Then there’s the shakedown of wildly expensive, proprietary inkjet-cartridges, a substance “more expensive than vintage Champagne and even human blood”.

Printers are thus weird outliers in world where most other consumer tech has gotten better over time. Processors have gotten faster; hard drives have plummeted in price. Name nearly any tech category, and it’s better and cheaper than previous decades.

But not printers. They were wretched ten years ago, and they’re wretched still.

Why?

It’s kind of interesting, really. I’ve been low-key reading and researching this for years and years, and the upshot is there’s no single reason printers are so lousy. It’s more a constellation of interlocking and reinforcing reasons.

But the Four Big Reasons Printers Are Wretched are …

The dedicated work that our engineers and the entire team at Kaddex has put in over many months has brought our vision for a new DeFi ecosystem into reality.

We have learned so much through the creation of Kaddex, and we expected that the learnings would continue today. But the level of activity and attention we saw today had us learning more than anticipated. After all is said and done, the team has learned a tremendous amount about how to make a more robust infrastructure set up that will help us scale into the future easily and without hiccup.

Below is a synopsis of what occurred 👇

Prelaunch

Right before launch and leading into the smart contracts going live, there was a large uptick of cross-chain transactions. Many of these transactions were failing or were trying to complete an already completed cross-chain transfer. This caused a lot of unanticipated network congestion leading into the initial launch.

Launch

Once we launched, a misconfiguration on our load balancer (which routes traffic to our then 3 nodes) caused a “false health check”, making it think a healthy node was failing. This crippled our ability to handle traffic at the first critical moments at launch. This was very unexpected for our team, as this load balancer has been working fine with this configuration on the beta for months. This was quickly fixed.

Right after this, the node response time very quickly shot up to 10 seconds or more per request. This usually happens where there are too many /local calls (queries to the blockchain state) being made at once. To fix this, we tried spinning up more nodes (going up to 9 nodes) but the response time remained high. This will require a bit more investigation as it only affected chain 2 and not other chains.

This was exacerbated with some inefficient calls on our website attached to the analytics and pool statistics which very quickly overloaded our nodes with a flood of calls. This has been fixed, and the front end is much more call efficient.

This also impacted X-Wallet users, specifically checking for balances and switching between chains, which kept some users from connecting to the DEX, if they were able to gain access.

In the end, we transitioned our node support to Flux, whose decentralized node network quickly came in to save the day.

We thank you all for your patience and support on this momentous day. We celebrate the start of Kaddex, and the future of DeFi on Kadena. And as a result of these changes, we are now better positioned to run the world’s most incredible DEX.

Recap of smart contract market dynamics

The current situation in the L1 landscape: The total market capitalization of smart contract L1 blockchains was valued at ~$400bn as of 2021 (likely declined by at least ~50% in aggregate to date). Ethereum is the largest smart contract L1 blockchain in terms of users, activity, total value locked (“TVL”). Continued demand for block space has led to network congestion and users are faced with high gas fees due to Ethereum’s capacity constraints — this is the underlying problem statement.

As of today, the current solutions to resolve Ethereum’s lack of scalability include:

1. Increase block size: Short-term band-aid solution; may compromise security as it makes blockchain node software more resource intensive.

2. L2 roll-ups: Optimistic (fraud proofs — e.g. Optimism, Arbitrum), Zero-Knowledge (“ZK”; validity proofs — Starkware, Immutable X, LoopRing, zkSync).

3. L2 sidechains: Polygon (fka Matic Network; note uses Plasma as well as Optimistic and ZK roll-ups but technically operates in parallel to the mainnet and has its own consensus mechanism and security framework is not dependent on the L1, hence distinct to aforementioned L2 roll-ups).

4. ETH 2.0: Changing Ethereum’s architecture from a single chain to multichain, initially through execution sharding; now data sharing is being considered. Ethereum’s consensus mechanism will also change from Proof-of-Work to PoS. More on ETH 2.0 here.

