The Cross-Chain Roundup #19
Week Roundup (March 27 - April 02, 2023)
It’s April already and we’re here to face it head-on with a fresh slice of the news as it emerges from the simmering cross-chain cauldron. From the rise of black-hats-turned-white-hats to the mainstreaming of zk-based L2s, the cross-chain landscape becomes more beguiling by the day.
It’s not all roses out there: DeFi can still be a dangerous place to the uninitiated – and a lucrative one to sophisticated hackers with a nefarious tilt, as the Allbridge story shows. Thankfully, it’s also part of a more comforting narrative: hacks that have a happy ending. If that doesn’t warm your heart, the rest of this week’s bullish bulletins will. Let’s dive in.
📰Cross-Chain Updates
Moonbeam has unveiled its new dev assistant, Kapa. Powered by ChatGPT, it’s trained to answer almost any dev-oriented question on Moonbeam. Kapa is now available to the public on Discord. Kapa.ai has been trained on the entire Moonbeam Documentation, the Moonbeam Community Forum, and the Substrate Documentation so it can answer complex questions like “I’ve launched a new parachain, how can I set up an XCM channel to connect it with Moonbeam?”
It’s become popular to launch an NFT collection to mark the birth of a new blockchain network. Base did it with the unveiling of its Optimism chain and now Polygon’s following suit to celebrate the birth of its zkEVM. The NFT, which can be claimed for free on Fair.xyz, is titled “To Ethereum, with Love” and will mark many users’ first transaction on the zkEVM.
Web3 infrastructure provider Ankr has become an implementation partner for Polygon Supernets. These EMV-compatible sidechains are suited to app deployment, without the risk of the main chain causing bottlenecks. With Ankr providing the infra, app developers will be free to focus on their product without getting bogged down with spinning up nodes, APIs, and all the rest.
Decentralized storage network Filecoin has confirmed that Axelar and Celer Network will be launching on its FVM. Interoperable with more than 30 chains for cross-chain messaging and liquidity, the FVM allows Filecoin to provide compute and storage to other chains. Celer’s bridge already supports the Filecoin Virtual Machine, with Axelar’s entry providing another option for FVM users.
Allbridge was hacked for $573K this week by an attacker who stole $283K of BNB and around the same amount of USDT. Allbridge has now offered the attacker a chance to become a white hat and receive a generous bounty if they return the funds. Since this story broke, the hacker has contacted the team and returned 1,500 BNB.
Connext has revealed the winners of the scaling Ethereum hackathon at ETH Global. Projects that received awards include an AI NFT marketplace, cross-chain deployment tool, P2P chat, onchain referral system, payment solution, and cross-chain yield aggregator. The winner, RarX, proposes creating an advanced cross-chain NFT marketplace where you can generate an NFT with an AI engine and natively mint tokens cross-chain.
Polkadot is getting its first Wasm NFT launchpad. Paras is responsible for the platform that’s debuting soon on Astar Network. Written in Rust, Paras will provide a place for minting, buying, and selling NFTs. At long last, it appears Polkadot is finally about to get its first dedicated all-in-one NFT platform.
You wait ages for NFT innovation to happen on Polkadot and then two major developments break at once. Having won the latest parachain auction on Polkadot, Moonsama will bring its NFT-focused network to the Substrate landscape. NFTs launched on Moonsama are programmable and composable through both WASM and EVM interfaces. Even more excitingly, Moonsama Network will be the world’s first blockchain governed by NFTs.
📜Interesting Reads
The Game Theory of Airdrops (Thread)
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