SEC - Page 280

Over the past six years, Binance has grown into a household name, becoming the largest crypto exchange in trade volume – transacting billions of dollars worth of crypto daily. Nonetheless, the exchange has faced a torrid six months since the turn of the year, with the exchange facing regulatory pressure from various jurisdictions, including the United States and Denmark, recently. 

The regulatory troubles, however, have not slowed the development of the platform one bit. In the past year, the Binance development team has launched over 200 upgrades to improve the trading experience, introduced hundreds of new tokens through its Innovation Zone, and integrated futuristic technologies to enhance security and provide a more seamless and frictionless exchange. 

In a letter penned to its customers this July, Binance stated its mission as “building an ecosystem of tools and information for anything you need in crypto”, and so far, the exchange is beating expectations in all areas. From providing users with educational content from Binance Academy and Binance Research to building a whole NFT marketplace with Binance NFT to offering a range of wallets and ways to pay with Binance DeFi Wallet, Binance Pay, Binance Card and Binance Gift Card, the exchange is building for the future. 

Notwithstanding, the exchange also introduced several updates based on real customer issues and feedback in the past year, aligning with its goal to make products for its community. 

A safer and secure exchange with new technologies

Binance has always worked to secure its clients’ funds and promote a safer transaction channel within the crypto ecosystem. Over the years, the exchange has introduced new technologies that make trading, staking, earning and getting information simpler than before. In the same breath, Binance is exploring new technologies to keep users “SAFU” – artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) being the latest to be integrated into the exchange. 

The exchange uses advanced machine learning to help the team detect suspicious language in communications on its peer-to-peer (P2P) exchange. Additionally, Binance leverages AI and ML technology to help detect potential payment scams, impersonation of customer service agents and other cases of malicious activity on its  P2P chat, P2P feedback and P2P advertisements. 

Notwithstanding, Binance introduced computer vision (CV) and AI to improve its customer screening during the  KYC process. AI and CV verify documents and videos when Binance users register with Binance. This technology has reduced the number of forged documents, hence reducing cases of money laundering on the platform. 

As well as bolstering security, Binance creatively leverages AI to help build new exciting and engaging features for its clients. In April, Binance launched its Chat GPT-like platform, Binance Sensei, allowing users to enhance their crypto knowledge by prompting the tool using text or voice commands. In addition, Binance also launched Bicasso, an AI-powered tool that generates your avatar, which can be minted to NFTs. 

Customer-driven upgrades on Binance

As alluded to, Binance gives its users an opportunity to contribute to the project’s development. Over the past year, the exchange has improved its features based on customer feedback, including Binance ID, integration of its DeFi Wallet, and building a faster, more efficient futures trading engine. 

Binance ID integrated the passkey technology to add a layer of security to users’ funds and accounts and protect them from potential scams and malicious activity. The passkey works on all devices and does not require a password, just other login systems such as Facial recognition or fingerprint. 

Following the improvements on Binance ID, the team also introduced a new upgraded DeFi wallet that integrates Binance ID and paskey technology, removing the complexity surrounding DeFi wallets by removing the need for a passphrase or seed phrases entirely. 

The exchange’s engineering team improved the Futures trading matching engine to make trading faster and more efficient for their users. The upgrades saw the engine’s capacity increase by 50%, increasing the transaction throughput, which allows more traders and bigger trade orders to be placed on the exchange. 

Finally, Binance oversees the continuous development of its platform – whether a small tweak or a big upgrade – to ensure it offers the best trading experience for the user.  Since the start of the year, Binance has launched nearly 200 new updates to make it easier to trade and access all the info a user needs on Binance.

Other Stories:

President Xi Jinping Advocates for CBDC Expansion

Arkham Introduces World’s First On-Chain Intelligence Exchange Amidst Huge Controversy

Bitcoin Attempts Fresh Breakout as Battle for Yearly Highs Intensifies

A blockchain developer claims to have reverse-engineered the source code of Brazil’s pilot central bank digital currency (CBDC) and discovered certain functions that could allow a central authority to freeze funds or reduce balances.

However, the developer argues that there might be situations in which these functions could be beneficial.

On July 6, the source code of Brazil’s digital real pilot project was made available on the GitHub portal by the country’s central bank.

READ MORE: Presidential Candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Admits Owning Up to $250,000 in Bitcoin

It was clarified that the pilot project was solely intended for testing purposes and that the presented architecture could undergo further changes.

Pedro Magalhães, a blockchain developer and the founder of tech consulting firm Iora Labs, claimed to have successfully reverse-engineered the open-source code of Brazil’s digital real.

He revealed several functions in the code, including freezing and unfreezing accounts, adjusting balances, transferring currency between addresses, and minting or burning digital real from a specific address.

Magalhães suggested that Brazil’s central bank would likely retain these functions for secured loans and other financial operations based on decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols.

However, he pointed out that the code lacks clarity regarding the circumstances under which tokens can be frozen and who holds the authority to execute such actions.

These aspects should be publicly disclosed in the smart contracts and discussed with the population, which has not been done yet, according to Magalhães.

The cryptocurrency community has expressed concerns that a CBDC could infringe upon financial freedom and privacy.

