The TON developers restarted the network after a failure that caused block generation to halt for up to six hours. Justin Heon, Chief Investment Officer of the TON Foundation, stated that the network was overloaded due to a large number of DOGS transactions. To restore operation, validators had to clear outdated transactions and blocks from the database.
On August 26, DOGS was listed on exchanges, significantly increasing the load on the blockchain—developers reported that the number of requests reached 150,000 per minute. According to Mikko Ohtamaa, co-founder of Trading Strategy, TON could not handle the load caused by the meme token airdrop. With the surge in activity, the network's throughput only reached 280 TPS, well below the specified 55,000 TPS.
On August 25, the TON team changed the logo in their channel to an image of the Resistance Dog token (REDO) to support Telegram founder Pavel Durov, who was detained in France last week. This move drew attention to the meme token, causing its price and trading volume to soar.
Base Surpasses Other L2 Solutions in Active Address Count
According to data from the analysis platform Growthepie, the number of active addresses on the Base L2 solution increased by 45% in August, surpassing networks like Arbitrum One, ZKsync Era, and Linea.
In the past 24 hours, there have been over 919,000 addresses interacting on the Base platform. In contrast, Arbitrum One saw a 1.6% decrease in active addresses, ZKsync Era decreased by 32%, and Linea decreased by 63%.
The significant 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 over 200,000 domains in the base.eth format.
Stablecoin Market Cap Hits Record High of $168 Billion
The total market cap of stablecoins has reached a record high of $168 billion, marking a historic milestone. Interestingly, this figure has shown steady growth for 11 consecutive months. USDT continues to lead among stablecoins. Since the beginning of this year, its capitalization has increased from $91.69 billion to over $117 billion.
BNB Chain Launches Cross-Chain Bridge with Celer, deBridge, and Stargate
With support from Binance, developers of the BNB Chain blockchain showcased their latest cross-chain solution in collaboration with Celer, deBridge, and Stargate. They introduced not only new bridges but also created a liquidity pool to improve asset transfers between different blockchains. They believe that the integration of these protocols with BNB Chain will significantly expand the network's capabilities, ensuring smooth and efficient transactions between different blockchains. In March, developers also introduced Rollup-as-a-Service infrastructure, allowing for the creation of custom L2 networks within the ecosystem.
Buterin: Airdrops Should Be More Secure
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin proposed a solution to eliminate airdrop issues through an authentication method. He emphasized that cryptographic methods based on zero-knowledge proof technology could significantly enhance the privacy level of such initiatives.
Buterin explained that the main goal of airdrops is to provide tokens to genuine community participants rather than speculators. It is also important to reward those who make real contributions to the project while maintaining principles of equality. In response to questions about the difficulties of this approach, Buterin pointed out the multifaceted nature of the issue, which will change and evolve over time.
He also added that token distribution does not necessarily have to be free, and there is the possibility of discounted sales. For example, contributions to project development could serve as a basis for determining the size of discounts for participants purchasing tokens.
Bitcoin Mining Difficulty Increases by 3%
Since the latest update, Bitcoin mining difficulty has increased by 2.99%, reaching 89.47T. The block cycle has dropped to less than 9 minutes since the last update, with an average hash rate reaching a record 718.28 EH/s. This indicates that Bitcoin miners are actively adding new high-performance hardware to the network.
For instance, IREN (formerly Iris Energy) has increased its hash rate from 10.5 EH/s on August 5 to the current 15 EH/s. This increase is attributed to the deployment of Bitmain's Antminers T21 and S21, which were previously ordered and have a hash rate of 17.3 EH/s. According to TheMinerMag, most new mining machines were delivered between June and August.