It is still unclear which of the above will dictate Ethereum’s future shape and form e.g. if Ethereum were to be roll-up centric, then the L1 will only be used for data availability and security while transaction execution takes place on the L2 protocols. This technical debt has therefore seen the emergence of alternate L1 blockchains. Notably Binance Smart Chain (“BSC”), Solana, Avalanche, Algorand, Cosmos, Fantom, Near— Aptos being the newest to enter the market.

1. Completeness — if the statement is true then a prover can convince a verifier

2. Soundness — a cheating prover can not convince a verifier of a false statement

3. Zero-knowledge — the interaction only reveals if a statement is true and nothing else

A ZKP protocol

For example, Alice wants to convince Bob that she knows Carol’s phone number. She calls Carol. Then Carol’s phone rings and shows it’s Alice calling. In this way, Alice proves to Bob her knowledge of the phone number without revealing what the number is. It is also a ZKP protocol.

When we talk about ZKP in the context of blockchain, it often refers to a particular branch of algorithms within the definition. These algorithms are called zkSNARKs (Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge) in most cases and have the following properties.

1. Non-Interactive proving process. The proving process only needs the prover to send a proof to the verifier.

2. Succinct proof. The proof has a small size, and verifiers can quickly verify it.

3. Programmable statement. The algorithm can convert any statement into a QAP (Quadratic Arithmetic Program) for proving.

You can refer to “awesome zero knowledge proofs” for detailed ZKP algorithms used in blockchains. Their development follows such a trend: the computation speed is getting faster, the reliance on the “trusted setup” is getting lower, and the proof size is getting smaller. Some algorithms and their related projects are listed as follows.

1. Pinocchio (ZCash Sprout version): the earliest introduction of ZKP to the blockchain.

2. Groth16 (ZCash Sapling version, Filecoin): faster than Pinocchio.

3. ZK-STARKs (StarkWare): no trusted setup.

4. PLONK (zkSync), Marlin (Aleo): universal trusted setup

5. Halo 2 (ZCash NU5 version): no trusted setup, recursive

ZKP has properties suitable for the blockchain. First, compared to other proving systems like Merkle proof and signatures, ZKP is able to prove any statement, bringing varieties to the on-chain logic. Second, its proof is succinct, costing less gas when verified on-chain.

The earliest usage of ZKP emphasizes its feature of zero-knowledge, proving transaction validities without revealing any transaction information, for example, ZCash. Later, ZKP experienced a bottleneck period. People find that blockchain privacy is not strongly needed, and ZKP is not user-friendly because it takes a long time to compute.

Recently, ZKP regained people’s attention because of its usage in blockchain scalability. By proving the validity of a large piece of data, ZKP scales the computation and storage capacities of the blockchain. Some proved data and their related projects:

1. L2 transactions: zk-Rollup projects like zkSync, StarkWare

2. L1 transactions: Mina

3. Off-chain data: Filecoin

Discussions on ZKP are very lively these days. Paradigm analyzes the hardware acceleration of ZKP and thinks FPGA is better than GPU and ASIC. a16z summarizes an overview of the ZKP. Presentations at “Zero Knowledge Summit Amsterdam” provide many thoughts and new ideas on ZKP.

Mining

This year, Ethereum will switch from PoW to PoS so that the blockchain mining market will shrink significantly. Although storage mining has emerged in recent years, including Filecoin, Chia, and Arweave, it is still unable to meet the market vacancy caused by the exit of Ethereum.

On the other hand, ZKP has some early applications in blockchain mining. There is a marketplace in Mina for ZKP workers to submit their generated proofs to earn tokens. In Filecoin, miners need to generate ZKP for every data sector stored off-chain, thus gaining storage power.

Mina ZKP marketplace

We can see that traditional hash mining is surrounded by controversies about energy-wasting, meaningless computation. Therefore, the blockchain area is trying to find a meaningful mining method. The properties of ZKP (proving arbitrary statement, complex proving but simple verification) provide more possibilities to the blockchain mining market.

