Ton Network Suffers Outage
TON developers have restarted the network after a failure that prevented blocks from being generated for six hours. According to Justin Heon, the TON Foundation's chief investment officer, the network was overloaded due to massive DOGS transactions. To restore operation, validators had to clear their databases of outdated transactions and blocks.
On August 26, DOGS was listed on exchanges, which significantly increased the load on the blockchain - the number of requests reached 150,000 per minute, the developers reported. According to Mikko Ohtamaa, co-founder of Trading Strategy, TON could not cope with the load caused by the meme token airdrop. With a sharp increase in activity, the network's throughput reached only 280 TPS, which is significantly lower than the stated 55,000 TPS.
On August 25, the TON team changed the logo in its channels to an image of the Resistance Dog coin (REDO) in support of Telegram founder Pavel Durov, who was detained last week in France. The action brought attention to the meme coin, causing its price and trading volume to skyrocket.
Base Outpaces Other L2 Solutions in Number of Active Addresses
According to analytics platform Growthepie, the number of active addresses on the Base L2 solution increased by 45% in August, allowing it to surpass networks such as Arbitrum One, ZKsync Era and Linea.
Over the past 24 hours, more than 919,000 addresses interacted on the Base platform. In comparison, Arbitrum One saw a 1.6% decrease in active addresses, ZKsync Era saw a 32% decrease, and Linea saw a 63% decrease.
This sharp increase in activity is likely due to the launch of the Basenames domain name system. Base CEO Jesse Pollack reported that in the first week after the launch, users created more than 200,000 domain names in the base.eth format.
Record Stablecoin Capitalization — $168 Billion
The total market value of stablecoins has reached a record $168 billion, setting a new historical maximum. Interestingly, this figure has been showing steady growth for 11 months now. USDT continues to hold the lead among stablecoins. Since the beginning of the year, its capitalization has increased from $91.69 billion to over $117 billion.
BNB Chain Launches Cross-Chain Bridge with Celer, deBridge, and Stargate
The developers of the BNB Chain blockchain, supported by Binance, together with Celer, deBridge, and Stargate, presented the latest cross-chain solution. According to them, the project not only introduces a new bridge, but also creates a liquidity pool to improve the transfer of assets between different blockchains. They are confident that the integration of these protocols with BNB Chain will significantly expand the capabilities of the network, ensuring smooth and efficient transactions between different blockchains. In March, the developers also presented the Rollup-as-a-Service infrastructure, which allows for the creation of customized L2 networks within the ecosystem.
Buterin: Airdrops Should Be More Secure
Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, proposed a solution to eliminate the problems with airdrops using authentication methods. He emphasized that zero-knowledge proof technology based on cryptographic methods can significantly improve the level of privacy in such initiatives.
Buterin explained that the main goal of airdrops is to provide tokens to real community participants, not speculators. At the same time, it is important to reward real contributions to the project and maintain the principle of equality. Answering a question about the difficulties associated with such an approach, Buterin pointed out the multifaceted nature of the problem, which will change and evolve over time.
He also added that token distribution does not necessarily have to be free; the possibility of selling at a discount also exists. For example, a contribution to the development of the project can become the basis for determining the size of the discount on the purchase of tokens for a participant.
Bitcoin Mining Difficulty Increases by 3%
Since the latest update, Bitcoin mining difficulty has increased by 2.99%, reaching 89.47T. The block period since the previous update has dropped to less than nine minutes, and the average hash rate has reached a record 718.28 EH/s. This indicates that Bitcoin miners are actively adding new, high-performance hardware to the network.
For example, IREN, formerly known as Iris Energy, has increased its computing power from 10.5 EH/s on August 5 to 15 EH/s currently. This increase is due to the deployment of Bitmain's Antminers T21 and S21, which were ordered earlier and have a hash rate of 17.3 EH/s. Most of the new rigs were delivered between June and August, TheMinerMag reports.