However, Magalhães noted that while these concerns are understandable, a CBDC could also offer certain benefits.

For example, it would make taxes more traceable, allowing the public to inspect the allocation of tax funds and purchases made by the state on-chain. This could enhance transparency in parliamentary amendments as well.

In July 2022, Fabio Araujo, an economist at the Brazilian central bank, stated that the digital real has the potential to prevent bank runs and provide a safer and more reliable environment for entrepreneurial innovation.

The digital real pilot is reportedly running on Hyperledger Besu, a privately operated Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible blockchain.

Since it is not permissionless like the Bitcoin or Ethereum mainnets, users would require the central bank’s approval to become a node, as explained by Magalhães on July 7.

Submit A Crypto Press Release

Despite monumental progress in the past few years, the most popular smart contract blockchains remain limited in their scalability prowess. New blockchains like Solana and Sui have been somewhat of a disappointment, while developers are looking for better frameworks than Solidity and the EVM.

In this environment, a new chain provides a completely new architecture for smart contract scalability: Vara. It wants to bring modern asynchronous computing to smart contracts, a first in the industry.

The traditional blockchain machine is sequential: each transaction is expected to be executed one after the other. You can’t create transactions that wait for some process to finish, so either it all gets executed in its spot in the queue, or it gets rejected (or reverted) outright.

This model applies both to Bitcoin and to the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), which have been some of the earliest blockchain designs out there. With some dubbing Ethereum as the “world computer,” over time people came to realize that it’s an incredibly inefficient one.

Since all nodes in the world execute the same sequential tasks, the performance of the EVM is laughable for modern computing standards. Ever since the early days of blockchain, the tech community’s goal has been to introduce parallel processing to the transactions, so that not every single computer is doing the exact same thing.

Ethereum’s roadmap is to scale by making, in a nutshell, more of these sequential blockchains using the EVM as their core. But other projects decided to tackle the core virtual machine architecture, notably Solana, Sui and Aptos. 

The goal for these projects is to ensure that, even if the exact same blockchain is replicated in all machines, at least it runs as fast as the machine itself.

Vara, a blockchain powered by the Gear Protocol, goes even further by adding fully asynchronous, multi-threaded transactions, which should provide developers much higher performance and flexibility.

Actor-based Processing Enables Modern Async-Await Programming

The key ingredient in Vara is a system that the team calls Actor Model, where an Actor can be a smart contract program, or a user’s wallet. Each Actor is an island of its own memory, which makes the blockchain much more efficient: each transaction can only modify the memory of the Actors it targets, while a global state system like the EVM has to keep literally every single contract in memory.

Actors communicate with each other by passing messages, which the recipient is free to accept, disregard or process later. This is a feature suited for secure parallel processing, as multiple Actors can send messages to another, but the target Actor will only process the messages one at a time. 

This asynchronous processing is available in Vara code through the Async-Await pattern, a modern web programming technique, which enables a huge amount of flexibility to developers, especially when it comes to off-chain interactions with oracles.

Requesting information from the Web is an inherently uncertain operation: it takes a long time (by CPU standards), it could fail, or it could freeze. Asynchronous programming is designed to deal with this issue, as you can just send the request, do other things, and collect the results when (or if) they arrive. 

Because blockchains are usually sequential, directly querying data is out of the question, so most projects rely on external and comparatively centralized providers like Chainlink. With Vara, oracles can be native to the blockchain’s code, which would make projects as decentralized as the chain itself.

Can Vara Stand Out Amongst The Competition?

From a technological perspective, Vara is similar to Solana and Sui, and to a lesser extent to Aptos, all of which are new blockchain networks that came after Ethereum. The Asynchronous model in Vara is more flexible for developers, for example enabling operations that span multiple blocks.

From a perspective of attracting developer talent, Vara has an edge over Aptos and Sui. Its smart contracts are based on WebAssembly, which focuses on Rust, a popular language used extensively in Web2 and Web3. While Aptos and Sui use Move, a novel language where few people have development expertise (and even fewer have good auditing experience).

Gear Protocol and Vara have been founded by Nikolay Volf, a core engineer at Parity who helped make Polkadot possible. The project is an active part of the large Polkadot community, and its founder Gavin Wood invested in the project. This gives it a good initial fit as it can attract its first developers and users from a well-established community, though Vara will be a stand-alone blockchain at first.

The market for alternative layer-1 networks has retreated in the past few months, as all the hype moved to the Ethereum layer-2 networks. Tokens like SOL, APT and SUI have fairly small capitalizations, and combined they have much less value locked in DeFi than just Optimism, the second largest layer-2.

But the woes of others may become an opportunity for Vara: its similarity to Solana may help attract its developer talent, now that the chain has been badly damaged by the FTX fallout. 

Vara has solid tech fundamentals, a consistent and well-made developer onboarding program, as well as the support of a passionate community. With the bear market, these factors start to outweigh flashy liquidity mining programs and massive capital allocations, as evidenced by SUI’s rocky start. 

Though it’s difficult to make predictions, at the very least Vara has all the ingredients to become a dark horse in the race for the most successful blockchain network.