Opportunities

We are focusing on some ZKP mining projects this year.

Filecoin

Filecoin leverages ZKP to prove off-chain data through algorithms named Proof of Replication and Proof of Spacetime. We think Filecoin mining will continue to be popular this year for three reasons:

1. Due to its economic model, the sector pledge has decreased from 0.25 to 0.16 FIL in the past year.

2. The price of FIL has dropped significantly, further reducing its mining cost.

3. The roadmap of FVM smart contracts brings a positive signal to the project.

Sector Initial Pledge Variations (FIL/32GiB)

Aleo

Aleo starts the first “Proof of ZKP” mining mode in which the miner’s computing power is determined by how many proofs it can compute per unit of time. The mining algorithm is named PoSW (Proof of Succinct Work) and can be described in short as follows:

pseudo_random(zk_prove(nonce)) < target_difficulty

zk_prove() is to generate a proof of “the current block containing its transactions” with nonce as its input. target_difficulty is adjusted according to the computing power of the whole network. You can see that PoSW and PoW are mostly the same, with the only difference being that PoW computes hashes while PoSW computes ZKPs.

In addition, Aleo developed the first “private smart contracts” Leo. Although there are other ZKP-based smart contracts like zkSync’s zkEVM, StarkWare’s Cairo, and Mina’s zkApps, none of them support privacy.

Decentralized ZK-Rollups

Current designs of ZK-Rollups are centralized: only specific operators can submit transaction batches and validity proofs to L1. Vitalik gives several suggestions for making the operator decentralized, like sequencer auction, random selection from PoS set, and DPoS voting. Both zkSync and StarkNet have clear roadmaps to decentralized ZK-Rollups. There are also some cutting-edge researches, like Polygon Hermes, StarkNet, PoVP, and taikocha.in.

Decentralized ZK-Rollups bring a new mining mode: miners can submit their generated proofs and thus earn rewards. It’s similar to the ZKP marketplace in Mina. But the marketplace is not the best solution since some proofs will be wasted due to no one buying. We need a parallel computing architecture for ZKP to aggregate power from all miners.

This is Nox, the CEO & Founder of BattleMancers. In this article, I will be talking about BattleMancers Genesis NFT collection.

This article covers:

1- Today’s NFT market 2- What is BattleMancers 3- What is BattleMancers Genesis 4- Utilities of BattleMancers Genesis 5- How to get one

Let’s get started!

1- Today’s NFT market Truth be told, NFT market is suffering heavily in the recent days. This is partly due to recent crash in crypto market, but there is another and more important reason; competition.

Firstly, most NFTs are traded on Opensea, the biggest NFT marketplace on Ethereum Network, and Opensea allows NFTs to be sold with ETH, SOL, MATIC or KLAY. It is not surprising that all NFT collections will be losing value when there is a bear market. Even if the floor price of a collection does not change (e.g. 2 ETH), a drop in ETH’s price will lead to a loss. Most investors are aware of this issue which only intensifies the sell pressure. Shortly, these are not the best days for NFTs.

However, there is another and bigger issue. Competition is getting really high in NFT market. There was a day when someone created a collection, people would do anything to buy a piece early. That is how some NFT collectors got rich by buying a Crypto Punk or BAYC. Furthermore, many NFTs were even sold only for their artistic attraction. That has tremendously changed and it is common to see many collections not being sold out nowadays. This is partly because there are so many collections out there and most collections do not either offer any value or fail to keep up with their roadmap and promises. Moreover, due to the popular demand, many scam projects entered the market for a quick cash grab. As a result, users are much more hesitant about buying into projects now because most projects make them lose money.

