Weekly Layers 1 & 2 Update (Week 5, 01/02/2022 – 07/02/2022)

Sphere 3D to buy 60,000 units of BTC mining gear, plans to get 15% of global hashrate. Vitalik Buterin talks about near-future hard fork for ETH.

Key Takeaways

• Sphere 3D has announced an agreement to buy 60,000 pieces of Bitcoin (BTC) mining equipment, with which it estimates to generate at least 15% of the hashrate of the current global network. This deal would also put Sphere 3D on pace to be one of the largest carbon-neutral bitcoin miners.
• In a recent tweet, Ethereum (ETH) co-founder Vitalik Buterin discussed some proposals to add ‘blob-carrying transactions’ in a near-future hard fork, bringing higher scalability to rollups before full sharding is complete.
• Polkadot (DOT) deposits and withdrawals are now live on the Crypto.com app via Cronos (CRO) chain. In addition, Crypto.com recently announced a multi-year partnership with the LeBron James Foundation to provide crypto education to underserved communities.
• Cronos (CRO) saw a +7.99% increase in total transactions to 14.00M and an increase of TVL to $2.23B (+14.95% week-on-week). The total number of wallet addresses now stands at 344,336, up +1.37% from last week.

Highlights

• Ethereum’s main client almost ready for the merge to proof of stake
• Cardano block size to increase by 11%
• Official: Total number of Cardano wallets hits 3 million milestone
• Gas-free transactions will revolutionize Web3
• Cardano uses the least amount of electricity per node, says CCRI Research
• Polkadot (DOT) consumes the least amount of electricity compared to other top chains, according to new research
• IMX token tumbles as GameStop appears to dump $42M from Immutable X grant
• Shiba Inu leads market comeback with massive 22% leap as launch of its layer-2 blockchain nears
• Polygon joins arms race to become ‘the AWS of Web 3’ with $450 million in fresh funding
• Layer 1 Project Aleo raises $200M

Layer 1 Project Metrics

Layer 2 Project Metrics