Polygon's main net London hard fork launching, what's it all mean?
Welcome to The Daily Forkast January 18th 2022.
I'm Angie Lau, Editor-in-Chief of Forkast.News, covering all things blockchain.
Well, India based blockchain scalability platform, Polygon's main net London hard fork went live
Tuesday Morning Asia time, allowing better visibility of transaction fees for users.
It also introduces burning of the native Matic token.
We're going to take a look at that story and a whole lot more coming up.
Let's get you up to speed from Asia to the world.
Well, let's kick off with some of the top stories coming out of Asia today.
First up, Binance is making moves into Thailand.
It's exploring a partnership with Bangkok based Gulf Energy Development to investigate
establishing a digital asset exchange in the country of 70 million people.
Despite the regulatory headwinds it has faced in its filing to the Stock Exchange of Thailand,
Gulf Energy said its expertize in setting up business in Thailand, coupled with Binance
technology, would help the country advance its development of digital assets and blockchain
infrastructure.
And Binance told Forkast.News the first step will be to explore opportunities in an open
and collaborative manner.
A clue to how it plans to strategically move into a country where it might not be welcome.
Just last July, Thailand Securities and Exchange Commission filed a criminal complaint against
Binance for operating a digital asset business without a license.
Meanwhile, South Korea's public broadcaster KBS is going meta.
It launched a metaverse version of its studios ahead of the presidential election in South
Korea in March.
Located within NAVERS Zepeto metaverse, the broadcaster aims to highlight awareness of
the election, with visitors able to check out virtual recreations of its news and political
talk show studios, as well as an outdoor stage which will host coverage of the ballot counting.
There's also the opportunity to learn more in the Presidential Election History Hall
and to challenge that knowledge by answering election related questions to escape from
a maze sounds very metaverse indeed.
And since Zepeto has over 250 million users globally, that's a lot of people who could
be brushing up on their Korean electoral expertize before March rolls around.
You can find those stories and a whole lot more at Forkast.News.
Well, India based Polygon's London hard fork has gone live.
The upgrade allows for more predictable gas fees, which could make Polygon more attractive
to developers.
It will also have a deflationary effect as it introduces burning of the native token,
Matic.
Forkast.News Monica Ghosh has more from India.
After trialing the upgrade on its Mumbai testnet, Polygon rolled out Ethereum Improvement Proposal
1559, commonly known as the London Hard Fork on its main net at Block 23.85 million.
The upgrade replaces the first price auction mechanism for gas fee calculation with a base
fee which depends on network congestion, meaning users can better estimate the cost of their
transactions.
They can also choose to pay a priority fee to speed up processing.
It has also introduced token burning for its native Matic token and with a fixed supply
of 10 billion tokens.
This will result in a deflationary effect, with one expert telling news that will benefit
holders, validators and delegates.
Following the announcement of plans for the upgrade in December, Matic spiked close to
the three US dollar mark.
However, it has since been hit by wider gyrations in the markets, but in the longer term, he
expects it to push back up with the supply reduced.
"I think it's not a story for the next two weeks, not the story for the next two months,
potentially in the next six months, we can start to see that thematic that we spoken
about the burning of tokens, the upgrade, the benefits which come from this, the the
more transparent processing fees, less spam and faster processing.
All of those things will drive the price higher in the longer term."
Matic's price was at US$2.20 shortly after the upgrade went live.
For Forkast.News, I'm Monica Ghosh Pune, India.
Follow the money that is every scam artists MO, and it is no different in crypto markets
and countries here in the Asia Pacific.
In India, authorities are looking into a $162 million alt-coin scam, over in South Korea,
prosecutors are demanding life sentences for seven people hot in a 1.8 billion dollar crypto
scam, and now a recent report by Chainalysis says scammers took advantage of DeFi protocols
to loot billions in 2021.
So what might we see in the year ahead?
Then let's find out with Kelvin Lam, CEO of Lithium Finance.
Welcome to the DeFi Download Kelvin.
Thanks for having me, Angie.
You know, it is certainly top of mind for regulators.
A recent survey of security regulators has found crypto scams to be the biggest threat
for investors and no doubt for everybody in the industry.
It's also a huge threat.
So why is that?
Why are the scams the biggest threat?
The primary reason for that is because crypto is going mainstream and put that into perspective.
I think the as we speak, the total market cap for crypto is over two trillion dollars
right now, and there was about a trillion dollars a year ago and less than two hundred
billion just a year before that.
So on one hand, we have these rapidly growing, relatively new and less understood market
with a lot of new investors getting in.
And on the other hand, these crypto assets are in full custody of the act of the users,
which is a good thing.
But unfortunately, it also means that law enforcement would be much harder if something
does go wrong and there's a less regulated space, if you will.
So overall, I think that percent, unfortunately, an excellent opportunity for these four actors,
making these less experienced investors highly attractive targets for scams and exploits.
And no doubt that is only going to increase this year as more and more people get into
the space.
Do you see the size or nature of these scams changing, though, in 2020 too?
What are the red flags to watch out for?
What the growth and value and volume in crypto?
I speculate that we will continue to see these scams.
Unfortunately, that SEC.
However, I think I'd like to think that investors are getting more sophisticated too.
So I'm hoping I'm hopeful that is illicit activities will become a smaller and smaller
share of the overall market.
At the same time, however, I also speculate that these bad actors are also getting better
and more sophisticated.
And in terms of the red flags, the ultimate bottom line is that if something sounds too
good to be true, that's probably the case.
And we probably want to watch out for projects that focused almost exclusively on price and
returns, but without much details on, you know, its utility.
The problem that is trying to solve and how they're going to solve that problem, and that's
particularly the case.
If you find only limited information on the people behind the team, that's always a red
flag.
Always do your homework.
I get that this is what we always say here at Forkast.
But you know, one thing is to do homework.
Another thing is to see a lot of hacking happen in this space.
Loopholes and DeFi protocols have been blamed for a rise in these scams.
So what's what's the industry's take here?
Loopholes and technical risks certainly are among the key risk factors.
Often, just like any other start ups, DeFi projects may prioritize speed of who perhaps
literally everything else, which sometimes unfortunately result in flaws and other witnesses
subject to exploits.
And these again presents excellent opportunities for bad actors, particularly and DeFi, because
very often significant amounts of money are involved.
Statistics that show that an ultimate protocols are much highly and much more likely to be
targeted for attacks.
About 80% of these attacks took place on alternative protocols as these audits are taken out to
identify vulnerabilities to avoid these attacks and make all these protocols much less susceptible.
The good thing that we see is that as the markets and users are becoming more sophisticated,
we're seeing more projects and investing time and resources and to audit as well as preventing
these attacks.
Add auditing to that arsenal of what to keep watch out for.
Thank you so much, Kelvin, for joining us to talk crypto scams and how to keep safe.
Appreciate it a lot.
And that's The Daily Forkast from our vantage point right here in Asia.
Thanks for watching us today.
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For more, visit Forkast.News.
I'm Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau.
Until the next time.