tool users, including smart contract generation, state rent and in-protocol MEV capture.”

“The launch of NewChain will be the last step in the Endgame launch process, and once it is deployed MakerDAO will permanently enter the Endgame State where further major changes are impossible, and its core processes and balance of power remain decentralized, self-sustainable and immutable forever,” Christensen said.

© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, one of the most influential business advocacy groups in the country, is taking up the banner of digital asset critics of U.S. regulation, and blasting the Securities and Exchange Commission’s approach to ether, Coinbase, Kraken and the broader digital asset industry. 

The association lent its support to Coinbase’s lawsuit against the SEC for a response to a request for crypto-specific rulemaking. 

Coinbase filed a rare writ of mandamus lawsuit against the SEC last month following up on a request made last summer for new rulemaking specific to digital assets. 

In its own filing to the court in support of that suit, the Chamber argues that the lack of direct response from the SEC to Coinbase’s request “is causing substantial economic harm to both Coinbase and the broader business community.” 

The Chamber also criticizes the commission’s enforcement action against Kraken’s staking-as-a-service business. The company settled and ended that business line in the U.S., but the Chamber criticized the action as emblematic of an aggressive SEC enforcement stance that could force more digital asset companies to end offerings in the U.S. 

Ether-eal ambiguity

The business group also blasts the uncertainty around ether, the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, and the major area around digital assets where SEC Chair Gary Gensler has taken a different tack from his predecessor, Jay Clayton. Under Clayton the SEC took a stance that ether may be sufficiently decentralized as to no longer be a financial security, whereas Gensler has strongly indicated otherwise while declining to explicitly express his opinion one way or the other in a recent congressional appearance. 

“Ether has been around for almost a decade, has a market capitalization exceeding $220 billion, and is a fundamental building block in the industry,” the Chamber’s brief reads. “Yet despite the ubiquity of ether, regulators still cannot agree on what it is.” 

The brief notes the shift in tone around ether from the SEC, the agency’s disagreement with the CFTC over the digital asset, and Gensler’s recent ambiguity before Congress and to reporters afterwards over whether ether is a security or not. 

The amicus brief filed earlier this week also piggybacks on one of the arguments the crypto trading platform makes in its own suit, that the SEC has already made up its mind on whether or not to issue a rule but declined to formally respond to the request, due to public statements by Gensler that current financial markets laws are enough to regulate digital assets. 

Coinbase could challenge the agency’s decision in court, though that would likely be a lengthy process. But the company chose to gamble with the preemptive lawsuit against the SEC now, and fight on its own terms, rather than wait on whether an investigation into several of its business lines would result in an enforcement action.

© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Developers resolved the finalization issues and are investigating what caused the outage.

BTC has been trading largely below the psychologically important $30,000 mark since late April, as investors wrestle with recent bank sector debacles and other macroeconomic uncertainties.

Ethereum is seeing a surge in staking activity following the Shapella upgrade that enabled validator withdrawals for the first time.

Thanks to that surge, the rate of staked ETH could double over the next 18 months, according to a new report.

Total ETH deposits during the week ending May 2 were four times higher than the amount added in the week before the Shapella upgrade last month. That data comes from a report by Staked, a non-custodial staking service provider and a subsidiary of crypto exchange Kraken. 

“Based on this increase in staking demand, we expect the ETH stake rate to increase from ~15% today, to the 20-35% range in the next 12-18 months, Staked said, noting that average daily deposits are currently 6.5 times higher than in April.

The company said 750,000 ETH had been staked in the six days following the Shapella upgrade. That’s more than the 600,000 ETH staked in the entire month of March. 

$1.8 billion in annual rewards

Staking, which Ethereum has described as a public good, refers to the depositing of 32 ETH — currently worth about $57,000 — to activate the validation software the network uses as part of its security model. I

Staking has been integral to Ethereum since the protocol was switched to a proof-of-stake-consensus mechanism last year in an event called The Merge.

After making the deposit, validators earn rewards for performing actions that help the network achieve consensus. The Block reported earlier this week that Ethereum’s staking rewards rate — a metric validators use to predict annual returns — hit a post-Merge record of 8.6%.

Ethereum currently generates about $1.8 billion in annual staking rewards, Staked said in the report.

Concerns about an “un-staking spiral” after the Shapella upgrade seem to have been dispelled, with the so-called “exit queue” falling to only about three hours after reaching a high of 10 or more days. Withdrawals of staked ETH can take longer if the demand to un-stake is high. 

As of May 2, a total of 1.97 million ETH has been un-staked, while a total of 1.65 million ETH was been staked for a net decline of just 320,000 ETH.

“As a result of the recent settlement with the SEC, Kraken was responsible for a majority of the early un-staking activity,” the report stated. “Coinbase and Binance have been responsible for most of the more recent un-staking activity.”

© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Musk says he’ll shift to being chief technology officer.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has so far disregarded congressional requests for information on its interactions with crypto platforms seeking registration as exchanges, according to Republican lawmakers in the House of Representatives, who threatened a hearing if they’re ignored any longer.

Uniswap, the decentralized exchange, outpaced centralized exchange Coinbase in April.