Three coins have risen to the top of the leaderboard: The Dogeson, a playful nod to Elon Musk, his son and Dogecoin; Shiro Neko, a cat-themed token tied to gaming and NFTs; and Orbit, a space-inspired coin.

These tokens topped the gainers’ charts on Saturday night. Here’s a closer look at each.

Dogeson

The Dogeson (DOGESON), a Doge-inspired coin named after an edited photo Elon Musk posted of himself and his son, X Æ A-12, is up more than 90% at last check Saturday.

With a market cap reaching $146.6 million, the token is built on the Ethereum blockchain and has garnered attention for its narrative of a “space-bound Doge” — meshing humor with a decentralized finance (DeFi) theme​.

Details about The Dogeson’s founding team or developers were not immediately clear.

Shiro Neko

Shiro Neko (SHIRO) is a new cryptocurrency project that blends blockchain technology with play-to-earn (P2E) gaming.

Its ecosystem is built around a native token that can be used for in-game purchases, staking, and governance.

It’s up over 83% at last check, with a market cap of about $441 million.

The project emphasizes a community-driven approach, immersive gaming experiences, and collectible in-game assets, including NFTs. It aims to attract both gamers and crypto enthusiasts through competitive challenges and real-world rewards​

Shiro Neko is also building on Shibarium, the Layer 2 blockchain for the Shiba Inu ecosystem, further anchoring itself in a popular crypto community. Additionally, the project is venturing into entertainment by launching an animated series featuring “Shiro” the cat.

The token recently had its Initial Exchange Offering (IEO) on Gate.io, with 88 billion tokens available for sale, representing 0.01% of its total supply of 1 quadrillion tokens.

This reflects a focus on early adoption and community-building in the crypto-gaming landscape​.

Orbit

Orbit (ORBIT) was up 77.6% at last check Saturday, with a market cap of roughly $44 million.

Built on the Blast Chain, the native utility token of the Orbit Protocol serves multiple purposes including facilitating governance, incentivizing participants, and enabling staking for rewards.

The protocol also boasts a Total Value Locked (TVL) of over $6.4 million and a fixed total supply of 100 million.

As of now, ORBIT’s market performance shows significant price fluctuations, with a 24-hour range of $0.02543 and $0.06379.

Dave Sandor, former executive director at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley for the Asia Pacific region, announced his new role as co-founder at OpenZK Network, a solution designed for ZK-Rollup scaling.

OpenZK announced Dave Sandor would be joining as co-founder to spearhead advancements in ZK-Rollup scaling solutions on X. Sandor has worked as an executive director at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to focus more on product structure, integrating institutional finance into potential decentralized finance. At OpenZK Network, Sandor will lead the development of next-generation Layer 2 solutions, focusing on improving the ecosystem’s reward mechanism and user experience. 

“Dave’s unique expertise positions us to advance the L2 landscape, delivering performance, security, rewards and a superb user experience for our entire ecosystem — from developers to traders to institutional partners.”

OpenZK’s X post

OpenZK has become the first native to support Ethereum (ETH) staking, re-staking, or liquidity, as well as stablecoin staking L2 scaling solution. Real-world assets, stablecoins, and staking are services that cater to these fast-growing segments in the DeFi.

With the growing momentum of L2 solutions, Sandor’s financial acumen is expected to be pivotal in guiding OpenZK’s strategic growth and development.

ZK-Rollups current challenges

ZK-Rollups are important for solving the issues blockchain has been struggling with for quite a while, such as scalability, cost, and privacy. They do this using an off-chain bundle of transactions that are validated using zero-knowledge proofs submitted to the main chain. This greatly alleviates congestion and gas fees for networks such as Ethereum while maintaining security. 

Furthermore, experts also have explained that ZK-Rollups offer improved privacy by only requiring proof of transactions to be verified without having to expose sensitive information such as the contents of those transactions, making them suitable for privacy-concerned applications such as identities and financial services that need to build trust amongst users. 

Despite these benefits, they also come along with several disadvantages. Some of them include complex development, computation-intensive proofs, difficulty in integrating dApps, and data availability issues for off-chain transactions, as seen previously in ZKsync. Sandor’s new position as co-founder of OpenZK can address ZK-Rollup’s present challenges and lay the ground for mass adoption and future growth of  ZK-Rollups as a whole.

Welcome to The Protocol, CoinDesk’s weekly wrap-up of the most important stories in cryptocurrency tech development. I’m Marc Hochstein, CoinDesk’s deputy editor-in-chief for features, opinion and standards.

IN THIS ISSUE:

• Ethereum’s blob mob
• Staking on Starknet
• Avalanche’s big upgrade
• L2 teams beam over Beam Chain
• Sui suffers a brief outage
• Bitcoin bridged, trustlessly

This article is featured in the latest issue of The Protocol, our weekly newsletter exploring the tech behind crypto, one block at a time. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Wednesday. Also please check out our weekly The Protocol podcast.