It all seems hopeless for NFT market but it does not mean that opportunities cannot be found. For example, when people stopped buying NFTs, we have started see some free mints. Why not give the collection for free and make money after if you cannot sell it in the first place, right? Similarly, the lack of interest also leads better and more based projects to appear since they have to prove that they can deliver what they promise in order to sell their collections. In short, the time for making easy money both for investors and for developers are now in the past. For investors, it requires a lot of research to find the next valuable collection, and for DEVs, it requires a lot of work and effort to present a collection worth buying. BattleMancers is one of the projects that requires work and effort. Let’s take a deeper look, shall we?

2- What is BattleMancers? BattleMancers is a play-to-earn tower defense game with PvP. The game is built in Unity and integrated to blockchain via Ethereum Network. Unlike most other crypto games, BattleMancers has an actual gameplay that requires strategy and real time decisions.

BattleMancers Game BattleMancers also addresses many issues experienced by the other crypto games such as controlling the inflation of in-game assets, offering an entertaining game experience, or allowing free-to-play options without damaging the investors.

BattleMancers has many cool features which needs a separate article to explain in detail, but let us say this; the whole purpose we build this game is to add value to our NFT collection, BattleMancers Genesis.

3- What is BattleMancers Genesis Collection BattleMancers Genesis is a collection of 10,000 unique commanders separated into 6 different races; Humans, Orcs, Elves, Dragonkin, Demons and Death Knights. BattleMancers will be in ERC-721 standards to enable trading on Opensea.

BattleMancers Genesis NFTs The collection lays the foundations of our game and unlocks play-to-earn mechanics as well as many other benefits. Most collections quickly lose value after launch due to not having sufficient use cases, and that is where BattleMancers Genesis collection outshines its competitors.

4- Utilities of BattleMancers Genesis High quality art is what most projects can offer because it is really hard and costly to offer a real product that can generate value. BattleMancers genesis does not only have top notch art, but numerous utilities to make it fun and profitable to own one.

So what are these utilities?

Some Utility Examples (a) Minting Rights: The most important utility of BattleMancers Genesis NFTs is to allow their holders to unlock play-to-earn features in the game. Everyone can play our game, but only those with a BattleMancer can mint what they earn and liquidate it on blockchain. That also brings along some tough decisions: will you open your lootboxes or sell them to others?

(b) Scholarships: We understand that many investors might not be gamers themselves or they might not have the time to play a game. BattleMancers Genesis NFTs can be leased to other players allowing P2E fans to earn from the game while the original owner of the NFT can make a passive income in the process.

(c) Staking: Our game has two currencies, BattleMancers Gem (BTMG) and BattleMancers Coin (BTMC). These tokens have a vital role to in the game economy. Both tokens can be earned by NFT holders via staking, and then, these tokens can be used in the game and/or exchanged in a DEX.

(d) Avatars: We have cute, serious, terrifying and mysterious BattleMancers. These are the NFTs representing you in the game as the commander of your armies. Having a BattleMancer NFT will allow players to set their profile avatar as their NFT and intimidate their foes.

(e) Special Lootboxes: Who does not like some unexpected gifts and airdrops? BattleMancer NFT holders will be receiving periodical rewards from the game as well as having access to new NFTs coming out after our genesis collection.

(f) DAO: Since these NFTs are the most valuable asset in the game, they will also have voting powers to take decisions about the future of the project.

(g) Alpha and Collaborations: As a team, we will be seeking out partnership opportunities after the launch, and any opportunities we find will be shared with our NFT holders.

There is even more use cases! But let’s keep some for later shall we? Now, you might be wondering how to get one of these NFTs.

5- How to get one The minting price of BattleMancers Genesis will be 0.1 ETH, and the collection will be released on August 30, 2022.

However, not everyone is allowed to buy one. The NFT sale will not be a public one, and users will need to get their ETH addresses whitelisted in order to participate in the private sale. Having a whitelist spot will ensure that when the mint day comes, you can buy one from the launch price. There are a few ways to get a whitelist spot:

(a) Join the raffle in Premint: Premint registers users for a raffle. If you are lucky, your ETH address will be whitelisted for the private sale. Go to the link and follow the steps:

https://www.premint.xyz/dashboard/

Premint Raffle Page (b) Follow us on twitter: To celebrate each milestone in our project, we are giving away whitelist spots on twitter.

