Weekly Update - Layer 1 & Layer 2 News (Week 18, 03/05/2022 – 09/05/2022)

$BTC hashrate climbs, reaches halfway point towards next halving. $ETH dev Tim Beiko highlights requirements for seamless Merge. Cronos ‘Huygens’ mainnet upgrade launches successfully.

Key Takeaways

• Despite macro headwinds and a recent price decline, Bitcoin’s (BTC) hashrate continued climbing higher as the 105,000th block was mined — marking 50% of the journey into its next halving.

• In the Ethereum (ETH) AllCoreDevs Update 011, Tim Beiko highlighted the technical requirements needed for the Merge to happen in a seamless manner — continued Mainnet shadowforks without returning any errors.

• The Cronos mainnet upgrade  v0.7.0 ‘Huygens’ was successful. The upgrade introduces variable transaction fees depending on network utilisation and the performance of the node storage.

• Cronos (CRO) saw a +5.44% increase in total transactions to 39.29M. The total number of wallet addresses now stands at 761,368, up +3.93% from last week.

Highlights

• El Salvador announces new purchase of 500 BTC

• Meta’s Instagram to support NFTs from Ethereum, Polygon, Solana, Flow

• Polkadex wins Polkadot’s parachain slot

• Polkadot upgrade locks in parachain messaging major step forward for multi-chain interoperability

• NEAR’s April Town Hall Highlights

• Apecoin integrates with Polygon, DAO Board member says native APE chain was never discussed

• Cardano's first eUTxO cross-chain DEX goes live on public testnet: details

• Cardano to host two developer events ahead of Vasil hard fork

• Chainlink set to power Latin American real estate platform

Layer 1 Project Metrics

* % change is based on the difference between two subsequent bi-weekly periods

† Sum of P, X and C-chain total transactions

 ‘–’ denotes missing, unavailable, or incomplete data

Sources: Coingecko, Etherscan,Ethernodes, Terra Station, Terra Etherscan, Avascan, Solana Beach, FTMscan, BSCscan,CronoScan, Cronos Explorer, DeFi Llama

Layer 2 Project Metrics

* Figure refers to Lightning nodes with active channels

† Ronin is the sidechain developed by Sky Mavis for Axie Infinity

 ‘–’ denotes missing, unavailable, or incomplete data

Sources:  DeFi Llama, Polygonscan, Clark Moody Bitcoin, 1ML, Ronin Explorer, Coingecko, Optimistic Etherscan, Arbiscan, Boba Explorer, Andromeda Metis Explorer

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