ON–048: DeFi (Part 2)

Coverage on Handshake, Polkadot, Celo, and Kadena.

Nov 20, 2020

Chain 9 processing more transactions from and to miners. Since last month, chain 9 has seen an increase in usage as mining pools have been distributing rewards on it. We anticipate seeing similar behavior as other participants on Kadena’s public blockchain migrate to various chains.

Sustaining adoption and interest in KDA. Following a spike in activity after the official listing of KDA on Bittrex Global, the project has maintained a steady momentum with regular product developments and partnership announcements. For example, at the end of August, the team announced that Kadena’s hybrid blockchain platform had scaled to reach 480,000 TPS. There are presently 49.2MM KDA coins in circulation.

Publicly available ASICs bring more mining output to Kadena’s public blockchain. At the end of October, Kadena informed our community of a 3rd party public ASIC becoming available for purchase. The difficulty chart clearly shows how the block difficulty, which is directly related to the hash rate, dramatically went up as miners began using the ASICs.

The horizontal pink bands that appear around the same time at the bottom of the nonce analysis graph show the distinct nonce signature that an ASIC miner generates. There has been a 100% increase in network hash power since the release of ASIC hardware.

Announcement of multi-protocol decentralized exchange, Kadenaswap. The DEX from Kadena will leverage the Pact smart contract language to interoperate with major DeFi protocols and coins such as BTC, CELO, DAI, DOT, LINK, and ETH. The exchange will launch in stages, including the creation of native decentralized bridges to Ethereum and other networks such as Cosmos and Polkadot. Kadena recently announced partnering with Terra to bring the Luna stablecoin to Kadenaswap, furthering the DEX’s value as a bridge between popular protocols. Progress on Kadenaswap can be tracked publicly.

The first two updates on Handshake were very oriented towards mining hardware, hashrate, and price. There’s been a ton of growth on-chain and off for Handshake, so we’ll be sharing insights broadly across the ecosystem so you can get a better signal on the rapid maturity Handshake. Handshake is now 40+ weeks old, with no mining 51% attacks; no major on-chain bugs; 0 protocol consensus failures with the HNS namespace (we even got our own Yahoo). Mining chain difficulty has also reached a new ATH of over 700milion. (Source).

The Handshake economy of scale is evolving at a rapid pace. If you’re familiar with the three body problem in mining from Anicca Research, you’ll see a similarly emerging mining economy of scale. Coupled with a decentralized naming economy, and all the composable economies of scales that follow it up the value chain, the Handshake network effect will be of the most lucrative and diverse we’ve seen in crypto to date. We’ve illustrated this concept using a repurposed version of their graphic to give you a 2D model of the naming/mining economy, so you can further understand its second order effects on actual states. (Source).

Many are unaware of Handshake’s complex to understand, but rather simple mechanism for minting and burning of the HNS asset. As new $HNS supply comes into the Handshake circulating supply, there’s a constant deflationary mechanism active which is burning $HNS as new names REGISTER into the Urkel Tree. (Source).

With the launch of decentralized name servers, additional browser support coming from Puma Browser which will bring HNS to iOS and Android, and a new HS3-SE mining rig from Goldshell.com, it’s been a very productive Late-Summer/Fall for Handshake. If you want to follow weekly for updates on Handshake regarding the Tech/Community/Naming Economy, check out our community weekly newsletter “The Shake”. The combined network hashrate has also now surpassed over 5PH, shattering my previous record of 3-4PH before the years end. (Source).

④ Handshake