Follow us now: https://twitter.com/BattleMancers

Example Giveaway Tweet (c) Hold an NFT from our partner projects: We will be having collaboration giveaways soon. Are you already an NFT holder? Let us know which community you belong to and maybe we will collaborate with them as well!

(d) Check Discord announcements: We will be organizing a series of events to reward our community not only with whitelists but also with free drops. If you do not want to miss these opportunities, join Discord now: discord.gg/qsxyMPnVYf

(e) Join us in our journey: Do you have some skills, resources or connections that can help BattleMancers grow? Contact us on Discord and we would be happy to reserve some whitelists spots for your contribution.

And that is it for today! I hope you enjoyed the article. If you want to learn more, feel free to contact us in our official social channels:

Official link: https://poap.xyz/

These NFT badges are issued to confirm attendance at the event, regardless of whether it was held virtually or in the real world. Each such badge is unique, which means that the only way to get a certain POAP is to be at the event. Collectors can quickly assemble their unique POAP collection, which documents their experiences of participating in events and traveling in the crypto space.

POAP are created using the ERC-721 standard used for NFT. However, in order for a NFT to be classified as a POAP, it must meet a certain set of criteria:

— it must be minted through the official POAP smart contract;

— it must contain metadata related to a specific time or date lasting up to one year;

— all POAP must have images associated with them.

POAP was originally created on the Ethereum network, but since October 2020, POAP have been created and distributed on the Ethereum xDAI side chain. Since xDAI is designed for fast and inexpensive transactions, issuers can create POAP for a very small fee. Thus, POAP are usually distributed free of charge to those who are eligible to apply for them.

POAP NFT can be considered as a stage of transition to Web3.0 as souvenirs of backstage passes of events or photos from events, digital collectible evidence of attendance can bring brands both short-term and long-term benefits. Viewed as mementos of the metaverse, along with VIP coupons, ticket stubs and photos after the event on Instagram, these blockchain-based tokens offer significant potential for fashion and beauty brands to stimulate user loyalty and reward them for participating in events. POAP was widely distributed at Metaverse Fashion Week (MVFW).

MOOW POAP Most recently, we have launched MOOW alpha test on iOS. In honor of this event, we had released 200 POAPs named MOOW Alpha Test Launch [07/15/12].

You can check out MOOW’s POAP collection in explorer:

https://explore.poap.xyz/0x80e02cd15abce158f5b87aae03586298a34a3d76/5359473

All testers who have managed to register their mails by July 15 had received a link from the mailbox: no-reply@moow.run.

To claim POAP you will need an Ethereum address, MetaMask wallet, and a few simple steps:

Follow the link from the mail, enter your Ethereum wallet address, check the box “free coinage in xDAI”, and click “Mint POAP token”. Congrats! You just have minted MOOW POAP NFT! To see your POAP in MetaMask, you need to add xDai network to MetaMask in its settings: Network Name: Gnosis Chain New RPC URL: https://rpc.gnosischain.com ID of the chain: 100 Symbol: xDAI URL of the block explorer: https://blockscout.com/xdai/mainnet To import your POAP into your mobile MetaMask:

1. Chose Gnosis Network (it’s xDAI)

2. Click “Import Token”

3. Paste address: 0x22C1f6050E56d2876009903609a2cC3fEf83B415

4. Symbol: POAP

5. Decimals: 0 Click import and enjoy your POAP! Official Links Website: https://moow.am/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/moow2earn Discord: https://discord.gg/CD6XwDzhSY Telegram Channel: https://t.me/moow2earn Medium: https://medium.com/@moow2earn Whitepapper: https://moow.gitbook.io/moow-whitepaper/