As prominent cryptocurrency figures advocate for privacy protocols like Zcash, could the Bitcoin ecosystem revisit the reactivation of Bitcoin opcode OP_CAT? The crypto community on X has been dominated by prominent figures advocating for the adoption of Zcash as privacy becomes increasingly threatened by governments and regulators. While the Winklevoss twins, Naval Ravikant, and Balaji Srinivasan back the adoption of Zcash (ZEC), its success could spur the Bitcoin ecosystem to push for more privacy features by revisiting the reactivation of OP_CAT, according to Eli Ben-Sasson, founder of StarkWare and a renowned mathematician who helped pioneer zero-knowledge proofs. In 2014, Ben-Sasson and his co-authors published “Zerocash: Decentralized Anonymous Payments from Bitcoin.” Read more
Some crypto industry observers believe that the Bank of England’s new proposed regulations for stablecoins are unnecessarily restrictive. The UK’s central bank, the Bank of England (BOE), has released a proposed regulatory regime for stablecoins. The consultation paper took into account the perspectives of the crypto industry, but some observers say it remains restrictive. BOE released the document on Nov. 10 — some two years after it announced the initial discussion paper. The original offered a vision for crypto that many in the industry claimed would doom the UK’s digital asset space. The BOE said that it received comments and feedback from a broad range of 46 different stakeholders, including “banks, non-bank payment service providers, payment system operators, trade associations, academia, and individuals.” Read more
Uniswap launched Continuous Clearing Auctions, a new onchain token sale mechanism designed to offer transparent price discovery, debuting with Aztec’s sale. Decentralized finance heavyweight Uniswap introduced Continuous Clearing Auctions (CCA), a new protocol aiming to facilitate token offerings through its infrastructure. According to a Thursday announcement, Uniswap’s CCA “helps teams bootstrap liquidity on Uniswap v4 and find the market price for new and low-liquidity tokens.” The company said this was just “the first of several tools” it is building to help projects launch and deepen token liquidity on the platform. The announcement coincided with preparations for the first CCA-enabled sale. Privacy-focused Aztec Network opened its community-only AZTEC token sale on Thursday, with a public phase scheduled for Dec. 2. Read more