Network news

BEAMING OVER THE BEAM CHAIN: What’s good for the L1 is good for the L2s. That’s the assessment the teams behind zkSync and Polygon, two of the leading layer-2 networks running on top of Ethereum, gave of Justin Drake’s proposal to overhaul the $400 billion blockchain, dismissing suggestions it would make their auxiliary networks redundant. “That’s really a misconception,” said Alex Gluchowski, the CEO of Matter Labs, the developer firm behind zkSync. “The changes that Justin announced are focused on the consensus layer, not on the execution layer. It’s not going to affect the execution layer.” In addition to incorporating ZK, Drake’s proposal seeks to shorten block times, which could cut transaction costs for L2s settling on Ethereum. Drake also said he wants to introduce single-slot finality, meaning blocks with transaction data could be finalized immediately, and that information would become permanent right away. “All of those things are great because we depend on Ethereum as the global settlement layer,” Gluchowski said. Brendan Farmer, a co-founder at Polygon, also told CoinDesk he doesn’t think the Beam Chain would obsolesce layer-2s. Instead, he said, the upgrade would “make rollups work better.” However, others in the crypto community were underwhelmed by the whole plan, lamenting in particular that Drake’s five-year timeline wasn’t ambitious enough, leaving ample room for centrally-developed chains like Solana to eat Ethereum’s lunch.” Read more

SUI OUTAGE: Sui Network (SUI), a relatively new blockchain, experienced an unexpected two-hour outage on Thursday. The downtime was caused by a bug in its transaction scheduling logic, which led to its validator network crashing. The issue was resolved, the network said. Blockchain outages can take place for a plethora of reasons, ranging from a 51% attack to technical errors. A common error is that of nodes – or individual entities that process transactions – being unable to sync with each other, causing the blockchain to go offline. Software bugs may be another error vector, where outdated code can render the network’s processes inoperable. Read more

STAKING ON STARKNET: Starknet has become the first major rollup blockchain running on top of Ethereum to let users earn money by staking their tokens and validating transactions. (Metis was the first layer-2 to do so but is far smaller and is an “optimium,” a different kind of L2.) Now, anyone who has at least 20,000 STRK tokens (roughly $12,000 at recent prices) can pledge the asset as collateral and earn rewards for validating transactions. Users with less than 20,000 STRK can delegate their tokens to validators to stake on their behalf. (Validators that behave maliciously or neglect their duties stand to forfeit staked tokens.) Validators and delegators that want to withdraw staked tokens must wait 21 days to receive them as well as any rewards earned from staking. Implementing staking on Starknet is part of a multiphase plan. During this first phase, StarkWare, the company developing Starknet will study staking habits on the network, and from there will assess whether and how its validators can be given the additional responsibilities of creating and “attesting,” or confirming, blocks in the protocol. Read more

AVALANCHE’S BIG UPGRADE: Avalanche, the eighth-largest blockchain by total value locked (TVL), is moving ahead with a major technical makeover. The Avalanche9000 upgrade went live in a test network environment Monday, bringing the changes one step closer to the main network. Avalanche9000 will be the largest upgrade that Avalanche has seen. It is designed to cut the costs of sending transactions, operating validators and building apps on the network, whose native token (AVAX) is the 11th-largest cryptocurrency, with a $16 billion market cap. The foundation is trying to attract developers to Avalanche and encourage users to create customized blockchains using its technology, known as subnets. Somewhat confusingly, subnets are now officially referred to in the Avalanche community as “L1s,” even though they are roughly analogous to the layer-2, or L2, networks that augment Ethereum and other blockchains. (Avalanche’s “primary network,” the equivalent of a layer-1 in other ecosystems, is considered a subnet.) The team is hoping to bring Avalanche9000 to mainnet by yearend. Among other changes, 9000 would allow for a new type of validator with which anyone can launch their own subnets. Read more

ONE-WAY TICKET: BitcoinOS, a smart contract project led by crypto O.G. Edan Yago, has executed what it bills as the first trustless bridge transaction for any blockchain. Using zero-knowledge cryptography, a nominal amount of bitcoin (0.0002 BTC, about $19 and change) was locked up on the main blockchain’s testnet, and a proof was generated minting tokens on the testnet for Merlin Chain, a layer-2 network. No oracle or custodian was involved, according to BitcoinOS. For now, however, Merlin Chain is like the Hotel California or a roach motel for the bridged BTC. “This is one half of the bridge showing the ability to bridge assets from Bitcoin to an EVM,” BitcoinOS said in a press release. “Once the other half of the bridge is completed, Merlin Chain users can settle their Bitcoin-pegged assets back to the mainchain by proving that the tokens were burned.”

Ethereum’s Blob Mob

Usage of binary large objects, or blobs, has surged on the Ethereum network, signaling that more users are embracing layer-2 scaling tech for faster and more affordable transactions.

This year, Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade introduced blobs, which allow large chunks of data to be temporarily attached to transactions, and later deleted after the data is verified. (You can think of a blob as a sidecar that rides along with a motorcycle for a time but eventually gets detached and discarded.) Layer-2 protocols such as BASE, Arbitrum, and Optimism use blobs to bundle transactions together, process them off-chain and then post them to the Ethereum main chain for verification without permanently gumming up the works.

The number of blobs posted to the network consistently averaged more than 21,000 this month, matching the record activity seen in March, according to pseudonymous data analyst Hildobby’s Dune Analytics dashboard.

Posting blobs costs a fee, which fluctuates depending on network conditions. The fees are paid in Ethereum’s native token ether, and are burned just like regular transaction fees, taking supply of ETH off the market, a positive for the coin’s price.

In this way, blobs mitigate the much-discussed cannibalization of the main chain by L2.

The blob base submission fee spiked as high as $80 on Monday, the highest since March, and the average number of blobs posted in each Ethereum block rose to 4.3. More importantly, blob fees have burned over 214 ETH worth $723,000 over the last seven days, the sixth largest source of fee burns on the network over that period, according to data from ultrasound.money.

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Calendar

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